Reading the account terms, the privacy settings and the classification
Step 3 of 5
Nobody reads a terms-of-service document end to end, and this step does not ask you to. It asks for fifteen minutes, divided between three documents, spent looking for a small number of specific things. The point is not to become a lawyer; it is to know, before you click Accept, what you have agreed to about money, about your data, and about who the game is rated for.
The three documents, and where they live
A game account normally arrives with two documents and one piece of public information. The two documents are the terms of service — sometimes called an end user licence agreement, a user agreement or game rules — and the privacy notice. Both are usually linked from the sign-up screen and from the footer of the publisher's website. The third is the classification, which is not published by the game at all but by the body responsible for it in your country.
Read them in that order, because each answers a different question. The terms answer "what am I allowed to do, and what can they do to my account". The privacy notice answers "what is collected about me". The classification answers "who is this suitable for".
Five minutes on the terms of service
You are looking for six things, and the search function of your browser will find most of them. Press Ctrl+F, or Command+F on a Mac, and type the words in italics below.
1. Whether purchases are a licence, not ownership
Search for licence or license. In nearly all games, items bought with money are licensed to you for use inside the game rather than owned by you as property, and they cannot be sold on or transferred. This is worth knowing before anyone in the household treats a purchase as an investment.
2. What happens to the account if the service stops
Search for terminate and suspend. Publishers reserve the right to close accounts for breaches of the rules, and to end the service itself with notice. Knowing the terms on which an account can be closed is the main reason to read this document at all.
3. Refund conditions
Search for refund. Note what the publisher says, and note separately that in Australia a contract term cannot remove your rights under the consumer guarantees — the ACCC explains how those guarantees work. If a document says no refunds under any circumstances, that statement does not override Australian law.
4. Minimum age and parental consent
Search for age. Most accounts have a minimum age and a separate provision about accounts for minors with a parent's consent. If you are setting up an account for a teenager, this paragraph decides whose name it should be in.
5. Rules of conduct
Search for conduct or prohibited. This is where cheating, third-party modifications and abusive chat are dealt with. It matters because breaking these rules is the most common way for an account with years of progress in it to disappear.
6. Changes to the terms
Search for amend or changes. Most publishers can change the terms with notice, and continuing to play counts as acceptance. There is nothing unusual about that; it simply means today's reading is not permanent.
Five minutes on the privacy notice
The privacy notice tells you what the publisher collects, why, who it is shared with, and where it is stored. Four questions are enough.
What is collected beyond the obvious? An email address and a password are expected. Look for the paragraphs about device information, IP address, in-game behaviour and chat logs, which are usually collected as well.
Is anything shared for advertising? Look for advertising, partners and analytics. This is the paragraph that varies most between publishers, and it is the one most worth reading slowly.
Where is the data processed? Large publishers operate across several countries, and an Australian player's data is commonly stored overseas. The notice should say so.
How do you ask for a copy, or for deletion? There should be a contact address or a form. Note it now, because looking for it later, when you want something done, is the frustrating version.
If you want to understand what rights you have over personal information held about you in Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the regulator and publishes plain-language guidance for individuals. It is the right source for that, rather than any game's own summary — and rather than this page, which describes only how this site handles information.
The settings to change before you play
These settings exist in some form in most large online games, though the names and the menus differ. They are described here in general terms that apply to the category, not as a walkthrough of any one game's screens.
- Profile visibility. Decide whether your statistics and profile are public. Narrowing this is the single easiest privacy change available.
- Who may contact you. Most games allow messages and friend requests to be limited to existing friends. For a young player, limiting both is sensible from the first session.
- Chat. Text and voice chat can usually be muted, filtered or disabled. Disabling voice chat removes an entire category of problem for a household with a minor in it.
- Marketing email. Separate from the account email itself, there is usually a preference for promotional messages. Turning it off at sign-up saves work later.
- Two-factor authentication. If it is offered, turn it on. Step 4 explains what it is and why it matters more here than almost anywhere else.
For families, the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on online safety for young people, including how to handle contact from strangers and how to report serious online abuse. It is a public service, free to use, and a better starting point than a forum thread.
Five minutes on the classification
Computer games distributed in Australia are classified, and the classification is displayed with markings and consumer advice. The Australian Classification Board publishes the classifications and explains what each category means and what the consumer advice lines refer to. Look the title up there rather than relying on a storefront, a review or a rating from another country, which uses a different system entirely.
Two things to look at. The category itself tells you the audience the game has been classified for. The consumer advice beneath it — short phrases about the content — is often more useful than the category, because it tells you what specifically earned the rating.
This course does not state any rating or age threshold for a particular title, because the classification is the Board's to publish and it can change. Check it at the source, for the title you are considering, at the time you are considering it.
On gambling-like features
If a game contains purchasable randomised items, treat that as a question for the classification listing and for your own judgement about who is playing. Nothing in this course presents paid randomised content, or anything resembling gambling, as suitable for a person under 18.
What Australian law gives you anyway
Two things are worth carrying into the next step. First, misleading or deceptive conduct in trade is prohibited under the Australian Consumer Law, which means a publisher's or a retailer's claims about what a product does are not merely marketing — they can be enforced against. The ACCC is the body that does the enforcing.
Second, if something presented to you as a game, a giveaway or a cheap top-up turns out to be a scam, reports go to Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre. Reporting takes a few minutes and helps build the picture that the agency works from.
The household, at Step 3
The hypothetical household spends its fifteen minutes and comes away with three decisions. The account will be in an adult's name, because the terms they read set a minimum age above fifteen and provide for parental consent. Voice chat will be off and messages limited to friends. And they look up the classification on the Board's site before installing, so that the conversation about suitability happens from the public listing rather than from anybody's opinion.
They also note the publisher's privacy contact address in the same place they wrote down their hardware details, which takes ten seconds and saves a search later.
Before you move on
You should now know, for the game you are considering, whether purchases are licensed rather than owned, on what grounds an account can be closed, what the publisher says about refunds, what the minimum age is, and what the Classification Board has published. You should have decided who the account belongs to and which contact and chat settings will be changed at sign-up.
Step 4 creates the account, and concentrates on the one thing that is genuinely hard to undo: losing access to it.
Checklist 3 — the fine print
- Open the terms of service and search for "licence" — note whether purchases are licensed rather than owned.
- Search for "terminate" and "suspend" — note the grounds on which an account can be closed.
- Search for "refund" — note the publisher's position, and remember Australian consumer guarantees are not removed by a contract term.
- Search for "age" — note the minimum age and any parental consent provision, and decide whose name the account goes in.
- Open the privacy notice and note what is collected beyond email and password.
- Note whether data is shared for advertising, and where it is processed.
- Write down the publisher's privacy contact address for access and deletion requests.
- Look up the title at classification.gov.au and read both the category and the consumer advice.
- Decide now: profile visibility, who may contact you, chat settings, marketing email.