Privacy policy

Last updated 2 October 2026

0. The short version (written so anyone can understand it)

Tap Leagues is an app and website clubs use to run sport: leagues, ladders, tournaments and social sessions.

• What we keep. Your name, email address, date of birth, where you play (county or region, and country), your playing category, results, who you play and your messages, to run your account and your club's competitions. If your club takes payments, a payment company, Stripe, keeps your card details; we never see your full card number.
• A lot of what you do here is public. Anyone on the internet can see your results, place in standings and profile, with your first name and surname initial and no photo. Only people who share a club with you, the admins of a club you ask to join or attend as a guest, and our staff see your full name and photo. Don't type anything you wouldn't want other people to read.
• Your email and phone number. Whether other members of a club can see them depends on that club's setting. Your club's admins can always see them.
• Analytics. On the website, analytics and session recordings only run if you say yes; we always log errors. In the app, crash reports and usage analytics only start if you say yes (section 14).
• Your playing score. We work out a score for you (your Tap Leagues rating) from your results and show it with your name where anyone can see it (section 13).
• Age. Our terms say Tap Leagues is for people aged 18 or over, but we don't check, so people under 18, including under-13s, may have accounts. Section 11 says how we protect them.
• If something worries you: report the message in the chat, block the person, tell your club, tell a parent or guardian, or email us at enquiries@tapleagues.com. You can always ask us what we hold about you, and it's free.

When you sign up, you tick a box accepting our terms and this policy. That tick is not you agreeing to how we use your data. Section 4 gives the real reasons we're allowed to use it.

1. Who we are

Tap Leagues is run by Tap Leagues Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 14712237), registered office 14 Avon Road, Leicester, England, LE3 3AA.

• Data protection contact: enquiries@tapleagues.com, or the Contact form. We haven't appointed a data protection officer.

Words mean what they mean in our Terms of Use: a club is a sports club, league or similar organisation with a page on Tap Leagues; a club admin manages a club on Tap Leagues for it; a member is anyone with a Tap Leagues account; and a junior is someone we know to be under 18 (section 11).

This policy is information, not a contract. We record the tick you give at sign-up (section 3); for this policy it shows only that the policy was put in front of you. It is not consent, and we don't treat it as consent: wherever we rely on consent, we ask separately and you can say no (section 4).

2. Who is responsible for your data: us, and your club

Two organisations make decisions about your data here. The controller decides why and how your data is used; a processor carries out a controller's instructions. This mirrors Schedule 1 of our Terms of Use (our data processing terms with every club).

What Tap Leagues controls. We are the controller for:

• accounts people create themselves, including the date of birth, county or region, country and playing category you give us;
• the record of what you agreed to and when, and your answers to the questions we ask (section 3);
• analytics, product improvement, security and fraud prevention;
• our own marketing, to people who signed up themselves (section 12);
• payment and commission records;
• the Tap Leagues rating and skill-balanced matchmaking (section 13);
• the AI features we run for ourselves: the help assistant and its conversations, match analysis and predictions, and summaries of results on the home feed (section 13);
• your yes or no to Squash Levels (section 5);
• the online safety system: reports, the message copies they carry, blocks, our decisions on them, and any report to the National Crime Agency (section 6).

What your club controls. For member data the club enters or manages (rosters, members it adds and whether they're under 18, bulk imports and the AI checks we run on them for it, members without accounts, results entered for its purposes, and its emails to members), the club is the controller and we process that data on its behalf, under Schedule 1 of the Terms of Use. The club also decides what's published about its members, whether a competition's approved results can go to Squash Levels (only ever sent when both players have also said yes), the automatic charging for its paid events, and how a report about a message in its chats is dealt with (a report about a child or about illegal content also comes straight to us).

Public display. We design the visibility defaults and your club chooses what to publish. However the law divides that responsibility between us, we are the single point of contact for anything shown publicly: contact us and we'll act on it, whatever your club chose.

Who to contact. For data your club entered, start with your club: it made the decision and can fix it fastest. But you never have to work out which of us is responsible: contact either of us and we will act on it. Your legal rights (section 9) work against whichever of us is the controller for that data.

2.1 If a club admin added you to Tap Leagues

If your club put you on Tap Leagues (typed in, imported from a spreadsheet, or added as a player with no account), this section is your notice.

