• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, September 5, 2014

So Google has followed in Apple's footsteps and apologised to parents faced with large in-app purchasing bills amassed from children buying badges and extra lives to enhance their gaming experience.

Its $19m settlement follows half a year on from Apple striking a $32.5m deal with the Federal Trade Commission. In the end, consumer and regulator pressure for the giants to do the right thing proved too strong and dusting off the corporate cheque book was a lot more appealing than a court room brawl. Both Apple and Google were in the wrong -- and they knew it. You cannot allow children's game to encourage youngsters to spend their parents cash at the press of a button, particularly for games they suspect have been made impossible to complete unless keys or magic swords, and so on, are purchased.

Which brings us nicely on to Facebook. It always seemed a move of staggering arrogance that it should roll out auto play video. I'm sure there's an argument that it allows people to get a better idea whether or not they want to watch a video but we all know it was launched to ensure video adverts are considered to have been played and are more likely to be clicked on for fuller engagement.

The issue, of course, is the auto play video, as the name suggests, is automatic. Not only do you have no choice about videos playing, you also have no choice about them eating in to your mobile data allowance. If you're on Wi-Fi, it's not an issue, but out and about video usage can put a massive dent in a data allowance, particularly for those on low end tariffs. Rather like the in-app purchase scandal, I'm thinking of all those parents, like me, who have a teenager on a low cost tariff so we know they're safe but we kind of also know they're spending every waking hour watching kittens skateboarding and, the big one recently, endless Ice Bucket Challenge clips.

The fact this happened over the summer brought in to sharp focus the mobile data allowance issue because so many families would have been away when friends threw cold water on themselves and dared them to follow suit. Luckily data has now been capped in the EU at 20 cents per Mb -- just imagine how costly the exercise would've been otherwise -- but, even so, a lot of people are starting off September with a case of 'bill shock' following on from August's automated video playing.

The problem is, as ever with Facebook, how auto play was done. The social media giant generally rolls out a new service or new privacy policy and counters any criticism with the argument that people can always go in to a long list of settings and alter things back to how they used to be. The obvious question, then, is why dictate a new service is used as the social site would like it to be, rather than how users would like to use it? Why prescribe? The answer is obviously centred on boosting advertising revenue first and foremost.

So, as September's bills land and consumer activists are insisting phone owners complain to Facebook about the spike caused by The Ice Bucket Challenge, and no doubt surfing kittens watched by teenagers round the pool, the social media giant is going to have to deal with exactly the same questions as Apple and Google have confronted.

The question will be, what responsibility does the social media giant assume for setting up its mobile service to automatically play videos and potentially overreach users' monthly mobile data allowance? It has to assume at least some responsibility because how many Facebook users know which setting they need to go in to so the automatic setting, prescribed by the site, can be undone?

Facebook did this. Like Apple and Google have already done, they need to step up.