Privacy notice

Grassroots Mgmt. is an app for running a junior football team: fixtures, training, availability, team sheets and match records.

Most of the people in it are children. This notice explains what we hold about them and about you, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read rather than to be defended, so if anything is unclear, ask.

Deleting your account

In the app: open Settings (the cog at the top right of any tab), scroll to the bottom, tap Delete my account and confirm. It happens straight away.

Without the app: email ada.appdevai@gmail.com from the address you signed up with and ask for your Grassroots Mgmt. account to be deleted. We will delete it within 30 days and tell you when it is done.

What is deleted: your account — your name, email address and password — your place in every team you belong to, and any match notes you wrote. If you are the only coach of a team, that team is deleted too, with everything in it: its squad, fixtures, availability, team sheets, match records, tactics, formations and FA squad list.

What is kept: a team that has other coaches carries on, and what you added to it — fixtures, availability answers, match records — stays with the team without saying who entered it. Deleting a parent's account does not remove their child from the squad; ask the coach to do that. Feedback you sent us is kept with your name removed, and our records of staff access are kept as evidence. How long everything is kept is set out under How long we keep it below.

Who is responsible for what

We are responsible for the information in this app. We decide what it can hold, how long it is kept, who can see it and how it is protected, so we are the data controller for all of it — your account, the players in your squad, and the technical information the app sends us to keep it working.

• Us: Brett Spooner, trading as ADA Development, 60 Trueman Drive, Rotherham, S62 7FA — ada.appdevai@gmail.com

Your coach decides which children go in the squad and what to write about them, and they are responsible for that being appropriate. But the app is ours, the rules about what it holds are ours, and if you want something corrected or removed you can come to us directly. You do not have to work out who at your club to ask.

What we hold

Your account

Your name, your email address and your password (stored scrambled, never in a form anybody can read). We also record when you last signed in and whether you have confirmed your address.

Accounts belong to adults. You confirm when you sign up that you are 18 or over. Children do not have logins here: in a youth team a child appears as a player entered by their coach, and the person holding the account and answering availability is their parent or guardian. In an adult team — Under 21 and above — the player holds their own account. We do not ask a parent or a player for their name, because nothing in the app displays it.

About players — usually children

Name, playing position, squad number, a contact email address and an optional phone number. The email address is how somebody is invited to the app in the first place.

Whose address that is depends on the team's age group. Under 18 and below it is a parent or guardian's, because the child does not have an account. Under 21 and above the player is an adult and it is their own. A coach can invite more than one address for the same player, which is how a child with two households gets both parents into the app with the same access.

We do not collect dates of birth. We used to, to show an age on a player's page, and we stopped: it was information about a child gathered to decorate a screen.

We do not collect medical information. There is nowhere in the app to put it, and there should not be.

The FA squad list — only if your team's manager uploads it

A team's manager can keep the squad list they download from FA Full-Time in the app, so it is with the team. It is the FA's own sheet, unchanged, and holds for each registered player their name, age, date of registration, photograph and an emergency contact's name — with a phone number where the club gave the FA one — and for each team official their name, role and photograph.

• Only the team's manager can see it. No other coach, no parent, no player, and nobody at another club. Only a manager can change who is manager, so no one else can make themselves able to see it.
• It can be looked at in the app and nothing more. It cannot be downloaded, saved, shared or printed from the app, screenshots and screen recording are blocked while it is open, and it is never stored on the phone.
• There is only ever one. Uploading a new one deletes the old one. The manager can delete it at any time.
• It goes when the team goes. If the team is closed or deleted, the sheet is destroyed with it.

The FA's conditions printed on the sheet still apply: it is for running the team's affiliated football, and copies are destroyed once no longer needed. The app itself records no age or date of birth; the age on the sheet is the one the FA prints.

If you are named on it as a child's emergency contact, we hold your name, and your phone number if the club gave the FA one, for that team's manager only, for as long as the manager keeps the sheet. You can ask us about it like anything else we hold — see "What you can ask for".

Team sheets swapped on match day

Before a match the two managers swap team sheets. When both teams use the app, a manager can show the other manager a QR code, which they scan with the app. It carries:

• the match: the league or cup, the season, which team is at home, the date and the kick-off
• the team's name
• the first name, surname and role of each manager and coach
• the first name and surname of each player who has said they are available for that match — nobody who has not answered or cannot make it

Nothing else: no squad numbers, ages, photographs, contact details or reasons. The code works without signal, and nothing is kept on either phone once it is saved.

The manager who scans it keeps it with their record of that match, where only they, as their team's manager, can see it. It is deleted when they remove it, or when the match or their team is deleted. In the same way, when your manager scans the other team's code, we hold that team's names against your match, for your manager only.

Only a team's manager can show or scan one, and only when they choose to: no sheet is ever sent without a manager holding up their phone.

Availability and match records

Whether a player is available for a fixture, and any reason given. What happened in a match: goals, assists, cards, substitutions, minutes played.