• What's held about you: your name, and your email address and phone number if the club entered them; whether the club has marked you as under 18; your club membership, attendance and bookings; your results, standings, handicaps and stats; and, if you came from a spreadsheet, every cell of your row in it.
• Where it came from: your club, the controller. Your squash level may also come from Squash Levels (section 5).
• Why: to run the club's leagues, ladders, tournaments, sessions and communications on Tap Leagues.
• The club's lawful basis: the club chooses it, usually its legitimate interest in running its sport or its membership arrangement with you. Ask your club which.
• How long it's kept: your club decides (section 8).
• Who else sees it: anyone on the internet, signed in or not, by your first name and surname initial, with no photo; members and admins of your clubs, by your full name and photo; other websites, through embeds and share links; and our service providers (section 6), some outside the UK (section 7). Your results are never sent to Squash Levels, because that needs your own yes, which you can only give from an account.
• Automated processing: we calculate and publish a Tap Leagues rating from your results, and AI may analyse your matches and summarise results on the home feed (section 13).
• What we use it for ourselves: our own purposes in section 2 (security and fraud prevention, analytics and product improvement, payment records, the rating and matchmaking, online safety). Never our own marketing.
• Your rights: everything in section 9, including asking the club what it holds, having it corrected or deleted, and objecting.
• Complaints: to your club, to us (section 10), or to the ICO at any time, at ico.org.uk.

Our own duty to tell you. For our own uses of your details (the rating, the AI features, security and online safety), the law requires us to tell you, not just your club, within a month and before we publish anything about you. This section is that notice, and every email we send links to this policy. Your club must also tell you about its own uses, within a month of adding you and before your details appear on a public page; the Terms of Use (section 4.2) give clubs the wording. A link to this policy alone isn't enough for that, because this policy can't say how long your club keeps its records or who at the club to ask.

3. What we collect

Section 8 says how long we keep each thing.

• Your account. Your email address, first and last name, phone number (optional), password (stored only as a one-way hash), date of birth, time zone, profile photo and settings. Your date of birth is needed to create an account: it tells us who is under 18, so the protections in section 11 apply, and lets your club's admins see your age. If you sign in with Google or Apple, the details they share with us, including your profile photo, and a record of your sign-ins with them (your account identifier with them, and the name, email address and photo address they sent), whether or not you finish signing in. If you start registering by email and don't finish, we keep what you typed. Some of our emails contain one-click sign-in links.
• Where you play and what you play in. Your county or region, country and playing category (women's or men's), if you give them. We ask for them after you sign up, and where a question is marked as required you can't carry on until you've answered. For your region we keep its name, Google's identifier for it and the map point at its centre: never your address and never your phone's position. Google's terms let us use that point only for features that serve you yourself, never to compare you with other members, and that is the only way we will use it. We ask for these so we can place you in the right competitions and, in future, show you competitions and leaderboards near you and in your category.
• What you agreed to, and your answers. The record of what you agreed to (your answer, the words shown, the edition or version, when, and how you gave it); a separate copy of every answer you give to our questions, exactly as you gave it, which isn't updated when you change your profile; and your answers to questions about a competition (such as whether to share your results with Squash Levels).
• Data your club enters. Names, email addresses and phone numbers your club's admins type in or import, including players with no account, and whether an admin marked someone as under 18. When a club imports a spreadsheet, we keep every cell of every row, including columns the import didn't use. Your club is the controller for this data (section 2).
• Playing. Your club memberships, bookings, waitlist places, check-ins and attendance, fixtures, results, approvals, standings, stats, handicaps (with any note an admin writes about a change), ladder challenges and their messages, the message you write when you ask to join and any waiting-list preferences, live scoring (which account is scoring and a random identifier for the device), your Tap Leagues rating, AI-written text about matches (section 13), and your squash level, if Squash Levels rates you. We collect levels from Squash Levels regularly for players whose results it has had from us, so a level can keep arriving for a while after you turn sharing off.
• Messages and safety. Your messages and photos in direct, group, club and competition chats, read receipts and typing indicators. When you delete a message for everyone, we still hold the original text, and a photo stays stored at its web address, where anyone who has that address can still open it. If you report a message, we keep a copy of it, its sender's name, a few messages before it, your reason and anything you wrote, and who reviewed it and what they decided; the same is kept about you if your message is reported. Who you've blocked, and who has blocked you.
• Payments. If you use paid events, Stripe collects and holds the card you save; we store only its brand, last four digits and expiry date. Your first saved card creates a customer record on our own Stripe account (your name, email address and Tap Leagues account number) that holds the card; when a club charges it, Stripe copies it to that club's Stripe account. We hold charge, refund, entry fee and commission records; which version of a paid meet's or entry fee's terms you accepted, and when; who an admin has asked to pay for whom, and whether they accepted; who an admin has set to pay a team's entry fee; and payments made by payment link. We never see your full card number and never hold your money.
• Help and support. Help assistant conversations (what you type, its replies, your thumbs up or down, your app version if you use the app, and the notice shown to you), which our staff can read and export with your name; and your name, email address, any phone number and message when you contact us.
• Location. If you search for clubs near you, your device's location, with your permission. If you use your device's location to choose your region, a rough position of your device is sent once, through our server, to find your region; we don't store it.
• Technical data. Records of the requests your signed-in app or browser makes (your account, the address asked for, the kind of request, your operating system and app version) and of your connections; your IP address and browser details in our server logs; visits to Tap Leagues short links (IP address, browser details, the page they came from and, if signed in, the account); the identifier used to deliver push notifications to your phone; bounce and spam-complaint records; a copy of every email we send you (recipient, subject and full message, including one-click sign-in, password-reset and payment links); and bulk emails sent to you (subject, text, sender and recipients).
• How you use the website and app, and error reports from them, as section 14 describes. If you send a problem report from the app by shaking your phone, it includes a screenshot of your screen, your email address and what you type.
• Records our staff create, such as a record of combining two accounts or player records, including a copy of the merged record and the dropped email address.

