iPod Lessons

I am completely paranoid when it comes to electronic devices.  Our bishop once shared with me that we had a few kids in the ward with problems with pornography because they were given phones without filters.  So I investigated a lot before we let Ethan buy the iPod Touch.  I even changed our router so it's now filtering content that is allowed in our home by wireless devices.  (Super easy to do if you go to http://www.opendns.com/ and it's free!)

When the iPod Touch came I disabled everything, put passwords/codes on everything and basically made it so it would only play a few games.  But I didn't disable this little thing called "In Apps" because I had no idea what it was or what it did. 

Well, last week I was balancing our checkbook and was amazed that there were $73.00 worth of charges from the iTunes store.  I flipped out!  I called Bryan asking where the iPod Touch was because we take it away at night so he can't stay up playing.  I tried to figure out what he had downloaded but couldn't figure it out by looking at the device so I called iTunes and was told to go online.  After about 30 minutes, I got on a chat with a very nice man from iTunes who explained that "In Apps" are offers in games that, when accepted, are charged to the credit card on file.  These are things such as extra coins to complete a level or an upgrade to a helicopter in a flight simulator games...yup....$73 worth of upgrades. 

Since I was stupid and didn't know what they were, the very nice man reversed all the charges and walked me through the process of taking that feature off and blocking anything else from coming up.  That is the first time I was really happy to be completely clueless!

When I picked up Ethan and his friends at school, I told them, "Guys, I learned something today that I want to teach to you too.  Now, no one is in trouble but it's something you all need to know."  I then explained what I had learned about in apps and they were shocked.  It was actually pretty funny because they know how much money $73 is.  Now Ethan is really careful about how he uses his iPod Touch, so maybe something good came of it!!