Privacy Policy

DinkPartner is a mobile app and website for pickleball players: you join a community, log the games you play, confirm each other’s scores, and get a rating from them. You can also find pickup games, line up for a court, run and enter tournaments, and find a coach. This policy covers the app, this website (including its public tournament, community and court pages) and our staff dashboard, and everyone who uses them: players, community owners, co-owners and admins, tournament organizers and their staff, people who pay an entry fee, coaches, and visitors who never make an account.

The service is operated by VertexSpot LLC, 920 US Hwy 64 W, Apex, NC 27523, which is responsible for your personal data (its “controller”). DinkPartner is run from the United States. Questions about this policy, and every request in section 16, go to [email protected], which reaches the person responsible for privacy here. We have not appointed a separate data protection officer or a representative in the EU or the UK; if the law comes to require one, we will name them here.

We collect what the app needs to work, and we have tried hard not to collect anything else. There is no advertising in DinkPartner, we do not sell data, and we do not build profiles for anyone other than you.

Why we may use it (UK and EEA). Most of the above we use because it is necessary to provide the service you signed up for — your account, your games and ratings, your communities and tournaments, and what you buy. We use technical records, reports and the audit log in our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure, honest and working. We use your device’s location, push notifications and any optional email only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time in your phone’s settings or in the app. We keep payment records and signed waivers because the law, or the legitimate interest of the organizer and of us in being able to answer a claim, requires it.

What we do not collect. No phone number, no gender, no contacts or address book, no advertising identifier, no history of where you have been, and no card numbers. There is no analytics or advertising software in the app or on this website; the app, this website, our staff dashboard and our server report errors to us so we can fix them (section 4). If you live in California or another US state with a privacy law, section 17 describes all of this in that law’s terms.

Location is used for three things: showing what is near you — near where your phone is, or near your home area when the app cannot tell; confirming you are at the courts when you say you are there — checking in, joining a rack, answering a rack’s call, or saying “I’m here” at a pickup game or a tournament; and putting a venue on the map. That is all. The app only reads your location while it is open on your screen: when you tap something that needs it, and — once you have allowed location — when you open Home or the Courts tab, or come back to the app, so that what is “near you” is near where you are.

• You do not have to share it — You can type your city instead of granting the app location access. The app works; only the things that need you to be at the courts — checking in, joining a rack or answering its call, and saying “I’m here” at a game on a mapped park — need location on.
• Your home area — If you pick a city, we save that city’s position. If you let the app find your home area instead, it reads your position once, at the phone’s low-precision setting (typically accurate to a few hundred metres or more), turns it into a city name on your phone, and saves both the city and that position, rounded to about two-thirds of a mile so it never points at a street or a house. The saved position is what “near you” is measured from whenever the app cannot tell where your phone is (location off, or no fix in a few seconds), and the app then says so — “Near Raleigh (your home area)”. If you leave “pickup games near you” on, it is also what decides whether a newly posted game is close enough (within about 15 miles) to tell you about. It is never shown to anybody, including on your profile; other people see, at most, your city. Change it in Edit profile whenever you like, or ask us to clear it. Where you are right now never changes it by itself: if your phone is more than about 15 miles from it, the app may suggest once that you update it, and only does if you tap Update.
• What is near you, and searching nearby — If you have allowed location, showing the courts, pickup games, coaches or communities near you reads your phone’s position at its low-precision setting and sends it with that request, rounded to about two-thirds of a mile. Looking for tournaments near you sends a position the same way. It is used to answer that request and is not saved — not to your account, and not on your phone, which keeps it in memory for a few minutes at most so it does not ask the GPS again on every refresh. Our hosting provider’s request logs, which we keep only for a short operational window, may record it with the request.
• Checking in, the rack, and “I’m here” — Checking in at courts, starting or joining a rack, answering a rack’s call, and checking in to a pickup game or a tournament at a mapped venue each send your phone’s precise position once, so we can confirm you are at that park. It is compared with the park’s location and then discarded — not stored, not logged. What we keep is the fact that you checked in, and when. A game at a place that is not on the map, and a host or organizer marking you arrived, send no position at all.
• There is no background tracking — The app does not ask for location while it is closed, does not read it in the background, and does not record a history of your movements.
• Your position can be wrong — Phones sometimes misplace themselves, especially indoors or near tall buildings. If a check-in is refused because the phone says you are somewhere else, try again in the open; the position is still not kept.
• A venue is a place, not a person — The public court board shows courts at a venue and how busy they are. It names nobody — not when you are signed in, and not when you are not.

