Privacy Policy

FootPal FC is a small app for friend groups (“crews”) to organise football games. It is a personal hobby project, not a commercial service. You can start your own crew, or join an existing one with an invite link from a friend.

To make the app work, we store:

• Your display name, any nickname you set, your playing positions, and optional profile details you add (a photo, nationality, favourite team, shirt number, card style, badges)
• Your email address, if you choose to add one (used only for login links and verification)
• Your e-transfer address, if you add one — shown only to someone who owes you money, at the moment they go to pay you. It never appears on your profile
• Game activity: availability votes, RSVPs, team assignments, scores, poll votes, payment status
• Messages and reactions you post
• Images you upload — your profile photo or a crew picture (if you use background removal, that happens on your device; only the result is uploaded)
• A push notification subscription for your device, and which kinds of notification you have muted, if you enable notifications

We do not read your contacts, your photo library, or anything else on your device you have not handed to the app. There is no advertising. We use privacy-friendly, aggregate usage analytics (Vercel Web Analytics) to see which screens and features get used — it records no personal information, sets no advertising cookies, and does no cross-site tracking.

The app can use your device location in two places, and both only happen because you tapped something. Nothing reads your location in the background, and nothing reads it while the app is closed.

• Sharing where you are.In a chat, the “Location” option can post your current position as a pin. That is your precise coordinates, and everyone in that conversation can see them. It only happens when you choose it.
• Searching for a place. When you search for a venue or a place to share, and you have already granted location permission, your coordinates go with the search so that nearby results rank first. They are used for that search and not stored. If you have not granted permission, the search just runs without them — the app will not ask you from a search box.

Place searches are answered by Photon, a search service run by komoot. They go through our own server rather than straight from your phone, so Photon never sees your IP address.

FootPal FC uses a single login cookie to keep you signed in, and your browser’s local storage for small preferences (like which tips you’ve dismissed). No third-party or advertising cookies.

Your data is never sold or shared for marketing. It is processed only by the services that run the app:

• Vercel — hosting and image storage
• Neon — the database
• Resend — sends login and verification emails (only if you add an email)
• Giphy — powers GIF search in chat; your search terms are sent to Giphy
• Photon (komoot) — answers place searches for venues and location shares; sees your search text, and your coordinates when you have granted location permission, but never your IP address
• Sentry — receives a report when something in the app crashes, so it can be fixed. Names, email addresses, message text and your login cookie are stripped out before anything is sent
• Vercel Web Analytics — privacy-friendly, aggregate usage stats (no personal data, no cross-site tracking)
• flagcdn — serves country-flag images for the nationality on your card

Within your crew, your name, positions, game activity, and messages are visible to other crew members — that’s the point of the app.

You can delete your own account whenever you like, from Settings → Delete account. You do not need to ask anyone.

What that erases: your name, email, nickname, photo, e-transfer address, nationality, favourite team, shirt number and every other personal detail on your account. Your uploaded photo is deleted from storage, not just unlinked. Every device you are signed in on is signed out.

What stays, and why:

• Messages you posted stay in their conversations, shown as from “Deleted user”. They are part of other people’s conversations too, and pulling them out would leave holes in threads that were never only yours.
• Your place in games that have already been played stays, also anonymised. The cost of each of those games was divided between the people who were there, so removing you afterwards would change what everyone else is recorded as having owed.

Deletion is blocked in two cases: while you still owe money to someone in a crew, and while you are the only admin of a crew that still has other members. The app tells you which one applies and what to do about it.

If you would rather not do it yourself, email amir.ibrahim3000@gmail.com and it will be done for you.

While your account exists, we keep the things listed above so the app works — a crew’s game history, ledger and chat are the point of it. There is no automatic expiry. When you delete your account, the erasure above happens immediately rather than on a schedule.

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the “last updated” date above will change and the app’s What’s New notes will mention it.