Reading the Terms and Conditions before Choosing Applications for My Family

The main responsibility of parents and caregivers is to care for and protect their children everywhere and under all circumstances including when they online. 

It is the responsibility of parents and caregivers to monitor their children’s online activities and always make sure that they are safe from any harm that may affect them physically and mentally such as using applications that may show them inappropriate content or them sharing their personal information. Therefore, checking the terms and conditions and the privacy policy is a step that should not be neglected by parents at all, especially if these applications are intended to be used by their children, so this is considered a mandatory step towards protecting our families.  

Why should I read the terms and conditions?   

How many times have you agreed to the terms and conditions without even reading a single line? Almost every time, right? Who of us has enough time to read hundreds of clauses full of legal jargon? We often avoid reading it until we encounter a problem, and then we learn by experience that we should never sign an agreement without reading it, because these terms and conditions are considered an agreement.  

Here are the main four reasons why you should read the terms and conditions: 

• To Prevent Abuse:  this helps you being aware of your duties and rights, and aware of the knowledge on how the application you are using operates, which allows you to prevent any type of abuse, fraud, or similar acts or even being phished by the company itself. For example, sometimes you might fall with some open contract which you cannot get rid of unless you pay a certain amount.  
• Content Management and ownership: being aware of how the application you are using shares and collects information from your devices is important and you should know that the application might become the data owner and take ownership of your information, posts, and shared content by simply adding a couple of lines in the terms and conditions documents. Therefore, this is one of the most highly important reasons to read this document very carefully.  
• Account termination and service deactivation, while these two terms both look very similar, they are actually quite different. The account termination action is in the hands of the service providers, they have permission to terminate the account based on certain abusive criteria.  
• While service deactivation is your own choice to deactivate and suspend your subscription to this application.  
• Liability and governing law: Terms and conditions agreements tend to limit the liability of service providers in the event of any malfunction or failure in the service, and therefore they will not be liable for any return payments. Whereas the governing law gives you an idea about which law legal disputes are resolved based on it, in case any of them occur. 

What shall I look for under the terms and conditions when am looking for an application for my kids to use?  

The terms and conditions are known for their long paragraphs and complex words that often include legal terms, and most of the time we may feel confused and lost about what we should look for or read, or even if we really understood the true meaning of what we have read. 

For that reason, most of us tend to accept these conditions without reading them and without knowing the importance and sensitivity of these paragraphs. 

Therefore, In the next lines, we will guide you on the most important points that you should focus on and read when checking the terms and conditions of any application, and it will also give you a comprehensive and somewhat brief picture of some of the common policies of any application: 

1. Who might use this application: this section addresses the age required to the application users as well in case any parental permission, supervision, or if guidance is required.  
2. How you can use this service: this section addresses your rights on how to use this service. In addition, it sheds light on the restriction that the company has set on using this tool. Such as child abuse, bullying, sexual harassment, and many other illegal acts. İn addition to the type of content you can share through the platform or application.  
3. The type of information the application or platform collects: some companies consider this a part of the privacy policy while other companies have it listed under their terms and conditions. While for users this should not be different, since in both cases it is something they should look at and review prior to sharing any type of information, especially what information is required to create a new profile, because such information can be used against the users and can lead to identity theft if leaked, besides being shared with an advertising agency to run targeted marketing campaigns. Besides, what the sites ask for to create your profile, such as your full name, age, sex, location, etc...  companies tend to collect more information directly from the device you are using through trackers and cookies, claiming it’s to enhance the user experience while using the platforms.  
4. Who has the right to access your data: Among the reasons why the application gathers your data as a user and collect it, is to sell it to advertising agencies for commercial purposes and to increase income, so it is necessary for you to know who has the right to access your data because it is an essential part of your protection steps, as a guardian, over your child's use of applications.
5. What you can do with the collected data: this section highlights your ability as a user of this application to manage your data by reviewing, editing, and deleting the data collected. As well as for you to ask the company not to use your data in any of their actions with third parties or for any other reason.  
6. İnformation retention period and storage:  for data protection and privacy, you should also be aware of the data storage policies and retention period this organization is applying on the data they store. You do not want to wake up one day and find your family members' names with some old personal photos leaked on the internet, while you assume, they were deleted and discard by the supplier at the time you deleted your account.  
7. Account Suspension or Termination: it is a mandatory option as it is required to be aware of how and when the companies are allowed to suspend your account as well as when and how you can request to deactivate your account.  

Is reading the terms and conditions enough for me to choose which applications my family can use?  

When you buy a home or a car, do you ignore reading the purchase agreement contracts with sales agencies? The answer:  absolutely not, so we advise you to deal with the list of terms and conditions for any application that you will use as your home contract because It is not much different from your home, which is doing your best to provide security in it and keep risks away from your family. Most of the time, it is better not to ignore reading all your contracts, especially the contracts concluded for the use of all Internet services to avoid any threats that might reach your child and family.

So, Reading the terms and conditions or any similar agreements will help in the evaluation of the tools and application which might be used by your family but they are not sufficient on their own. In order to protect our family in the best way, we need to know how these apps work and how to set them up properly while being aware of all cyber security threats and protection measures. You can check the SafeSpace website for more information.