While Once Human has blown up in popularity rather quickly, it’s currently being review-bombed due to a few specific lines in its terms of service. Let’s find out what lines are causing people to feel uneasy about this new multiplayer survival game.
The Once Human’s Terms of Service Controversy Explained
As of the time of this writing, Once Human is currently sitting at a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam with just under 5,000 reviews. Many players have mentioned concerns over the game’s terms of service. To be fair, there are some interesting items that NetEase will have access to, including:
- First and Last Name
- Title
- Prefix
- Email Address
- Telephone Number
- Messaging Accounts
- Postal Address
- Date of Birth
- Age
- Gender
- Country/Region
- Government-issued ID (Passport, etc)
- Debit or Credit Card Details
- Account Details
- Billing Address
Related: How to Redeem Rewards in Once Human
Much of this information is par for the course, including credit card details when microtransactions are in the picture. But players have highlighted an issue with Starry Studio accessing government-issued IDs. There are a few reasons in particular that they could use an ID—let’s say, for age verification purposes—but players are seemingly not happy about that.
While the terms of service are huge in many games, it seems that Once Human has struck a cord, especially considering the need for things such as ID and even nicknames on social media.
NetEase Responds to Concerns
If you’re interested in seeing what NetEase had to say about the terms of service controversy, you can find their full Discord message below:
“We wanted to take a few moments to discuss data privacy.
NetEase takes our users’ data privacy very seriously and adheres to the data privacy principles such as data minimization, purpose limitation, and transparency.
For example, we would only collect government-issued IDs for the following reasons: where the local laws require us to do so (such as for a specific promotion), when the identity of a user’s parent must be verified to obtain consent for their child (if required by applicable child protection laws), or when the user wishes to correct their age information (again, if such verification is required by law). In any case, the ID information is deleted immediately after we have fulfilled the purpose for collecting the ID information in the first place.
Similarly, we may ask our users for additional information such as social media account usernames, names, and address in user surveys that users voluntarily participate in. Users are free to provide as much or as little information in these user surveys, if they choose to respond to the survey at all.
In the spirit of transparency, we have indeed included the type of information that we may collect (which may not be the case if the users aren’t accessing the specific functionality), the purpose for which we collect the data, and how we process the data in our privacy policy. Our privacy policy also clearly states how you can exercise your rights to manage your personal information by contacting our in-game customer services. We have recently revised our privacy policy with the aim to improve clarity and transparency, which will be published soon.
We have heard your concerns and will continue to improve on how we describe our data privacy practices. If you have any specific questions or concerns after your review of our privacy policy, then please feel free to contact us.”
Likewise, Once Human has stated in their terms and conditions that this is in compliance with the Know Your Customer and age verification requirements for the online gaming sector, as instituted by the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. With that being said, it’s well worth reading the terms of service yourself.
Is Once Human Stealing Your Information?
Now, one thing to consider about NetEase is that Once Human complies with Chinese laws. As per AP News, children are only allowed 1 hour of online play per day, which could be part of this verification process. And looking through the Steam forums for Once Human brings up talks of the CCP and your information being given to them, or that the game is being used as a Crypto-mining scheme that is running multiple programs in the background while you’re playing the game.
There are no verified instances of Crypto-mining or any sort of issues regarding the ID systems, for what it’s worth. Once Human is a fantastic free-to-play experience, but you’ll have to use your own judgement when it comes to deciding to play or not.
Once Human is available to play now.