The app has screens for an automatic check-in that would notice you arriving at a court. It is switched off and unavailable in this release, and those screens say so. When it does arrive, it will work the way it is already built to: your phone is handed a list of park circles, your phone’s operating system decides on the device when you have entered one, and the only thing sent to us is “check me in at this court” — the same request the button makes, with the one position needed to confirm you are there, which is checked and discarded. We will update this policy, and ask for the permission it needs, before it is switched on. Until then the app never asks for “always” or background location.

The app asks your phone for a permission only when you use the thing that needs it, and works without any of them.

• Location (while using the app) — For your home area and for confirming you are at the courts (section 3).
• Notifications — To send push notifications (section 5).
• An invitation link, once, on first launch — When you open DinkPartner for the first time after installing it, the app checks once whether you arrived from a DinkPartner invitation link: on Android it reads the install referrer Google Play provides, and on Android and iPhone it may read your clipboard one time (iPhone shows a notice when it does). Only a dinkpartner.com community, invitation or game link is used, to open that page in the app; anything else is ignored. Nothing read this way is stored or sent to us or anyone else, and the app never reads your clipboard again.
• Photos and camera — Only when you choose to add a profile photo: to let you pick one from your library or take one with the camera. The app reads only the picture you pick. Before it leaves your phone it is cropped to a square, made 512 × 512 pixels, and saved afresh without its EXIF data — so the place it was taken (GPS), the time and the phone that took it are removed. That copy is uploaded to private storage and shown only to the people who can see your profile (section 6), through a link that stops working after about an hour. It is kept until you remove it or replace it, or delete your account; the photo it replaces is deleted. An administrator can remove a photo that breaks the rules.
• Nothing else — No contacts, no microphone, no calendar, no Bluetooth, no health data, no tracking across other companies’ apps and websites (so the app never asks for Apple’s tracking permission), and no advertising identifier.

On your phone. The app keeps your sign-in in your phone’s secure storage, and keeps a game you have not finished logging, and scores waiting for a connection, in the app’s own storage. Deleting the app removes them.

No analytics, no ads; error reports only. There is no analytics, attribution or advertising software in the app, on this website or in our staff dashboard. When the app crashes or our server fails, a report goes to Sentry, our error-reporting provider: what failed, where in our code, the app version, the phone’s model and operating system, and how long things took. It carries no name, email address, password, sign-in token, location or anything you wrote, and identifies your account only by a code that cannot be turned back into it. It is used only to find and fix faults. When a page on this website or our staff dashboard fails in your browser, the same kind of report goes to Sentry: what failed and where in our code, which page it was (without anything after its first part), and our build’s version. It carries no account code at all, no cookie, nothing you typed and no recording of the page, and we tell Sentry not to keep your IP address.

Page speed. This website measures how quickly each page loads and responds in your browser (the figures known as Core Web Vitals) and sends them to our own server, not to anyone else: the measurement and its grade, which page it was without anything after its first part (for example “/pricing/” or “/c/”, never a community’s or court’s own address), and a random number for that one page view. No cookie, nothing stored in your browser, nothing that identifies you or your device, and nothing you typed. It is used only to keep the site fast.

Cookies. This website sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser; its public pages load their content from our API as you view them. Our staff dashboard keeps a staff member’s sign-in session in the browser’s local storage, which is necessary for it to work, and loads its typefaces from Google Fonts; neither is used to track anybody. Because there is nothing to opt out of, there is no cookie banner. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or “Do Not Track” signal, there is nothing it needs to switch off: we do not sell or share data either way.

Push notifications go to the phones you are signed in on, and only if you allowed them. Every one also lands in the inbox in the app.

