Terms of use

These terms are an agreement between you and ClearCode Digital Ltd. In them, we and us mean ClearCode Digital Ltd, you means the person who holds the account, and the product means PC Guardian in all its parts — the software installed on a Windows PC, the console you manage it from, the phone app, and this website.

You are dealing with us as a consumer, for your household. That matters: consumer law applies to this agreement and several clauses below exist because of it.

You agree to these terms when you create an account. If you do not agree to them, do not create one — and if you have created one and changed your mind, close it and nothing more happens.

The privacy notice forms part of this agreement. So does the description of the product on this site, including the parts of it that describe what the product does not do. We are not entitled to advertise one thing and supply another, and we are not trying to.

• You must be eighteen or over.
• You must be the parent, legal guardian or authorised carer of each child you add, or acting with the agreement of somebody who is. Section 4 is where this is set out properly.
• The account is for one household. You may install the agent on the number of PCs your tier allows, and those PCs must be ones you are entitled to make decisions about.
• This is a consumer product. It is not licensed for use by a school, a business, an employer, or an organisation monitoring people it employs or supervises.

This is the clause that matters most. Every time you add a child, you confirm two things.

You must not use PC Guardian to monitor, restrict or gather information about an adult. Not a partner, not an ex-partner, not an adult family member, not a lodger, not an employee. It does not matter whose computer it is or who pays for the broadband.

The product is built to make this difficult rather than merely to forbid it. A date of birth implying eighteen or over is refused. Nothing about content is ever captured. The agent cannot be hidden from the person using the machine.

• Keep your password and your override PIN to yourself, and specifically away from the children the product is protecting. The PIN is what stands between a determined child and an uninstall.
• Turn on two-factor authentication if you can. It is free and it is the single most useful thing you can do for the account.
• Tell us promptly if you think somebody else has your credentials, so we can help you get the account back.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account, other than where somebody has got into it through a failure on our side.

If a card expires, a payment fails, or you decide to stop paying, the filtering does not stop. The agent drops to Free-tier scope on one PC and carries on enforcing the last rules you set. What you lose is the management: the phone app, the request workflow, the feed, the reports, the extra devices.

We are not willing to be in the business of switching off a child’s protection because a direct debit failed.

We will supply the product with reasonable care and skill, and the software will be of satisfactory quality and fit for the purpose it is described as being for. Those are statutory obligations and nothing in this agreement reduces them.

What we are supplying is the enforcement described on this website: the filtering, the application control, the screen time, the request workflow, the reporting, and the tamper resistance set out in the bypass table — including its published limits. Section 11 is part of the description of what you are buying, not a disclaimer bolted onto the end of it.

You are buying a specific thing with specific edges. These are the edges, and they are the same ones published on the front page.

• Windows only. It protects Windows PCs running the agent. It does nothing for a phone, a tablet, a games console, a smart TV or a Mac.
• It is not antivirus. It blocks the addresses of known malware and phishing sites. It does not scan files, examine what is already on the machine, or remove anything. Keep your antivirus.
• It does not stop somebody booting the PC from other media. A person who starts the machine from a USB stick and edits Windows from outside it can disable this. That is adult-level effort and it is out of scope. The setup wizard shows you how to set a firmware password, which is the actual defence.
• Category lists are good, not perfect. We use free public blocklists plus five thousand hand-classified domains. Something will get through a category you thought was closed, and something harmless will be blocked. Both are one tap to fix.
• Windows Home cannot enforce as strongly as Windows Pro. The console reports which of the three enforcement levels your PC is actually running rather than showing a tick that means nothing.
• Almost all of it depends on the child using a standard Windows account. If you override the installer’s warning and leave a child as an administrator, several of the protections stop being difficult to remove. The installer makes you type a confirmation phrase before it will let you do that.
• It is not a substitute for supervision. Software can hold a boundary. It cannot explain why the boundary is there.

We do not promise that a child will never see something they should not, and no honest product in this category can. What we promise is the enforcement described, maintained, and fixed within fourteen days when somebody demonstrates a child-level way round it.

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the software on the number of PCs your tier allows, for as long as your account is open. We keep ownership of the software and everything in it.

You must not:

• copy, sell, rent, sub-license or redistribute the software;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except where the law gives you that right regardless of what this clause says, or where the security page invites you to test it and report what you find;
• remove or alter anything identifying it as ours, including the code signature;
• install it on a PC you are not entitled to make decisions about, or use it against an adult;
• use it to break the law, or to do something to somebody else’s computer that you would not want done to yours.

We distribute from our own download host, reached from your account. An installer obtained from a software download portal is not ours and is not covered by this licence, because those portals repackage installers with advertising bundled into them.

We aim to keep the service available and we will tell you about planned work that will interrupt it. If our service is unreachable, the agent on the PC carries on enforcing the last policy it received, so an outage at our end does not leave a child unfiltered.

We will change and improve the product over time. We will not remove a capability you are paying for without telling you first and giving you the chance to cancel. Support is by email, at the address at the foot of this page; Family Plus is handled first.

Windows changes underneath us regularly, and occasionally a Windows update breaks a layer of enforcement. The agent tests its own filtering when it starts and every hour after, and it tells you in the console if a layer has failed. A filter that has quietly stopped working is worse than no filter, so we would rather show you the failure than hide it.

You can close your account whenever you like. What happens to your data when you do is in the privacy notice.

We may suspend or close an account if you break these terms in a way that matters — particularly sections 4 and 5 — or if we are required to by law. Unless we are prohibited from doing so, we will tell you why, and give you a chance to put it right where putting it right is possible.

If we fail to comply with these terms, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of that failure. Loss is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if we both knew it might when you started using the product.

We do not exclude or limit our liability in any way for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• anything else it would be unlawful for us to exclude or limit, including your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

We are not liable for loss that was not foreseeable, or for business losses — this product is supplied for household use, and if you use it for a business we have no liability for loss of profit, loss of business, or business interruption.

We are also not responsible for what a child does, or for a consequence of a decision you took against the product’s own advice — the clearest example being leaving a child as an administrator on the PC after the installer has warned you and made you type a confirmation phrase.

Write to us first. Tell us what happened and what you would like done about it, and a person will answer.

We do not currently take part in an alternative dispute resolution scheme, and we would rather say so than imply one exists. If we cannot resolve something between us, section 19 says which courts have the final word.

We may change these terms — to reflect a change in the product, in our costs, or in the law. If a change affects you materially we will tell you at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you may cancel and be refunded for any period you have paid for and will not use.

• Transfer. You cannot transfer this agreement to somebody else. We can transfer it if the business changes hands, and we will tell you if that happens; your rights are unaffected and you can cancel.
• Delay is not waiver. If we do not insist on something straight away, that does not mean we have given it up.
• Severance. If a court decides one clause here is unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.
• Third parties. Nobody outside this agreement has rights under it, except that a child in your household may enforce the commitments in sections 4 and 5 and in the privacy notice. That exception is deliberate.
• The whole agreement. These terms, the privacy notice and the product description on this site are the agreement between us.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland you may bring proceedings in the Scottish courts, and if you live in Northern Ireland you may bring them in the Northern Irish courts.