Sony BMG to pay one million dollars to settle online case

Date: 12/12/2008 1:09:00 AM

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has agreed to pay one million dollars to settle charges it violated US law by collecting personal information online from children under the age of 13, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Thursday.

Sony BMG, a subsidiary of Sony Corp. of America, the US arm of the Japanese electronics giant, agreed to the payment as part of a settlement with the FTC over charges it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The FTC had alleged that Sony BMG, through its music fan websites, had improperly collected and disclosed personal information from thousands of children under the age of 13, without their parents' consent.

"Sites with social networking features, like any websites, need to get parental consent before collecting kids' personal information," FTC chairman William Kovacic said in a statement. "Sony Music is paying the penalty for falling down on its COPPA obligations."

Sony BMG represents hundreds of musicians and entertainers including many popular with children and teenagers, the FTC said, and operates more than 1,000 websites for its talent.

Users are required to submit their date of birth to register for the sites, the FTC said, and on 196 sites, Sony BMG knowingly collected personal information from at least 30,000 underage children without parental consent.

It said this allowed children to interact with adults through comments, message boards and other forums.

The FTC said the civil penalty to be paid by Sony BMG matched the previous largest penalty in a COPPA case, the one million dollar settlement agreed to in September 2006 by social networking website Xanga.com on similar charges.

http://www.msnarabia.com/channels/msnnews/article.aspx?CatID=3&ID=667918&S=Hl

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was reading and found this ^^

a question: is it ok to post such news here?????

One million dollars? That's chump change.

wow that is not a big deal. 1,000,000 is nothing to a company like SONY. Talk about Slap on the wrist

See, this $1 million will delay the PS3 price cut by 10,000 more units. The PS3 is doomed.

it's not about the money , just protect ur kids from sony , they are evil
they made me love them when I was a kid and now I'm sony fanboy so WATCH OUT FOR UR KIDS

A million bucks is nothing. Sony has 47,000 more where that came from.

And that's ridiculous. You can't sue a company over allowing children to go on message boards!

Wow.. a lot of Sony threads these days.

what a stupid sounding law.... when I was 13 I was saying I was 18 all the time on the internet... I think most 13 year olds know they can do that.

Yep.  It's an interesting law though... it is one.  It's one of the biggest annoyances of consumer psychology.