Apple to refund $32.5m to parents

Apple settled recently with the FTC about refunding In-App purchases made by children on their parents’ accounts. Tim Cook said they settled because it was what they were planning to do anyway and he wanted to avoid a lengthy lawsuit.

For background, in previous versions of iOS, there was a 15 minute window where you wouldn’t be asked for your iTunes account password again after successfully validating. This 15 minute window remained open despite changing apps. So it’s easy to see how a child might have simply been playing a game and ended up purchasing things without their parents’ permission. In some cases, this ended up being a substantial amount of money.