What you have to provide. An account needs your name, email address and date of birth and the tick beside our terms; without them we can't give you one. Where one of the questions we ask after sign-up is marked as required, you must answer it to carry on. Booking a paid meet date or joining its waitlist needs a saved card, but nothing is charged until charges run after the session (section 13.1), and accepting a place you're offered doesn't need one; without a card you can use everything free. Everything else (your phone number, crash reports, analytics, Squash Levels, marketing) is your choice. No law requires you to give us anything.

4. Why we use it, and our lawful bases

A lawful basis is the legal reason we're allowed to use your data. Legitimate interests means we've judged our reason is good and doesn't unfairly override your rights; you can object to any use on that basis (section 9). Where the basis is legitimate interests, the interest is named.

We never rely on one blanket "you consented to everything". We claim consent only where there's a real choice, and you can withdraw it as easily as you gave it (section 9).

Where we act for your club, not for ourselves. Publishing your results, standings, stats and profile (section 5), sending a competition's results to Squash Levels, and automatic charging for paid events (section 13.1) are your club's decisions, carried out by us for it, on the club's own lawful basis: ask it which. The rating on those pages, and our charge and commission records, are ours (table above).

5. Who can see your information

Much of Tap Leagues is public by default. "Your clubs" means any club you belong to.

Public pages include club pages (with the member list and the club's address and venue map), player profiles, standings, results and stats. Anyone with a share link can open its page. Standings and results can be printed to PDF: a PDF shows what the person who made it could see, so one made by someone in your club can carry full names, juniors' included, and anyone given its link can open it until we delete it after 7 days. Clubs can embed standings, results and stats on their own websites: unless the club limits which websites a widget works on, the embed works from any website, and embeds show everyone by first name and surname initial, with no photo (a name an admin has typed in place of a team's or player's name appears as typed). Search engines can index public pages, so your name and results can turn up in a web search. Email addresses and phone numbers never appear on public pages.

Your clubs' admins can also see your bookings, attendance, charges, payments and results for the club's events, your join request message, and reports about messages in the club's chats, with the messages before them. Admins can be under 18 themselves. The admins of a club you ask to join, or whose session you attend as a guest, also see your full name. Our staff can see account data to run the service, sign in as a member to help with a support problem, and read the emails we send, help assistant conversations and every report. Your date of birth, region, country and playing category are seen only by you and our staff.

