July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about kids it’s that having them is a bad idea. Worse, though, is letting them anywhere near your iPad.

Plenty of parents  learned that the hard way after their young ones racked up absurd charges on their credit cards because of in-app purchases in games like Tap Fish. These games, while presumably free, made it exceedingly easy for kids to spend hundreds of dollars on virtual goods.

The problem was so pervasive that a group of parents sued Apple over it in 2011. Two years later, Apple has reached a settlement, which will give affected parents $5 iTunes credits for their troubles. For claims of amounts over $30, Apple will also offer the option of cash refunds.

The one big drawback? Apple won’t dispense the payments until next year at the earliest, as GigaOM reports, which should temper some of the initial enthusiasm greeting the settlement.

Timeline concerns aside, the big question is how much the settlement is going to cost Apple. Though the final amount will depend on how many people end up filing claims, Apple says it plans to send a notice of the settlement to over 23 million iTunes account holders.

Apple’s Tim Cook will shortly be hearing a question something like that, as Justice Lucy Koh has ordered him to appear in court to give a deposition regarding alleged antitrust violations. Apple is one of a list of companies, including Intuit, Adobe, Google, and Pixar, that are being accused of agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees.

The case has been ongoing, believe it or not, since late 2010, when the Department of Justice required the tech companies to nix those agreements and reached a settlement with them.

According to the DOJ, the anti-poaching agreements reached back as far as 2005 for Apple and Adobe, 2006 for Apple and Google, and 2007 for Apple and Pixar. The settlement at the time prohibited the companies from “entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.”

The current lawsuit is a follow-on action brought by employees who claim that the companies’ illegal agreements harmed their employment prospects. And while Cook was not Apple’s CEO at the time,  Bloomberg reports that Justice Koh told Apple lawyers that since Steve Jobs was copied on emails about the practice, she found it hard to believe that Cook would not have been consulted as well.

There’s currently no timetable for Cook’s deposition, but Google’s Eric Schmidt will be deposed on February 20, and Intel’s Paul Otellini will be grilled in the next few weeks.

If Apple and the other tech companies lose the lawsuit, which is being brought employees as varied as engineers and chefs, they would be liable for additional salary and compensation for the affected staff.

Justice Koh is the same judge who is presiding over many of the Apple-Samsung legal battles. You’d think she’d be getting a little tired of seeing the Cupertino company in her courtroom.

photo credit: igrec via photopin cc

Social media giant Facebook is facing a new class-action lawsuit that involves minors purchasing Facebook credits without parental consent.

Facebook Credits are the currency on Facebook’s platform. People can exchange real money for a number of Facebook Credits and use them to buy virtual goods within games hosted on Facebook. For example, you can purchase chips to use in a poker game, or a virtual tractor for Zynga’s Farmville. Facebook then takes a 30 percent cut of all transactions.

The class-action suit was filed by Arizona-resident Glynnis Bohannon, who is seeking a refund after her young son purchased Facebook Credits. The suit is questioning Facebook’s terms of service requirement that its users not provide any false personal information. If some, or all, of a person’s information is false, the court could rule that the Facebook Credit transactions are void, and are likely subject to a full refund.

The suit also questions the vagueness behind Facebook’s terms for minors who use Facebook Credits. Currently those terms state: “If you are under the age of 18, you may make payments only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. You should review these Payments Terms with a parent or guardian to make sure that you both understand them.”

With this kind of stipulation, it could be very easy to convince a judge that Facebook isn’t doing enough to verify a user’s personal account information and to provide a system of checks and balances to ensure that children under the age of 18 have parental consent. And as PaidContent points out, U.S. law allows minors to back out of financial agreements in some cases.

Facebook has requested to move the class-action lawsuit to a federal court (PDF). We’re reaching out to the company for a statement and will update the post with any new info.

Photo via Arvind Balaraman / Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Image via Flickr's Werwin 15

The repercussions keep rolling in from the Wall Street Journal’s expose that detailed how Google was bypassing the default privacy settings on Apple’s Safari browser in order to place tracking cookies that followed users around the web. Matthew Soble, an Illinois resident, has filed suit against Google in a Delaware federal court and is seeking class action status, reports Bloomberg.

Soble’s lawyers assert that Google knowingly violated federal wiretapping laws by placing these cookies in the browser of Safari users who believed that their setting blocked this kind of advertising technology.

