You can play every daily case with no account and no sign-up — that’s the default way to play, and it stays free either way.

When you play, we record which case you answered, which option you chose, the date, and the country you played from. That’s it for the game itself.

If you create an account, we store your email address so you can sign in, and a password kept only as a salted, irreversible hash. Your email is never stored alongside your answers.

You can optionally tell us a few things about yourself — your age band, legal background, field of law, education, and gender. Every one of these is optional, “prefer not to say” is always an answer, and leaving them blank never blocks anything.

You can also tell us your country or jurisdiction yourself, separately from the country we work out automatically (see below).

When you first visit, we record the referring site or campaign link (if any) that brought you here. We use this to understand which communities our players come from and to check whether players from different sources answer differently. It is not used to identify you.

Your real name, contacts, precise location, or advertising identifiers. The game has no free-text input, so you can’t accidentally tell us something personal.

We work out which country you’re playing from using your connection, the same way most websites do. We use it to group answers by country. We don’t store your IP address alongside your answers.

Your individual answers are never published or shared with anyone.

They are combined with other players’ answers into group totals — never smaller than a minimum group size — and those aggregated, anonymised results may be used to study how people reason about legal and ethical questions: in academic research and publications, in public-policy analysis, in comparisons across countries and over time, and in datasets licensed to others for the same kinds of analysis, including the evaluation of automated and computational decision-making systems, such as artificial intelligence. Licensing those aggregates is how a free, ad-free game pays for itself.

Because results are aggregated and anonymised before any of this happens, they cannot be traced back to you.

Hard Cases is a personal project run by a legal academic. Results from the game may be used in academic research and publications. Where a study requires it, that research is conducted under university ethics approval.

We don’t sell or share anything that identifies you. We don’t build a profile of you as an individual for anyone else. We don’t show ads, and no advertiser pays to appear here. We don’t track you across other websites.

You can download everything we hold about you at any time, in a plain file you can read.

You can delete your account whenever you like. When you do, your login and your personal details are erased permanently. Your past answers stay in the group totals — by then they’re anonymous, no longer connected to you, and removing them would distort results other people rely on.

Your data is stored in Australia. Some service providers we use may process data elsewhere. Access is limited to what the game itself needs.

Write to us at [email protected]. If you’re in the EU or UK, you may have additional rights over your data, including the right to complain to your local data protection authority.