Beyond the account, the file is built from how you play and spend, with machine fingerprints for anti-cheat and a reserved right to monitor voice and text. Retention is as long as they judge necessary, a length they decide with no fixed end.
Behaviour, chat, and spend, often a minor's. Worth listing.
Account and purchase data persists for years; moderation records longer.
Play needs little; age-assurance and appeals may demand a face or ID check.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
A gaming account is a resale target with a card attached, and years of voice and text chat sit behind it. Where a child plays, what leaks is those messages and the age check that proved how old they are.
The game reads how you play, and can listen
Beyond your account, every policy read builds a profile from your play and spending: inferences and segments about your tastes you never typed out. Voice and text chat with other players can be recorded and reviewed. Several policies word that recording as their own choice, so you cannot tell whether any one match was kept.
A child's account runs on a parent's consent
Where children play, policies gate accounts by age and lean on a parent's consent, switching off chat, purchases, or social features rather than turning the child away. The thresholds vary widely: one service opens supervised child accounts at seven, another sets its consent gate at thirteen, another holds back social features until sixteen. Under children's-privacy rules, a child's data cannot be kept indefinitely, and US regulators have fined game makers hundreds of millions of dollars for collecting it without a parent's consent.
The account closes; the data lingers
Every policy read keeps your data for as long as they judge necessary, a length they decide with no fixed end. Deleting your account rarely closes it: several reserve open-ended holds for legal reasons, fraud, or player safety. Some note that commercial and tax law can require your purchase records to be kept for up to ten years, whatever you do with the account.
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
Who you play and talk with maps a social graph.
Two kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a ground the company grants itself.
To enforce bans and stop blocked or abusive users coming back.
A legal duty to preserve child-safety reports, which overrides an erasure request for that data.
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
The advertising ID on your phone and your in-game activity feed ad markets built to match you across other apps: one ad network embedded in thousands of apps aimed at children was fined for tracking locations without knowledge or consent. The breach stakes are real: a single ransomware attack on one publisher exposed the personal data of more than fifteen thousand people.
Spend and engagement data drives targeting and monetisation.
Behaviour and chat train matchmaking and moderation models.
Anonymised is their word. In-game chat carries a writing style that language models attribute at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024), and four transactions identify 90% of people (de Montjoye et al., 2015).
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
Four card transactions identify 90% of people in payment data (de Montjoye et al., Science, 2015).
Language models infer where a person lives, their income, and their sex from their writing alone, at near-human accuracy and at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
Browser and device fingerprints were unique for 84% of visitors in the first large study (Eckersley, 2010), and sparse histories of what people viewed re-identified them against public reviews (Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2008).
THE STUDIES Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)·Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata (Science 347 (6221), 2015)·Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models (ICLR 2024, 2024)·How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010), 2010)·Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008)
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation, and increasingly AI training can all ride under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already covers it.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line: use your data to run the service, not to improve, target, or train on it.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Often technically true, and still misleading. It usually means no cash changes hands. Data can still flow to ad networks, analytics firms, and partners: on their definition, sharing is not selling.
THE MOVE Flip the do-not-sell switch where one exists. The written objection on top of it goes on your record.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
How data leaves the building with no name attached. Recipients are listed by what they do, never who they are. You cannot send a request to a company you cannot name, which is the point.
THE MOVE An access request can ask for the recipients by name, not just the categories. UK and EU law put that choice with you. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Stripping the name does not strip the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies grant themselves free, indefinite use of this data because in their telling it is no longer about you.
THE MOVE If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for: legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits, their own business reasons. None of them carries a firm end date. Deletion becomes a negotiation, not an event.
THE MOVE Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own. Their reply goes on your record.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
A contract term, not a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. The careful version ends with your account. The broad version can be passed on, never expires, and survives deletion.
THE MOVE Whether the licence ends with the account is written in their terms, not yours. Closing the account goes on your record.
“we reserve the right to monitor and record voice and text chat”
Blanket recording of what you say and type to other players, worded as the company's own choice. You cannot tell whether any one session was kept.
THE MOVE What was recorded and what is still held is theirs to answer. Their reply goes on your record.
“a machine 'fingerprint' or 'hash' of your machine components”
Anti-cheat software reads machine-level details of your computer and can run in the background while you play. Some policies extend this to outside anti-cheat firms.
THE MOVE What the anti-cheat reads from your machine is theirs to answer. Their reply goes on your record.
“if a report is made, and action is taken, the communications would be retained for up to 2 years”
A short chat window becomes a multi-year hold once another player reports you or a sanction attaches. The trigger sits outside your control.
THE MOVE Whether a report has put your chat on a longer hold is theirs to answer. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →