San Diego County on Monday launched its new Consumer Fairness and Public Protection division, which aims to use civil legal action against corporate entities that allegedly cause public harm, with the announcement of its first three lawsuits.
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One of the lawsuits is against the online gaming platform Roblox. Like other similar lawsuits filed in recent years around the country, it alleges that Roblox financially exploits its young users and exposes them to child predators.
The other two lawsuits are against the mobile marketing firm AppLovin, for allegedly delivering graphically violent and sexual advertisements through games designed for children, and against Polymaker, a company that sells filament for 3D printers, for allegedly marketing its product to makers of “ghost guns,” which are highly regulated in California.
Terra Lawson-Remer, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, spearheaded the effort to create the Consumer Fairness and Public Protection unit, or CFPP. She said Monday the new unit is designed to make sure businesses follow the law and don’t exploit the public.
“I expect companies to follow the law,” Lawson-Remer said at a Monday news conference. “These should not be radical expectations. They are the rules, and they should be followed. When companies break these rules, somebody needs to be there to enforce them.”
Lawson-Remer said the 2008 financial crisis, and the government bailouts that followed, taught the world an important lesson about who suffers from corporate wrongdoing.
“When powerful institutions have too much power and nobody is enforcing the rules, regular people end up paying the price,” she said.
The board chair said the new CFPP was also needed because the Trump administration has tried to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog created in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, he sought to essentially shutter the agency, though litigation has helped preserve some of its workforce.
Lawson-Remer said the biggest difference from the 2008 crisis is that it’s now mostly tech companies instead of banks that are allegedly harming the public. “But the problem feels familiar,” she said. “Powerful companies testing the limits because no one is there to enforce the rules.”
The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 in March to officially create the new CFPP, but its creation was not welcomed by all. San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan said earlier this year that the unit was redundant given that her office’s Economic Crimes and Consumer Protection division already does the same work. Stephan also questioned why the CFPP would be funded through a pool of hundreds of millions of dollars that her office won through consumer protection settlements and judgments.
The CFPP was established under the office of County Counsel Damon Brown. Lemon Grove Mayor Alysson Snow has been hired as assistant county counsel to lead the new unit, which is expected to eventually have up to 30 full-time employees.
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“It’s a great day for San Diego County, but it’s a bad day for scammers,” Brown said at Monday’s news conference. He said the mission of the CFPP is “straightforward — when bad actors or unlawful business practices put our children, our families (or) our communities at risk, this office is here to act.”
Brown said the first three lawsuits, announced Monday, “are proof positive that we have hit the ground running.”
The Roblox lawsuit alleges that the company, a massive online gaming and video game creation platform “played by tens of millions of children,” has become “a hunting ground for child predators.” It also alleges that Roblox “has created a massive, largely unsupervised online world which manipulates children for profit.”
Roblox did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday. The company has faced dozens of civil lawsuits over similar allegations in recent years, including from both Republican and Democratic state attorneys general.
The AppLovin lawsuit alleges that the online marketing company is illegally exposing children to graphic advertisements while also illegally tracking users of all ages.
“While parents do everything they can to protect their kids playing mobile games from harmful content, AppLovin strips away those digital safeguards and steers obscene advertisements to children anyway,” the lawsuit alleged. “At the same time, AppLovin disregards child safety tools to harvest children’s sensitive personal information — information precise enough to pinpoint where kids live, where they study, and whether they are sleeping — and feed it into the Company’s artificial intelligence advertising engine. AppLovin has turned child-friendly mobile games into a surveillance platform that tracks children and adults alike, monetizes their personal information, and deploys a deceptive user interface to mislead and coerce users into generating revenue for the Company.”
AppLovin did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.
The Polymaker lawsuit, which the new CFPP filed in conjunction with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, alleged that the Texas-based maker of 3D printer filament is knowingly designing and marketing its product in California to those who wish to make parts for unregistered and untraceable “ghost guns.”
The suit alleged that Polymaker has extensively marketed its product as the leading filament for making 3D-printed guns and parts, including by hiring a “3D printed gun influencer” as its head of customer experience and creating and selling a special product line in collaboration with an influencer that is branded with firearms-rights slogans. The company has also allegedly promoted the utility of its filament on online gun printing message boards and provided guidance on a company website on the best adhesive to use to bond 3D-printed gun components.
“Taken together, these actions reflect Polymaker’s comprehensive business strategy to market and sell its filament to facilitate the 3D printing of ghost guns and for its filament to become the frames or receivers of 3D printed firearms, in violation of California’s gun safety laws,” the lawsuit alleged.
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Polymaker did not immediately respond Monday to a message seeking comment.
