Step 3 of 5

Reading the terms, the privacy notice and the rating

Nobody reads a twelve-thousand-word terms of service from beginning to end, and this step does not ask you to. It asks you to find four specific passages, ask a privacy notice three specific questions, and look up one public record. That is twenty minutes of work with a browser's find function.

Why read a document you did not write

The terms of service for an online game is a contract between you and the publisher, and ticking the box is the moment you accept it. You will not negotiate it, and you cannot change it. So the point of reading is not to agree or disagree; it is to know, in advance, what the four or five situations are in which this document will suddenly matter to you.

Those situations are predictable. One day the account stops working. One day you want to take something with you. One day the rules change. One day you want to complain to somebody. The passages worth finding are the ones that govern those days.

Open the document in your browser and use the find function — Ctrl + F on Windows, Command + F on a Mac. Search for the words below rather than scrolling. Copy what you find into a note, with the date you found it, because these documents are revised.

The four passages that matter

One: suspension and termination

Search for terminate, suspend and ban. This passage says on what grounds the publisher may close your account, whether it must warn you, whether anything you have paid for is refunded if it does, and whether there is an appeal. Account closure is the single most consequential thing in the document, because it takes away everything attached to the account at once. Note whether the grounds are specific — cheating, abuse, payment fraud — or open-ended.

Two: what you actually hold

Search for licence, license, virtual and currency. In this category, the standard position is that you are granted a personal, revocable licence to use the software and the in-game items, rather than owning them. That has consequences: items usually cannot be sold, transferred or taken to another account, and an in-game currency generally has no cash value and cannot be converted back to money. Knowing this before you spend is the point of reading it.

Three: how the terms change

Search for amend, modify and changes to these terms. Most publishers reserve the right to change the terms. What varies is whether you are notified, how much warning you get, and whether continuing to play counts as acceptance. It usually does.

Four: law, disputes and complaints

Search for governing law, dispute and jurisdiction. This tells you whose courts and whose law the publisher says applies. If the answer is a foreign country, it is worth knowing — though, as the section below explains, an Australian consumer's rights under Australian law are not removed by a clause in a contract.

Four passages, four notes. That is the whole exercise, and it works on any terms document in this category, not just one.

Three questions for the privacy notice

The privacy notice is a separate document from the terms, and it is often shorter. Ask it three things.

What is collected? Look for the list. An online game typically records the account details you supplied, technical data about your device and connection, how you play, and anything you type in chat. Some also collect data through third parties such as advertising or analytics partners.

Who is it shared with, and where does it go? Look for the words disclose, third parties and transfer. A game published outside Australia will almost certainly store your data outside Australia. That is lawful and ordinary; it is still worth knowing.

How do you get it back, or get rid of it? Look for access, correction, delete and request. There should be an address or form for asking what is held about you and for asking that it be corrected or erased.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner administers the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and publishes plain-English guidance on what the Australian Privacy Principles require and on how to make a privacy complaint. It is the right reference if a notice seems to be saying something unusual, and it is also where a complaint goes if you cannot resolve one with the organisation itself.

The Australian classification

Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme, and the classification is a public record. The Australian Classification Board maintains a searchable database of classified titles, and its site explains what each classification means and what the consumer advice lines attached to a classification are for.

Two things make this worth a minute of your time. The classification itself tells you what the content is considered suitable for, which is the obvious use. The consumer advice attached to it is often more informative: short phrases describing the particular elements that produced the rating, including, in some cases, advice about in-game purchases.

This course does not state any game's classification, including the one it uses as an example, because classifications can be revised and a figure copied here would eventually be wrong. Look the title up in the Board's own database, which is free to search.

Households with children

If anyone under 18 will use the computer or the account, two further pieces of reading are worth doing before the account exists rather than after.

The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on online gaming, including material on in-game chat, on contact from strangers, and on what parental controls are available on common platforms. It is written for parents rather than for specialists.

Separately, games in this category that sell randomised items — where money buys a container whose contents are decided by chance — raise questions some parents want to consider deliberately. Nothing in this course presents paid randomised items as suitable for children. If a game you are looking at sells them, that is a fact to weigh with the classification and the consumer advice beside it, and the Classification Board's site is where the official position on that title is recorded.

What Australian law does regardless

A contract cannot remove rights that Australian law gives a consumer. The Australian Consumer Law provides guarantees that apply to goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia, and those guarantees cannot be contracted out of by a term in a publisher's agreement. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes guidance on what those guarantees cover and on how to pursue a problem, including with digital products.

The same body of law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce — which is the rule that binds publishers, advertisers and sites like this one when they describe what something is or does. If a game's advertising promises something the game does not deliver, that is the framework under which it is considered, and the ACCC is where such conduct is reported.

None of this is legal advice, and this site is not qualified to give any. It is a pointer to where the authoritative material is.

The household we follow

Our hypothetical household spends half an hour on this step. They find the termination clause and note that it lists specific grounds. They find the licence passage and read the sentence saying in-game currency has no monetary value and is not refundable; they decide that the figure they wrote down in Step 1 is therefore a figure they should treat as spent the moment it leaves the account.

They note the governing law is not Australian, read the ACCC page on consumer guarantees, and conclude that this does not remove their rights here. They look the title up on the Classification Board's database and read the consumer advice. They copy all of it into one note, dated, and move on.

Finding these documents for the example

For the product this course uses as its example, the terms of service and the privacy notice are published on the vendor's own website, which is where you should read them rather than in any summary — including this one. The material supplied to this publisher by the affiliate network describes only the commercial arrangement: a single opt-in, a download, and creating and activating an account. It says nothing about the contents of the vendor's legal documents, and so neither does this page.

Visit the World of Warships websitePaid affiliate link. A commission is paid to this site if an account is created and activated after following it; you pay no more because of it, and it did not shape the advice above. Full disclosure.