• What you can turn off — Community updates and announcements, activity from people you follow, pickup games near you, players near you looking for a partner, tournament updates, reminders, the weekly recap, and alerts about your favourite parks. Set them in the app under Notifications.
• Quiet hours — Hold those optional notifications until your quiet hours end.
• What you cannot turn off — Things about your own account, something you belong to, or a decision waiting on you: a game asking for your confirmation, a dispute on a game you played, a change to a pickup game you joined, a spot opening for you, being called to a court from a rack, your registration, schedule, a refund or a cancellation in a tournament you have entered, being added as tournament staff, an invitation, a change to your role in a community, a community you belong to being closed (or, if you run it, hidden by us), a subscription of yours ending, the outcome of a report you made, and a change to your account. Organizers are also told when a player disputes an entry fee with their bank. They are not marketing, and some of them ignore quiet hours because they are useless an hour late.
• Marketing — Off unless you turn it on. We do not send any today.
• Test notifications — When you ask for help with notifications, our support staff can send a test to your own phones and address only, to check they arrive; that is recorded in our audit log.

Email is used for your verification and password-reset codes, and as a second channel for the notifications still worth reading an hour later: account changes (a password change, a suspension), invitations to a community, a co-ownership offer or a tournament, scores waiting for your confirmation or disputed, overdue confirmations, a tournament you have entered or staff (registration, waiver, schedule, cancellation), a receipt when an entry fee is refunded, and — for owners and organizers — a community hidden by us or an entry fee disputed with a bank. We send email through our email provider (section 13), never by text message. Almost all of these are about your account or a decision waiting on you, so — like the pushes above — they cannot be turned off; the email switch in the app turns off the optional ones, such as reminders and the Sunday weekly recap (which goes only to an address you have confirmed). A muted category is never emailed. Every notification email says why you got it and links to the settings that control it.

Your inbox and your devices. Clearing a notification removes it from your inbox; we keep the record of having sent it, so that we do not send you the same thing twice. Signing out — which signs you out on every phone at once — deletes the push tokens for all your devices, and so does deleting your account. A token the push service says no longer works is deleted too.

Most of what the app shows other people is under your control, and the default is the cautious one.

• Your name and handle — Shown wherever you appear — a game, a ladder, a draw, a list of members, a rack, a search result — to people signed in to the app. Anyone signed in can find you by name or handle, except people you have blocked. Whatever your setting below, this is all somebody outside it sees.
• Your photo — Seen only by the people who can see your profile under the setting below — and by you. Somebody outside it sees your initials instead. The photo is kept in private storage: the app is given a link to it that stops working after about an hour, and only for someone allowed to see it. It is never shown to somebody you have blocked or who has blocked you, never on a page anyone can open without an account, and never where you appear only as “a player”.
• Your profile, ratings and game history — You choose: public (anyone signed in), community (people in a community with you, and people you have accepted as followers — the default), or private (only people you have accepted as followers). Change it whenever you like. Your bio, playing hand, home city and how reliably you confirm scores follow the same setting.
• A community's ladder — Members of a community you belong to see your rating, record and place on its ladder, whatever your setting — a ladder that left people out would not be a ladder. Leaving the community takes you off it.
• A game — Seen by the people who played it, members of the community it was played in, and people who follow one of its players.
• A request for a partner or a fourth — When you post one, players near the park you chose (or, if you post it to one of your communities, its members) see your name, a level — your rating in that format rounded to the nearest half point, or the level you gave yourself — the park or place you named, the time and your note. Never your home location or your exact rating: where a request is placed is rounded to about two-thirds of a mile and only used to measure distances. Only you see who answered. People you have blocked, and people who have blocked you, do not see it.
• Followers — You decide who follows you: a request is yours to accept or decline, and you can remove a follower at any time.
• Blocking — Hides both ways and removes any follow between you. There is no one-way block that leaves you visible to the person you blocked.
• People you add — If you hold a seat on a game for somebody who has not joined, or invite somebody by email, we keep their address to deliver the seat or the invitation. Tournament and community invitations are emailed to them, saying who sent them; a held seat is not — you share the link yourself.
• Public pages, for anyone — Without an account, anyone can see a public tournament’s page (its name, dates, venue, divisions, entry counts, refund policy and waiver text, and the organizer’s name and handle — not their photo, and not who has entered), a public community’s page where we show one (its name, description and member count — not its members or ratings), and a court board, which names no player at all; it may name the community or tournament that is using a court. Inside the app, people signed in see a tournament’s draws, schedule and results with the players’ names.

