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Microsoft will have to pay $20 million to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the company violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In the complaint filed by the DOJ on behalf of the FTC, the department accused the tech giant of collecting its underage Xbox users' information and retaining their data even without their parents' consent. To be able to play Xbox games and use services like Xbox Live, users have to sign up for an account and provide their personal information, including their full name, email address and place of birth.
Until 2021, users were also asked for their phone number and to agree to Microsoft's advertising policy. The FTC found that Microsoft only asked users under 13 to get their parents to complete their account creation after they had already provided their personal information. And apparently, from 2015 until 2020, Microsoft collected and retained data from underage users, even if their parents didn't complete the registration process. Under COPPA, online services and websites must obtain verifiable parental consent before using any personal information from children.
The FTC also explained that Microsoft combines a user's gamertag with a unique persistent identifier that it could share with third-party developers, even for accounts owned by underage users. In a
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Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote was today, and with it came the company's long-awaited mixed reality headset. Apple Vision Pro is the company's name for its much-hyped entrance into spatial computing. The headset runs a new operating system called visionOS and starts at $3,499 when it launches next year.
Vision Pro wasn't Apple's only new hardware for the day; it also launched several new Macs. The 15-inch MacBook Air is the biggest-ever version of that model, running the M2 chip and starting at $1,299. The company also launched a second-gen Mac Studio and the first-ever Mac Pro with Apple silicon. Of course, it also upgraded its software ecosystem, announcing iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 a
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 Apple today introduced an Apple silicon version of the Mac Pro that uses the new M2 Ultra chip, and with that update, Apple's transition to Apple silicon is now complete. The first Apple silicon Mac came out in 2020, and three years later, every Mac is using Apple-designed chips.
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