Mother Sues Google After Child Buys $66 Worth Of In-App Purchases In Marvel Running Game

We all do it, those of us with kids anyway. We let our kids use our mobile devices to play games, play music or surf the Web. It seems harmless, it distracts them from the constant "Mommy, mommy" coming from the back seat of the car or the other room of the house. While many may jump onto the "bad parenting" or "digital babysitter" argument there is another reason to be concerned with the practise of sharing your mobile device.

Recently a mother in California sued Google over the in-app purchases made by her child while playing a game on her mobile device. Read more here: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/03/11/mother-sues-google-after-child-buys-66-worth-of-in-app-purchases-in-marvel-running-game/ . Now, it appears that at some point the mother had changed her phone settings to avoid being prompted all the time for her password, likely due to the inconvenience. What she didn't realize was that this made available her Google account information and stored credit card details for use with in-app purchases, or the ability to purchase items like "Smurfberries", or "level-ups" in downloaded games. Her child likely didn't know that they were doing anything wrong but in a short period of time they had racked up a significant amount of extras that the mother had never intended or been given the opportunity to decline.

This all comes back to the ongoing trade-off between security and convenience that has plagued the online world for years. The mobile industry has done very little to change the security/privacy paradigm, in fact, they have replicated all of the challenges that have been faced by desktop and server computers for decades.

Secure Spaces takes a different approach. Secure Spaces creates separate Spaces on your device, like rooms in your house, to store apps and data separately. The apps and data in one Space cannot be accessed by the apps and data in another Space. The mother in this story could have created an Open Space on her device and placed the children's games into that Space and nothing else. The games would not have access to her Google account, her credit card information, or any other contacts, phone numbers, apps, passwords, or data that she maintains in another Space.