A man from Somerset will undoubtedly sleep more easily this evening after it was announced that Apple would cover him for £4000 of in app purchases that were run up by his 8 year old daughter using his iPad. Due to an unfortunate sequence of events Lee Neale only became aware of the charges when his bank account was frozen.

His daughter, Lily, had been using three apps that all have the feature that allows users to buy items that help to complete levels within the game. The items can be bought using real money and this is where the problem started for Lee Neale. His daughter was not aware that she was spending real money and so kept buying features from within the apps that she loved playing so much. The apps do require you to enter your iTunes password to authorise the purchase but young Lily had watched her father enter the password in the past and she knew what it was so when she given the prompt she knew exactly what to type.

Every time a purchase was made an email confirming the purchase was sent to the email address his iTunes account was tied to. This was Mr Neale’s work email address and Mr Neale had been seconded to another company and so did not receive the emails. As said earlier, Mr Neale only became aware that there was a problem after his bank froze his account.

The bills were run up between March and the start of July but half of that amount was spent in six days. Apple have now said that they will cover the costs, though initially they adopted an attitude of “all iTunes purchases are final”.

I can understand that there is a lot of concern about in app purchases but it has proven a successful business model for a large number of developers creating a potentially constant income stream. Stories such as this one tend to cause a certain amount of panic in the press who are looking for a story to cover. If I look back over my life these types of stories have always been around. When I was a child the story would be about the child who had run up large phone bills ringing chat lines. Then during the last decade there have been many examples of children running up huge bills on their mobile phones. This “new variation” on an old problem is likely to occur less frequently due to the requirement of a password. I do not see that there is really anything else could have done to prevent this happening. The system that is in place for authorising in app payments is about as fool-proof as you can get.

Some might argue that it is the fault of Mr Neale for letting his daughter know his password or by not changing his iTunes email address when he moved employment locations, but this is the real world. The above points may appear to be common sense moves but in many cases things that are common sense only become apparent when they are pointed out.

My advice is to always keep your password secret, even letting your nearest and dearest know what it is can lead to unintended consequences. I have had many a conversation with a client where I have needed to set up a password for them and they will say “Oh, use…” and then tell me a password that they obviously use for most things. I always try to stop them from doing this and am always greeted with same reply “It’s OK, Mike, I trust you”. This is flattering but the reality is that if they then have an account that is hacked and they think about who could possibly have known I would rather that my name did not appear on that list.

I think that Apple have done the right thing here as the chain of events is almost certainly unique. I can see the reason that they would have said that the purchases would stand initially and I am glad that common sense prevailed to help Mr Neale out. Now ask yourself the questions “Who knows my passwords and what damage could that cause?”

If there is anybody on the list for the first question you don’t need to ask the second question, just change your passwords… Now!