No, it is not for the attempt of Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard, but it is for another and more important issue that has been a plague since the Internet became public access and it is the management of information.

More specifically, children data and as per the Federal Trade Commission or just FTC, Microsoft was illegally collecting personal information from children on Xbox consoles without their parents’ consent and automatically violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Microsoft acknowledged that the situation was provoked by an “technical glitch” that user registration had and was resolved already by late 2021.

Pretty much it was a checkmark that was pre-marked during the sign up process and this was not supposed to happen if the user registered his birth date and happens to be a minor of 13 years of age, but happened anyways and hence the undesired data mining.

Despite Microsoft attempts to fix this tech woes even before 2021, FTC claims that Microsoft was still mining data from 2015 to 2020, even with incomplete sign ups processes.

CVP of Xbox Player Services, Dave McCarthy, addresses the result of this fine for Microsoft:

“Regrettably, we did not meet customer expectations and are committed to complying with the order to continue improving upon our safety measures.

During the investigation, we identified a technical glitch where our systems did not delete account creation data for child accounts where the account creation process was started but not completed.

This was inconsistent with our policy to save that information for only 14 days to make it easier for gamers to pick up where they left off to complete the process.

Our engineering team took immediate action: we fixed the glitch, deleted the data, and implemented practices to prevent the error from recurring. The data was never used, shared, or monetised.”

While one thing HAS NOT TO DO WITH THE OTHER, I may get the feeling that the FTC will implicitly at best, can use this incident whenever it is up to them to “stop” the Activision Blizzard acquisition if the CMA fails to convince even the UK government on “how bad” gaming market will get.