Privacy Policy

This explains what Footy Finder collects, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read. If anything here is unclear, email hello@footyfinder.app and we will explain it.

Who is responsible

Pietro Di Paola is the data controller for Footy Finder, operating from Italy. Contact: hello@footyfinder.app.

What we collect, and why

• Name, email and password. To create your account and sign you in. Your password is stored only as a bcrypt hash, so we cannot read it, and nor can anyone who obtains the database. Your address is used to sign you in, to send a reset link if you forget your password, and to tell you if a game you joined is cancelled. Nothing else: no newsletter, no announcements, and nothing you have to unsubscribe from.
• Date of birth. To confirm you are old enough to use a service that arranges meetings in person, and to show your age. Other players are shown your age only, never the date.
• Positions, skill level and biography. So organisers can build balanced teams. These are visible to other signed-in players.
• University, course and year. Optional. Visible to other signed-in players; they exist so a stranger on a teamsheet is less of a stranger.
• Profile photograph. Optional. Visible to other signed-in players and to nobody who is not signed in.
• Games, teams and requests. Which fixtures you organise or join, and when.
• Reports. If someone reports a no-show or a conduct problem, we keep the report, the reason and the date.
• Who you have blocked. If you block another player we record that the two of you should never be put in the same game. They are not told, and nobody but you can see your list.

• Reports you file, and reports about you. The name you give, the name of anyone you report, the category and what you wrote. Reports are not public and are never shown to the person reported. Nothing in one is verified when it arrives. Matching a typed name to a real account is done by hand afterwards.
• Ratings. A star out of five, given by an organiser to a player or by a player to an organiser, after a game has been played. Your averages are public: every signed-in player sees them on your profile, alongside how many ratings they are based on. Who gave which rating is never shown to anyone.
• How many games you have played and hosted. Counted from completed games, and public in the same way.

Our lawful basis

• Contract. Your account, your games and the information other players need in order to pick teams. Without these the service cannot work.
• Consent. Your photograph, biography and study details. All optional, all removable at any time from your profile.
• Legitimate interests. Reports and moderation records, to keep the community usable and safe, balanced against the interests of the person reported.

Who can see what

Other signed-in players can see your name, age, photograph, positions, skill level, biography and study details, and which games you are in. They cannot see your email address, your date of birth, or any report.

Your rating averages, rating counts, games played and games hosted are visible to every signed-in player. That is the point of them: somebody deciding whether to join your game, or to let you into theirs, is deciding about a stranger. Nobody can see the individual ratings behind an average, or who gave them.

Anyone holding a link to a game, including people without an account, because those links get pasted into group chats, can see the pitch, the kick-off time, the format and how many places are left. They cannot see who is playing. Names, photographs and profiles are withheld until someone signs in, and the preview card that a chat app draws for the link carries no names either.

The WhatsApp group link for a game is shown only to its organiser and to players who hold a place in it. Once you have seen it, you have seen it. We cannot withdraw a link from someone's memory or screenshot, so treat joining a game as sharing that link with you permanently.

Cookies

One cookie, ff_session. It keeps you signed in and does nothing else. There is no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie and no third-party tracker on this site, which is why you are not being asked to consent to any: a cookie strictly necessary to provide a service you asked for does not require consent under the ePrivacy Directive.

We do count how the product is used, and that is described under Measuring how the site is used below. It is done without storing anything on your device and without any identifier, so it neither sets a cookie nor requires your consent.

Your browser also remembers one thing locally: whether you chose the light or dark theme. It never leaves your device and we never see it.

Measuring how the site is used

We count a small number of events so we can tell whether the product works: someone opened the front page, pressed a button on it, started signing up, finished signing up, posted a game, joined one, joined a waiting list, filtered the list, or filed a report. That is the complete list.

These counts carry no identifier of any kind. There is no account number, no device identifier, no cookie and no IP address attached to them, and no random identifier that persists from one event to the next. Each one is recorded with a fresh random value that is thrown away immediately, so two events from the same person cannot be connected to each other, and no event can be connected to you. We can see that four hundred games were posted last month. We cannot see who posted any of them, and neither can anyone else.

A few events carry a short label describing the thing itself, never the person: which button was pressed, whether a game was five-a-side or eleven-a-side, whether it was public or approval-only, and which filters were used. What you typed into the search box is never sent. Neither is a pitch name, a team name, or anything you wrote.

One of those labels describes the link rather than you. When we share a link to this site we sometimes tag it with where we put it, so we can tell whether anyone opened it. If you arrived by such a link, that tag is counted with the visit. It names the place the link was posted, never the person who followed it, and it is subject to everything above: no identifier, and nothing connecting that visit to any other.

Your browser never contacts our analytics provider directly. Events are sent to our own server, which forwards the counts on. The provider is PostHog, and the data is held in the European Union.

Because none of this is personal data, there is nothing here to access, correct or delete, and nothing to consent to. If we ever change that, this section changes first and you will be asked.

How long we keep it

• Account information: until you close your account.
• Games and rosters: kept as history so past fixtures stay coherent. After you close your account these no longer identify you.
• Reports: 12 months from the date of the report.
• Ratings: kept as long as the account, since they are what the averages are computed from. Closing your account destroys them with it.
• Blocks: until you remove them, or until either account is closed.
• Password reset links: one hour, then they stop working. We store only a hash of the link, never the link itself.
• Delivery records for the emails we send are held by Resend under their own retention policy, not by us.

Your rights

You can exercise these yourself, immediately, from your profile page, not by writing to us and waiting a month.

• Access and portability. Download everything we hold about you as a JSON file.
• Rectification. Edit any field on your profile.
• Erasure. Close your account. Your name, email, date of birth, biography, study details and photograph are destroyed. Past games keep an anonymous placeholder so other players' history stays intact. After this, nothing in our records identifies you.
• Objection and restriction. Email hello@footyfinder.app.

You may also complain to your national supervisory authority. In Italy, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali.

Who else touches it

We do not sell data, share it with advertisers, or use it to build a profile of you. We do not run our own computers either, so the companies below process data on our behalf, under contract and on our instructions only:

• Fly.io: Runs the application itself. European Union / United Kingdom.
• Neon: Hosts the database where everything is stored. European Union.
• Cloudflare: Registers the domain and forwards mail sent to our addresses. Global network, mail forwarded to an EU inbox.
• Resend: Delivers the two emails we send: a password reset link, and notice that a game you joined was cancelled. European Union (Ireland).
• PostHog: Counts anonymous product events, such as how many games are posted. It receives no identifier and never sees who did anything. European Union (Germany).

Your data is stored in the European Union. These are United States companies operating European infrastructure, so where any transfer outside the EEA occurs it relies on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

Nothing about you is decided automatically. There is no profiling, no scoring and no algorithm that suspends an account. A person reads reports and a person decides.

If this list changes, this page changes with it.

Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sessions are held in a cookie that page scripts cannot read, and expire after 24 hours of inactivity. Sign-in attempts are rate limited. No system is perfect; if we discover a breach affecting you we will tell you.