Step 3 of 5

Reading the terms, the privacy notice and the purchase rules

Nobody reads forty pages of legal text, and this step does not ask you to. It asks for ten minutes and four specific questions, which is enough to tell you what a company is actually offering and what it reserves the right to do.

Which documents exist, and what each is for

A game company usually publishes three or four separate documents, linked in small type at the bottom of its site. They do different jobs, and knowing which does which saves you reading the wrong one.

All of them are the company's own words about itself. That is not a reason to distrust them — it is a reason to read them as a statement of intent rather than as a neutral description, and to notice what they decline to say as much as what they say.

The four questions worth answering

These four are the ones that change a household decision. Everything else in the documents is background.

1. Can the account be taken away, and on what grounds?

Look for the paragraph about suspension and termination. Nearly every company reserves a broad right here; the useful detail is whether there is any stated process, whether purchases survive a suspension, and whether there is an appeal path. If the answer is “at our sole discretion, with no refund”, that is common and you should simply know it before you spend.

2. What happens to money already spent?

Find out whether purchased items are described as property or as a revocable licence — in this category it is almost always the latter — and what the company says happens if the game closes. Pair that answer with the budget you wrote in Step 2.

3. What is collected about the player, and who gets it?

In the privacy notice, look for the list of categories collected and the list of parties it is disclosed to. Pay attention to whether advertising or analytics partners appear, and whether the player's age affects any of it.

4. What are the rules about children?

Many companies state a minimum age, or require a parent or guardian to create or approve the account below a certain age. If a child in your household is the player, this paragraph decides whose name the account is in, which you provisionally settled in Step 2.

How to search a long document quickly

Eight searches and eight paragraphs is a realistic ten minutes, and it gives you a defensible answer rather than an impression. If a search term returns nothing at all, that absence is itself information — a privacy notice with no mention of deletion, for example, is telling you something.

What is normal, and what is worth a pause

It helps to know which clauses are ordinary in this category, so that you spend your attention on the ones that are not.

Reading the privacy notice as an Australian

Personal information handled in Australia is governed by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, which cover collection, use, disclosure, overseas transfer, access and correction. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes the principles in full and in plain language, and it is the body you would complain to if an organisation covered by the Act mishandled your information.

Two things follow for a reader at this step. The first is that you can reasonably expect a privacy notice to tell you what is collected, why, who it goes to and how to contact somebody about it — and that a notice which does none of those is a notice worth noticing. The second is that many game companies are overseas, so part of what you are reading is a statement about information leaving Australia. That is lawful and ordinary; the point is to know it is happening rather than to be surprised by it.

Whether any particular company is covered by the Australian Act depends on facts about that company that we cannot assess for you. What you can do is read what it says about itself, and keep the answer.

Purchases, cancellations and your consumer rights

If you buy a game, a subscription or an in-game item while in Australia, the Australian Consumer Law applies to that purchase. Among other things it provides consumer guarantees that cannot be excluded by a term in a contract, and it prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct by businesses. The ACCC sets out what those guarantees cover and what a business may not claim about them.

The practical reading is this: a line in a vendor's terms saying “all sales are final” does not by itself remove rights that the law gives you. It also does not mean you will get a refund for changing your mind, which is a different thing. Read the vendor's stated process, note it, and know that the ACCC's material describes the floor beneath it.

For subscriptions specifically, find three facts before subscribing: how to cancel, when the cancellation takes effect, and whether access continues until the end of the paid period. All three are usually stated in a single paragraph.

Making sure you are on the real site

Documents are only worth reading if they belong to the company you think they belong to. Reach a vendor's site by typing the address or using a link you already trust, rather than through an advertisement or a message, and check the address bar before you type anything into a form.

Approaches that imitate game sign-in pages, offer free in-game currency, or ask for account details to “verify” something are described regularly by Scamwatch, which is run by the National Anti-Scam Centre and publishes current examples and a reporting path. Reading a few of those descriptions once is a better use of five minutes than any warning we could write.