Free-text fields. Anything typed into a free-text box (a handicap note, a ladder challenge message, a join request) is stored as typed and may be seen by others. Tap Leagues isn't designed to hold health, medical, disability, religious or ethnicity data, and we ask clubs never to enter it, but a note such as "back from injury" is health information. If something like that has been written about you, tell us or your club and we'll remove it.

If your club put you here and you want it stopped: email us and we'll take you out of public view, remove your profile, or take you out of embeds and share links, whichever you ask for. You don't need an account and you don't need to ask your club first.

Entry fee payment links. A club admin can create a link that lets someone pay a team's entry fee without signing in. Anyone with that link can see the club, the competition, the full names of the team's members, juniors included, and the amount, even after the fee has been paid.

Reports. A report from a club's or competition's chat goes to that club's admins; one from a direct message or a chat that belongs to no club comes to us; and a report about a child or illegal content comes to us as well as to the club's admins. We can see and act on any report.

Squash Levels. Squash Levels is an independent rating service. It receives a match from us only when all of these are true: both players have said yes to sharing with it; it's a singles squash or racketball match; the competition's Squash Levels setting is on; and neither player is under 18. The club's setting alone never sends anything. For each match it receives the date and time, both players' names and Tap Leagues IDs, the scores, the sport, the type of competition, the match's own ID, and the club's name, address, country and map location. We collect each player's level back and show it in squash competitions (section 3).

• Your yes or no is one setting for your whole account, and it's off until you turn it on. You're asked the first time you open or join a competition where it applies, and can change it any time in your profile.
• Juniors are never asked and never sent. Players without an account can't answer, so their results are never sent either.
• If you turn it off, we stop sending your results. What Squash Levels already has, it holds under its own privacy notice; ask it to delete it.

6. Who we share it with

(a) Independent organisations. These use data under their own privacy notices, not on our instructions.

• Your club and its admins, and other members and the public: as section 5 describes.
• Stripe, the regulated payment provider. For UK clubs, Stripe's contracting company is Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, established in Ireland, and the regulated payment services are provided by Stripe Payments UK Ltd, authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (firm reference number 900461). Stripe holds your card details under its own terms and processes payments for your club under the club's own agreement with it. If you're a club admin who sets up payments for your club, we send Stripe the club's name and its page on Tap Leagues, and your email address as Stripe's contact for the account; if the club will hold the account, the club's address; and if you'll hold it yourself, your name and phone number, with your email address as the account's support address, which Stripe can show on receipts. Stripe uses them, and whatever else you give it, for its identity checks, and shares information about the club's Stripe account and payments with us, under its own privacy policy. Stripe's code on our website receives your IP address and browser details (section 14).
• Squash Levels: the match details section 5 lists, only in the cases it describes.
• Google and Apple, if you choose to sign in with them, and the app stores, for our app. Sign-in code from these and other providers can load on our sign-in pages (section 14).
• Services you choose to share to, such as WhatsApp, if you use a share button.

(b) Our service providers. These process data on our instructions, each under written data processing terms with us: our hosting provider (UK); file storage (UK) and encrypted backups of our database (Ireland); email delivery (Ireland); an AI service (UK) for the AI features in section 13; maps and location lookup, which find your region and its centre point and locate club addresses; push notification delivery, which carries notifications, including chat message text, to your phone; error monitoring (United States); and, only with your consent, analytics and session recording (section 14). These are also the sub-processors for the data clubs enter (Terms of Use, Schedule 1, S1.5).

(c) When the law or serious events require it.

• The National Crime Agency. The law requires us to report child sexual exploitation and abuse content we find on Tap Leagues, including through a report, to the National Crime Agency, with the content, when it was posted, and details of the account that posted it, including its IP address where we have it. A director of Tap Leagues is responsible for making those reports.
• Other authorities: police and other law-enforcement bodies, regulators and courts, where the law requires or permits it; and, to safeguard a child or vulnerable adult, the police, a local authority or another safeguarding body (Terms of Use, Schedule 1, S1.6a).
• Advisers, and a buyer or successor: our legal or accounting advisers, and, if Tap Leagues or its assets are ever sold, merged or go through insolvency, those involved, under duties of confidence. Whoever takes over becomes responsible for your data under the same laws, and any purchaser will be bound to use your data in line with this policy.