A reason given for being unavailable is only ever visible to that team's coaches. So are a coach's private notes on a match. They are not shown to other parents, other players, or other clubs.

Technical information from the app

So we can tell when something is broken and fix it:

• Which version of the app you are running, your device model and operating system version
• A random identifier for your installation of the app — not a device identifier, and it disappears if you reinstall
• Error reports when something goes wrong, including what failed and which version it failed on
• The date you last used the app. A date, overwritten each time — not a record of when or how often you open it

We deliberately do not collect an activity trail, a location, an advertising identifier, or anything about what you look at in the app.

If you send us feedback or report a bug

Only when you choose to, from Settings. We receive what you wrote, a reference number, when the problem happened, and the same technical details listed above, so we can tell which version of the app went wrong.

If you attach screenshots, please look at what is in them. A picture of a squad list or an availability sheet contains real children's names, and it reaches our email inbox, which is a Gmail account. We keep the text of your report; we do not store the screenshots anywhere except that mailbox, and we delete them from it once the problem is understood.

Why we are allowed to hold it

We do not use anything here for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not profile anybody.

Who else sees it

Inside your club: coaches see the squad and everything needed to run it.

Parents and players are full members of the team, not a restricted audience. They see the fixtures, the whole squad list, who the coaches are, the match record and every player's statistics — the things anybody standing on the touchline already knows.

What they do not see is anybody's personal details, and they cannot change anything. Contact details, a coach's email address, a coach's notes on a match, and the reason another child gave for missing one are all withheld. Your own child's availability is yours; another family's is not.

No other club — with one exception your manager controls. Clubs are separated in the database itself, not merely in the app's screens. The one way anything crosses is a team sheet on match day: the names of your team's staff and of the players available for that match, shown by your manager to the other team's manager, face to face, as a QR code (see "Team sheets swapped on match day").

Our staff can see whether your account works, what version you are running and what errors you have hit — in order to answer support requests. For that work they cannot see squad lists, contact details, availability reasons, match notes or anything about a child. That is not a policy we ask staff to follow; the support tools cannot return that information at all.

There is exactly one exception, and it exists because you are entitled to it. When somebody asks for a copy of everything we hold about them, one tool can gather it — including the children that account is linked to and the availability given for them. It can be used by the owner of the business and nobody else, it needs a reason typed in before it will run, and it writes a record that says plainly that a full export was taken. It is the only way any of that information can leave the app, and it only ever runs on one named account at a time.

Every time a member of staff looks at an account, that is recorded — who, when, and why they said they were looking. The record cannot be edited or deleted by anybody, including us.

Companies that help us run the service:

Push notifications reach your phone via Expo in the United States, and from there through Apple or Google. Most carry a fixture and a time and nothing else.

One kind carries more, and only to coaches: when a player or parent says whether they can make an event, the team's coaches are told straight away — the player's name and whether they are available, with the fixture. It never includes the reason given for not being available, which stays in the app and is seen by the coaches only there. No notification carries anything else about a child, and none goes to a parent about any child but their own.

How long we keep it

Old technical data is deleted automatically every night, and so is a team whose subscription ended more than two years ago — restarting the subscription in that time keeps it. The ten-year limit on a subscribed team's records is not yet enforced by the app; until it is, a club can ask us to remove its records at any time.

What you can ask for

• A copy of everything we hold about you
• Correction of anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in the app
• Deletion of your account, which you can do yourself in Settings
• To object to how we use it, or to complain

For anything about a player — correcting a name, removing a child from a squad — speak to your coach, because those records belong to the club.

For anything about your own account, email ada.appdevai@gmail.com. We will reply within a month, usually far sooner.

To delete your account without using the app, email ada.appdevai@gmail.com from the address you signed up with. We will delete it within 30 days and confirm when it is done. What we keep afterwards, and for how long, is in the table above.

If you are not happy with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or call 0303 123 1113.

Children

Most players are under 18 and many are under 13, so:

• A child has no account. In a youth team the account belongs to their parent or guardian, who sees the fixtures and answers availability on their behalf. Above Under 18 the player holds their own account and confirms they are an adult when they sign up
• We collect the least we can: enough to pick a team and let a parent say whether their child can play
• The one exception is the FA squad list, if a manager chooses to keep it here: it carries each child's photograph, age and emergency contact, and only that team's manager can ever see it
• On match day your manager can show the other team's manager a team sheet: the names of the children who are playing, and nothing else about them
• No profiling, no advertising, no tracking, no nudges to share more
• Reasons for unavailability stay with the coaches, because a parent explaining a child's absence should not be explaining it to the whole team

If something goes wrong

If personal information is lost or exposed we will tell the Information Commissioner within 72 hours where we are required to, and we will tell you directly if it is likely to affect you.

Changes

If we change what we collect we will update this notice and say what changed. For anything significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

Terms of use

What you are agreeing to when you use the app, what a subscription costs and what happens when it ends, is a separate document: terms of use.

This section used to say the app was free while it was in early release and that formal terms would appear on this page. Both have since changed: it is £5.99 a month per team, and the terms have a page of their own.