One of the many examples, this is an illegal repackage of https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-the-icc-champions-trophy-2017/
But there are thousands of free itch.io games illegally repackaged and sold as premium ios apps
Apple is complicit and doesn’t care as they take 30% of each sale
Honestly, if someone is stupid enough to save their card info on their child’s gaming device and not even put it under parental controls, then they deserve the life-altering debt that they wind up with…
Still doesn’t excuse the predatory software companies who target children, or the app stores and operating systems which enable them. But my sympathy is not with the parents.
No, I’m talking about years ago. it was just something that I remembered happening. Almost 20 years ago… games and ringtones and other things (can’t remember) had just started being a thing on people’s phones. kids started playing on parents phones, and the companies saw an opportunity to milk them… They got away with it for a while too until pressure became too much that laws were made. I’ve no sympathy for any parents that would allow their kids access to things like that nowadays either, and don’t personally know anyone that it happened to years ago, but I remember the stories in the news. It was a time when the tech companies took advantage of their headstart over average parents. Nothing new to what’s happening now, except hopefully people are a bit more aware of how unscrupulous they are, but they don’t seem to be.
‘The cloud’ is the biggest scam going in terms of locking people into subscriptions nowadays, and that was heavily pushed as something that everyone should get/use/want.
I never saw the point of the cloud, always viewed it with suspicion, and even though people thought I was a backwards luddite I stuck with local storage.
Until my phone apparently decided to start saving everything to google’s cloud by default without ever telling me or asking. I feel robbed, like just completely violated. I never consented to storing my docs on google’s servers. They just took my data.
And once I finally realized what was happening, it was a fucking headache just trying to move them to local storage just so I could copy/paste files to a different device. Absolutely absurd.
Oh, and I couldn’t even find the setting to disable cloud storage. The closest thing is just disabling cloud backups…
My next phone will definitely be a degoogled ROM.