We don't sell your data, and there are no advertising networks on Tap Leagues.

7. Where your data is stored, and when it leaves the UK

Our servers and database, the files you upload and our AI service are in the United Kingdom. Some data goes outside the UK:

• Ireland: email delivery, our encrypted backups, and Stripe. UK law treats transfers to the European Economic Area as adequate.
• The United States: error monitoring, maps and location lookup, push notification delivery, bot protection on our forms, sign-in providers, and the analytics and session recording you allow (section 14). For these we rely on the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the company is certified under it, and otherwise on the UK Addendum to the standard contractual clauses; independent organisations transfer data under their own safeguards.

Contact us at enquiries@tapleagues.com if you'd like a copy of the safeguards.

8. How long we keep it, and what happens when you delete your account

Where we keep something for a set time, the table gives it. Where we can't guarantee a set time, it gives the criteria we use: we keep the data only as long as we need it for the reason given, then delete it. Some of these reasons outlast your account, so those records are kept after you delete it.

What the law makes us keep, whatever else this policy says. If we report child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the National Crime Agency, we must keep the reported content and related account information for one year from the report, and the report's reference for five years, even if you or the other person delete the message or the account.

Deleting your account. You can delete your account at any time from your profile, once nothing is booked or owed (Terms of Use, section 9.3). It's irreversible. Your sign-in account is scrubbed: your name becomes "Deleted User" and most profile details are removed; your email address is kept, altered so it can't be used to sign in, and our staff can still read it. Your player record becomes "Deleted Member", with its email and phone removed, so your results stay under that name. Your sign-in methods, push notification tokens and saved cards are removed from Tap Leagues; your card and customer record stay with Stripe, and our link to that customer record is removed, so no club can charge them. Messages you sent stay, with their text, in other people's chats, your profile photo stays stored at its web address, and the records in the table above are kept for as long as it says. The caches on your own device are yours (section 14).

9. Your rights

You have all the UK GDPR rights, and exercising them is free:

• Access: a copy of what we hold about you.
• Rectification: having wrong data corrected. You can correct most of your own details in your profile.
• Erasure: having data deleted, and deleting your own account (section 8).
• Restriction: having data held but not used while something's disputed.
• Portability: receiving data you gave us in a usable electronic format, or having it sent to another provider where that's technically possible.
• Automated decisions: having a person review an automated decision that affects you (section 13).
• Objection: objecting to any use based on legitimate interests (section 4), and to any marketing, at any time. To object to the Tap Leagues rating or skill-balanced matchmaking, email us and a person will deal with it.
• Withdrawing consent: as easily as you gave it, without affecting what happened before: website analytics in the cookie settings on our website (section 14); app crash reports and analytics in the app's settings; Squash Levels in your profile; our news and updates in your notification settings, or with the unsubscribe link in the email.
• Complaining to us: making a data protection complaint directly to us, and having it acknowledged and answered (section 10).

How to exercise them: email enquiries@tapleagues.com and we'll deal with your request within the time the law allows. For data your club entered, section 2 explains who to ask, and we'll route and help either way.

10. Complaints

• Complain to us first, if you like. You have a legal right to complain to us about how we use your data. Email enquiries@tapleagues.com or use the Contact form, and say it's a data protection complaint. We'll acknowledge it within 30 days, look into it without undue delay, and tell you the outcome.
• About data your club entered. Start with your club (section 2), which can act fastest. If that goes nowhere, come to us and we'll help route it.
• Complain to the regulator. You can complain to the Information Commission (the ICO) at any time, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, whether or not you've complained to us first.
• About a report, a removed message or online safety: see the Terms of Use, section 5.3.

11. Children and junior members

Our terms say Tap Leagues is for people aged 18 or over, and that clubs are responsible for any under-18s they add or let join. We don't verify ages, so we don't rely on that rule: you give your date of birth when you sign up, nobody checks it, and someone under 18, or under 13, can create an account. There are no parent or guardian accounts. This section says how children are protected here.

Designing the service safely for children is our responsibility, not your club's. Children use Tap Leagues, so the ICO's Children's Code applies to how we design it, and so does the law's requirement to take account of how children can best be protected. No promise a club makes us changes that.