“The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information,” Rachel Whetstone, a senior vice president of communications and public policy at Google, told VentureBeat by email. “Unlike other major browsers, Apple’s Safari browser blocks third-party cookies by default.  However, Safari enables many web features for its users that rely on third parties and third-party cookies, such as “Like” buttons.  Last year, we began using this functionality to enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content–such as the ability to “+1” things that interest them.”

The search giant’s position is that they were simply trying to see if users were already signed in with their Google account so they could use the +1 button without logging in again. But in doing so, the company also placed advertising cookies. “We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers.  It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information,” Whetstone said.

Galley slave from Wikicommmons

Groupon employees have alleged abusive working conditions, breach of contract, and a boss (Groupon’s Eastern European CEO Daniel Glasner) whom they described as a “slavedriver”.

Before we dive into the specifics, it should be noted that these emails were excerpted, not printed in full, and translated from German on the Berlin-based tech blog Village Ventures.

The first email reads:

I must remain anonymous, otherwise I will face serious issues. Here I send you something that has bothered us for days, weeks, months, on a regular daily basis at Groupon. Strong pressure, breaches of contractually agreed bonuses with subsequent penalties. Now our titles are supposed to be changed — we will be degraded — if we do not acquire our Dreamlist partners.

“Dreamlist partners” refers to high-end restaurants and spas that Groupon is hoping to provide deals for. CEO Daniel Glaser responded with  a statement denying the accusation.

We don’t have any insight or connections in Berlin, so let’s leave the he said she said alone for now and examine the historical context.

In September 2011, Groupon employees in the U.S. filed a class action lawsuit. Like their German counterparts, they were owed money for unpaid overtime and bonuses, in that case reaching into the millions of dollars.

Leading up to that lawsuit, a series of increasingly negative testimonials appeared on the website Glass Door, where employees can post anonymously about their bosses and company.

• Immense pressure to hit unrealistic sales goals.
• Management out of touch with what’s going on during phone calls (it’s getting harder and harder to close deals as more and more people don’t want to work with Groupon)
• Used to be a fun culture. Now it’s all about the bottom line and feels like your typical call center
• Sales staff are worked to the bone
• Everyone is miserable and they treat the customers ( merchants) as well as employees with little respect. All they care about is how much money groupon makes. They also created a “boiler” room environment and micromange to the 100th degree. They suffocate you and you can barely breath or go to the bathroom with out feeling guilty.
• They make you feel guilty to take a Saturday off to go to a wedding.
• Sales staff cries all the time.

The issues of unrealistic sales goals, demanding hours, and brutal managment mirrors the complaints coming out of Berlin.

Groupon has been called the fastest growing company in history. It achieved an IPO that valued it in the billions of dollars. A brutal sales culture may be the obvious byproduct of that aggressive expansion.

Netflix’s stock price suffered from two very large decreases in the summer and fall of 2011, in part due to massive price increases to subscription plans and a failed attempt to spinoff Netflix’s DVD-by-mail rental business into a separate company. And while the company was clear on those plans, it wasn’t entirely clear on some of the content deal renewals necessary to keep Netflix’s streaming library up to par with competitors.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System (PDF), claims that senior management didn’t reveal to investors that many of its streaming content contracts would soon need to be renegotiated at a much higher cost.

The suit also claims that members of Netflix senior management sold their stock when it was artificially high during the summer — prior to letting investors know the company’s true costs associated with renewing contracts. The official statement from Robbins, Geller, Rudman & Dowd LLP (the firm hired for the class action suit), reads:

“The complaint alleges that during the Class Period, defendants issued materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company’s business practices and its contracts with content providers.  As a result of defendants’ false statements, Netflix’s stock traded at artificially inflated prices during the Class Period, reaching a high of almost $300 per share on July 13, 2011.  While Netflix stock was inflated (partially by Netflix buying back its own stock), Company insiders were selling 388,661 shares of their own Netflix stock for proceeds of $90.2 million.

Although the suit was filed by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System as well as “all plaintiffs similarly situated”, it’s possible not all investors will participate.

We’ve reached out to Netflix for further comment and will update this story with any new information.

Update: Netflix declined to comment on the lawsuit.

[Via PaidContent.org]