• Community owners, co-owners and admins — See the community’s members and their roles, requests to join, invitations, and bans. They do not see your email address, your birth year or your home position.
• Tournament organizers and co-organizers — See who has registered (name, handle and rating, and the photo of anyone whose profile they can see), partners, check-in, payment status, and each signed waiver — the version, the time and the IP address it was accepted from — and can export them. Not your email address and not your birth year. Once an organizer has downloaded an export, that copy is theirs to look after, and our retention periods do not reach it.
• Scorekeepers — See the draw and check-in to do their job. Not waivers.
• Whoever starts a rack — Sees the line, like everyone in it.
• DinkPartner staff — A small team, signing in with a second factor, can see account records — including your email address, your last sign-in, your games, communities and ratings, and reports — to answer support requests and reports, keep the service working, and act on abuse. They see which phones an account has, not the tokens; they never see a password or a card. Everything they change is written to an audit log with a reason.

You can report a player, a game or a community from inside the app. A report records who made it, what it is about, the reason you chose and anything you write. Only our staff read it.

• The person or community you report is not told — Not that they were reported, and never by whom.
• You are told the outcome, and only that — When we close a report you get a notification that it was reviewed. It does not name the subject, quote our notes, or say what we did to anybody. Your reports are listed in the app under Me → Privacy.
• What we may do — Void a game, hide or close a community, end a co-ownership, remove a profile photo (it is deleted, and nothing else on the account changes), or suspend an account. Each decision is written to our audit log with a reason. An owner whose community we hide or close is told, and a player whose account we suspend is told by email.

Reports and the decisions on them are kept for as long as the accounts involved exist, and afterwards against the anonymous record, so that a repeat pattern can be recognised.

A coach listing is published to everyone using the directory. That is its purpose — it exists to be found by people looking for lessons — so treat everything on it as public.

What a live listing shows to anyone signed in:

• Your name, handle and photo — The same ones your profile already uses. The photo follows your profile’s setting like everywhere else: set your profile to public if you want every reader to see it.
• Your headline, description, rate and what you teach — Your own words.
• Where you teach — Up to five venues you pick from the court map — so a reader can work out roughly where you are. Pick accordingly.
• Certifications you have entered — Shown as your claims, because that is what they are. We do not verify them and we do not display any mark suggesting we have.

Players reach you by message. A player writes to you in the app, and we store the message and who sent it so that it reaches you and stays in your coach inbox. We do not store your phone number; if you choose to give it out, you do that in your own reply. Whatever you arrange after that happens on whatever channel you choose, outside DinkPartner, and we are not a party to it.

Stopping the subscription delists you; it does not delete you. If the listing lapses, or you switch it off, the profile stops appearing in the directory, but we keep what you wrote so that listing again does not mean typing it all again, and we tell you when it lapses. To have the profile erased, write to [email protected]; deleting your account erases it, together with the venues on it and the messages players sent you.

The court map is built by players. If you add or edit a park, the courts in it, or a note about how to find them, that information is public and is not attributed to you in the app. We keep a record of who made the change for moderation and for undoing damage, and that record is not shown to other players.

A court’s public board names nobody. The page a court’s QR code opens, and the public court page on this website, show how busy the courts are and how long the line is — never who. The data behind them carries no player at all, so there is no name to leak.

Inside the app, where you are signed in, the rack and the “who’s on” screens do name the players who put themselves in the line — that is the point of them. Putting your paddle in a rack tells the other people at that court that you are there and want a game. A check-in is counted, not named: it adds one to how busy the courts look, and lasts about ninety minutes unless you end it.

If you run a facility and want a venue corrected, a court removed or a listing taken down, write to [email protected]. You do not need an account, and we will not ask you to prove ownership before removing something you tell us is yours and should not be listed.

There are two kinds of payment, they are separate, and we never see your card number in either.

• Entry fees for a tournament — Taken by Stripe, on our behalf as the organizer’s collecting agent, by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Stripe holds the card details. What we store is what you paid for, how much — the entry, our fee and the processing cost, separately — in what currency, any refund, and Stripe’s reference for it.
• DinkPartner Plus, tournament hosting and coach listings — Taken by the App Store or Google Play as an in-app purchase. Apple or Google takes the payment and tells us that a purchase happened, what it was for, its transaction reference, and whether it is still active, renewing, refunded or ended; we check each purchase with Apple or Google directly and keep the record they send. On an iPhone the app also hands Apple a random account code we made for your account (it says nothing about you), so Apple’s record of the purchase shows which DinkPartner account it belongs to. We never receive your payment details, and we tell you when a subscription of yours ends.

