Step 3 — Reading the account, privacy and purchase terms

A game sign-up looks like three empty boxes and a button. Underneath, it is a request to enter an agreement with a company, usually one based outside Australia, about a service it can change or discontinue.

The boxes themselves tell you something. An email address is nearly always required, because it is how the publisher establishes that a real person is reachable and how it recovers your account later. A chosen display name is usually public inside the game. A password is yours alone — and because a game account can accumulate purchases over the years, it deserves a password you do not use anywhere else.

What a sign-up for a free desktop game should not need is a payment card, a phone number for verification without explanation, a date of birth beyond what is needed for age-appropriate access, or a copy of an identity document. Being asked for those at the point of creating a free account is a reason to stop and read more carefully rather than a reason to panic. If something looks like an attempt to obtain personal information under false pretences, Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, publishes information about how such attempts work and accepts reports.

Almost every publisher of an online game maintains four documents. They are rarely in one place, and they are almost always linked from the footer of the publisher's own website — the small grey text at the very bottom of the page.

If a publisher does not appear to have one of these, note the gap rather than inventing an explanation for it. In practice, the absence of a visible privacy policy on a service that requires an account is the single thing on this page most worth pausing over.

1. Open the publisher's own site and scroll to the footer. Open each of the four documents in its own tab. Do not use a summary written by someone else; the publisher is the party bound by its own wording.
2. Read the first screen of each. The opening paragraphs name the company, the jurisdiction and the scope. Knowing which company you are dealing with, and in which country it is established, is worth more than most of the detail that follows.
3. Search, do not scroll. Use your browser's find function and the word list in the next section. Read the surrounding paragraph for each hit.
4. Write down four answers. Who the company is; what happens to your account if you stop playing for a long time; whether purchased items are owned or licensed; and who to contact about a purchase problem.
5. Note the last-updated date. Terms change. A date tells you how current what you read is, and gives you something to compare against if you look again next year.
6. Only then create the account. With one email address you can reach today, and a password used nowhere else.

Each of these words tends to sit next to a clause that affects you directly.

• "terminate", "suspend", "inactive" — the circumstances in which the publisher can close or freeze an account, and whether long inactivity is one of them.
• "licence" or "license" — usually the clause explaining that in-game items are licensed for use inside the service rather than owned as property. This is standard, and it is still worth reading once in your life.
• "virtual currency" — how bought and earned currencies are treated, and whether they expire or can be refunded.
• "refund" — the publisher's own process. Read this together with the Australian consumer guarantees described below.
• "third party", "share", "transfer" — who else receives information about you, and whether it goes overseas.
• "anti-cheat", "monitor" — many online games install software that watches for cheating programs while the game is running. Knowing it is there, and what the publisher says it inspects, is better than discovering it later.
• "age", "parental" — any age requirement for holding an account, and anything about accounts for younger players.
• "governing law" — the country whose law the publisher applies. In Australia, consumer guarantees still apply to goods and services supplied here regardless of what a contract says about this.

After you submit a sign-up form, most services send a message with a link in it and will not let you play until you open that link. Three things are happening at once.

The first is simply verification that the address exists and belongs to you, which stops accounts being created against other people's addresses. The second is establishing a recovery route: if you lose your password in two years, that confirmed address is how you get back in. The third is commercial: a confirmed address is one a publisher can use to contact you, subject to whatever you agreed to about marketing.

Two practical points follow. Check the sending address of the confirmation message, and open the link from the message rather than from anything else that arrives around the same time — a sign-up is a moment when look-alike messages are most likely to be convincing. And if you were offered a choice about receiving promotional email during sign-up, the choice is easier to make then than to unwind later.

This also explains something about the paid links on this site. The publisher's arrangement with the affiliate network pays on registration and confirmation of the email address followed by logging into the game, which is precisely why those three events are described here rather than glossed over. We would rather you understand what triggers our commission than discover it later.

Two public bodies publish the material that matters here, and both are worth a bookmark rather than a summary from us.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes on the consumer guarantees that apply under the Australian Consumer Law to goods and services supplied in Australia, including digital products. Those guarantees are not something a company's terms can simply remove, and the ACCC's own pages explain how they work and what to do when something goes wrong.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the national privacy regulator. It publishes the Australian Privacy Principles and explains how to make a privacy complaint. If you ever want to know what questions a privacy policy ought to answer, its published material is the reference point.

For anything involving online safety — harassment in a game's chat, image-based abuse, or safety settings for younger players — the eSafety Commissioner is Australia's independent online safety regulator and has guidance and reporting pathways for adults and families.

We are not lawyers and this course is not legal advice. What it can do is tell you which door to knock on, which is usually the information people are actually missing.

Our hypothetical household — three adults, one eligible desktop, no names and no product claims — sits down with four tabs open and a kitchen timer.

They find all four documents in the footer of the publisher's site in under a minute. The terms of service takes the longest; they search it for "terminate" and "licence", and write down that items are licensed inside the service rather than owned. They note the company name and the country it is established in. The refund policy gives them a contact route, which they save next to the password.

They make two decisions on the spot. The account will use a shared household address that all three can reach, so that a recovery email does not depend on one person's phone. And the password will be unique to this account. Then they create the account, open the confirmation message, check the sending address, click through, and stop for the night. Playing is Step 4, and doing it tired at eleven o'clock would make the next step's judgement worse.

You should be able to name the company behind the game, say whether in-game items are owned or licensed under its terms, know how to raise a purchase problem, and have an account whose email address you can actually reach.

You should also know where the Australian consumer and privacy regulators publish, so that if something does go wrong later you are not starting the search from nothing.