Refunds and disputes. When an entry fee is refunded, we record the amount and send the payer a receipt. When a payer disputes an entry fee with their bank, Stripe tells us, and we tell the organizer that a dispute was opened on their tournament — not who opened it.

Organizers who take entry fees open a Stripe account and give their identity, bank and tax details to Stripe directly, not to us. We store which Stripe account is theirs and what we have paid into it. Where the law requires it — in the US, for example, Form 1099-K — Stripe and we report payouts to tax authorities, using the details the organizer gave Stripe.

If you enter a tournament with a waiver, you sign the organizer’s waiver yourself. Not your partner on your behalf — each player accepts their own.

What we record when you do, and keep:

• The exact text you agreed to — Stored as a numbered version. If the organizer edits the wording afterwards, that creates a new version; it does not rewrite what you agreed to.
• When you accepted it — To the second.
• The IP address you accepted it from — Because a signature that cannot be placed is not much of a signature.

The organizer and co-organizers of that tournament can read and export it; scorekeepers cannot. You can read every waiver you signed in the app.

A signed waiver is kept for seven years after the tournament finishes and is then deleted. Deleting your account does not delete a waiver you signed. What is removed is the link to your profile, so the record reads as a deleted player — the signature, the time, the address and the text stay. A liability record that one of the parties can delete on their own is not a record, and that is the entire reason the organizer asked for it. We keep it on that basis — to allow a legal claim to be made or defended — even after you ask us to delete your data, and use it for nothing else.

We use a small number of providers to run the service. They process data on our instructions, under contracts that require them to protect it, and for no purpose of their own — except Apple, Google and Stripe, which also handle payments under their own privacy policies.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We disclose data to someone else only when the law requires it, when it is necessary to protect somebody’s safety, or — if DinkPartner is ever sold or merged — to the business that takes it over, which would remain bound by this policy.

Where it is processed. These providers, and we, are in the United States, so if you use DinkPartner from elsewhere your data is processed in the US. Where the law of your country requires a safeguard for that transfer, we rely on the providers’ certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK and Swiss extensions) where they have it, and otherwise on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses in our agreements with them.

You can delete your account from inside the app: open Me, scroll to the bottom, tap Delete account and confirm with your password. You do not have to email anyone to ask. It takes effect at once — there is no waiting period — and cannot be undone. If you cannot get into the app, write to [email protected] from the account’s address and we will do it for you.

What happens:

• Your account is closed — Your email address and password are erased, every session is ended, and the push tokens for your phones are deleted. The address is free to register again.
• Your profile is anonymised — Your name is replaced with “Deleted player”. Your handle, photo (deleted from storage too), bio, birth year, city, home location (including the saved position nearby features use), DUPR ID, self-rating and playing hand are erased. Who you follow and who follows you, who you blocked, your notification settings, any live check-in and your coach listing (with the messages players sent you) are deleted. Your rating and its history, your past memberships, your notification history and reports you made stop being shown to anyone and are kept only against that anonymous record, because other people’s games and ladders depend on them.
• Your games stay, without you on them — They are other people’s games too. Your place in them reads as “Deleted player”, and the scores continue to support everyone else’s rating.
• Messages you sent a coach stay with the coach — Shown as from a deleted player. So do announcements you posted in a community.
• Signed waivers stay, detached — The one exception, for the reason in section 12.
• Payment and purchase records stay — For the period in section 14, as do entries in our audit log.
• Backups catch up — Copies in our database backups disappear as the backups roll off, normally within 30 days.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription bought through Apple or Google — cancel it in your Apple or Google account. If you own a community, transfer it first. If you would rather not delete everything, most of what you might want is a setting instead: make your profile private, leave a community, or turn notifications off.

Inside the app, at any time:

• See what we hold — Your profile, your games, your rating and its full history, your memberships and your signed waivers are all readable in the app.
• Correct it — Edit your profile. Correct a game that is not yet confirmed, or dispute it — a disputed game does not count while the dispute is open.
• Limit who sees it — Profile visibility, community membership, blocking.
• Stop the messages — Notification categories, quiet hours and email in the app; location and push permissions in your phone’s settings.
• Delete it — section 15.

Your rights. Depending on where you live, you have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal data (in a portable, machine-readable form if you want one), to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to withdraw a consent you gave, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information — which we do not do. We apply these to every user, wherever you live. Exercising them will never cost you anything or change how the app treats you.

To make a request the app does not handle itself, write to [email protected] from the email address on your account (or tell us which account, and we will confirm it is yours before acting). Somebody you authorise may ask on your behalf, with your written permission. We answer within 30 days; if a request is complicated and the law allows more time, we will tell you within those 30 days. You can take a copy of your data yourself at any time: in the app, Me → Privacy → Download my data gives you a machine-readable (JSON) file of your account, profile, ratings and their explanations, games, communities, follows, the blocks you made, tournament entries with your waiver acceptances, purchases and the reports you filed — up to three times a day. If you cannot use the app, ask us and we will send the same file to your account’s email address. If we refuse a request, in whole or in part, we will say why.

Appeals. If you disagree with our answer, reply to it with the word “appeal”, or write to [email protected] with that word in the subject. Somebody who did not make the first decision will look at it again and answer in writing within 45 days, explaining what we decided and why. If you still disagree, you can complain to your state attorney general (or, outside the US, your data protection authority), and we will tell you how in our answer.

California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon and a growing list of other states give their residents privacy rights. We give the rights in section 16 to everyone, wherever they live, so you do not have to prove which state you are in. This section is the notice those laws ask for.

• What we collect, in those laws' categories — Identifiers (name, handle, email address, account id, IP address, push token); customer records (account and payment records); characteristics (age, from your birth year); commercial information (purchases, entry fees, refunds); internet or network activity (how you use the service, technical records); geolocation (your home area, and the one-off position sent to confirm you are at the courts); audio, electronic or visual information (a profile photo, if you add one); and inferences (your rating and the reliability figure on your profile). We collected all of these in the last 12 months, from the sources and for the purposes in section 2, and keep them for the periods in section 14.
• Sensitive personal information — Your account log-in (email address and password) and, for a moment, your precise location when you check in at the courts. We use them only to provide the service you asked for and to keep it secure — never to infer anything about you — so the “limit the use of my sensitive personal information” right has nothing to act on. The precise position is not stored.
• Who we disclose it to — The service providers in section 13, for the business purposes described there, and the people the app shows it to (section 6, section 7).
• We do not sell or share personal information — We have not sold or “shared” (for cross-context behavioural advertising) anybody’s personal information in the last 12 months, and we do not do either, so there is no “Do Not Sell or Share” link to offer. We do not use your data for targeted advertising or for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. We do not knowingly sell or share the data of anybody under 16 — we have no accounts below 18.
• Your rights there — To know what we collect and how we use it; to get a copy; to correct it; to delete it; to opt out of sale, sharing, targeted advertising and significant profiling (which we do not do); and not to be treated differently for asking. Make a request, use an authorised agent, or appeal as described in section 16. We verify a request by matching it to the email address on the account.
• Shine the Light — California residents may ask which personal information we have disclosed to third parties for their own direct marketing. The answer is none.

Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and never in a form we could read; verification and reset codes are stored the same way. Traffic is encrypted in transit, and the database enforces encrypted connections. Access to production data is limited to the people who run the service, our staff sign in with a second factor, and administrator actions are written to an audit log.

No service can promise it will never be breached. If a breach affects your personal data, we will tell you without undue delay, along with what happened and what to do, and we will notify the regulators the law requires us to, within the time it requires — in the UK and EEA, within 72 hours of becoming aware of it.

DinkPartner is for adults: you must be 18 or over to have an account. We ask for your birth year when you register — not the full date — and the app and our server both refuse an account below 18. Because we know only the year, somebody who turns 18 this year can join from 1 January of the next. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them (the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). We do not offer accounts to teenagers of 13 to 17 either, and there is no parent-managed account. Please do not give us a child’s email address — to hold a seat on a game, or to invite them to a community or a tournament.

If you believe somebody under 18 has an account — a parent or guardian especially — tell us at [email protected]. We will close it and erase its personal data as in section 15, without asking the child to prove anything first.

When this policy changes we update the date at the top. If the change is one that actually affects you — new data collected, a new purpose, a new provider — we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, rather than quietly reposting the page, and where a change needs your consent we will ask for it. We will not use data we already hold for a materially different purpose without asking you first.

Privacy questions and requests: [email protected]. Anything else: support. Post: VertexSpot LLC, 920 US Hwy 64 W, Apex, NC 27523. If you need this policy in another format because of a disability, see our accessibility statement or write to us and we will provide it.