How we know someone is under 18. From the date of birth they gave us or, for a player a club added without an account, an admin marking them as under 18. With neither, we treat the person as an adult, so clubs must mark the juniors they add. The protections below apply only where we know.

What changes for a junior:

• Embeds and downloaded match lists. In embeds, and in match lists an admin downloads, a junior appears by first name and surname initial, with no photo, even to people in their own clubs. A PDF is different: it shows what the person who made it could see (section 5). Everyone, adult or junior, appears that way to people outside their clubs.
• Their email and phone are hidden from other members, though not from their club's admins.
• No marketing from us. Juniors never receive our news and updates or any other marketing from us. Emails their club sends through Tap Leagues reach them like any other member (section 12).
• Never sent to Squash Levels, and never asked.
• No AI match analysis, challenge prediction or home feed summary on a match or challenge that includes them.
• Their clubs' admins see their age and that they're under 18, to help the club look after them.

What does not change. A junior can join clubs, be messaged by anyone who shares a club with them and message back, receive photos, pay entry fees and meet fees, save a card (creating a Stripe customer record in their name), create a club and be a club admin, with the same access as any admin. The Tap Leagues rating includes juniors' results (section 13); a PDF made by a member of a junior's club, or an entry fee payment link, can show the junior's full name (section 5); and a club's member import sends juniors' names to our AI service like anyone else's (section 13).

Under-13s and consent. In the UK, a child under 13 can't give their own consent to an online service like ours: a parent or guardian has to. That matters wherever we rely on consent. Juniors are never asked about Squash Levels or our news and updates. The app's question about crash reports and analytics, and the website's cookie choice, can be answered before we know someone's age, so for a child under 13 a parent or guardian should answer them. The law may raise this age to as high as 16 in future; if so, this section will change.

Paying. Under-18s can pay for events and save cards like anyone else. A child can generally end a contract, and nothing in our terms binds a child against their interests (Terms of Use, section 3).

Junior members added by clubs. A club that enters a junior's details is the controller for them (section 2), and every club promises us it has told a parent or guardian that the child's details are going onto Tap Leagues and what will be visible, and has their agreement (Terms of Use, section 4.2). Where a disclosure is needed to safeguard a child, the law recognises a legitimate interest for it.

A child who understands their rights can use them themselves (section 9); we won't insist a parent does it for them. Parents and guardians can also use a child's rights for them, where that's in the child's interests, with the club or with us. If you're a parent and your child has an account we don't know about, or you want your child taken out of public view, tell us and we'll act on it.

12. Emails, notifications and marketing

Service messages are not marketing. Running the service means sending things like email verification and sign-in links, booking and entry fee confirmations, offers of places, notices that bookings have opened, receipts and failed-payment notices, fixture and result notifications, messages from other members, and notices about the Terms of Use or this policy.

• Notification settings. You can switch most topics (email and push) on or off in your notification settings. They start switched on, except our news and updates, which stay off unless you say yes (below). Emails about signing in and security, about money you've paid or owe, and confirmations of your bookings and entries can't be switched off, so they always arrive.
• Push notifications show the message. A chat message notification shows who it's from or the chat's name, the message text and, for a photo, a small copy of it, and can appear on your lock screen. Your phone's own settings can hide notification previews.

Marketing from us. We send news and updates from Tap Leagues (new features and releases) by email and push notification, only with your consent: they stay off unless you say yes. We ask with an optional tick after you sign up; if you choose not to answer yet, we may ask again, no more than three times. You can change your mind in your notification settings, and every news email has an unsubscribe link. We never send it to anyone we know to be under 18. Unsubscribing from our news doesn't stop the emails your clubs send you.

Emails from your club. Clubs can email their members through Tap Leagues. These are the club's messages: the club is responsible for having the right to send them, and we process them for it (Schedule 1). Each says who sent it and has an unsubscribe link, and replies go to the sender. Only a club's admins can send them. They reach the members they're addressed to who have an account, members under 18 included, unless they've unsubscribed from that club's emails.

Who we are, in every email. Every email we send, including your club's, ends with a link to this policy and our company name, number and registered office.

13. Automated decisions, profiling and AI

13.1 Automated payment decisions: read this if you use paid events

These decisions are taken by software, without a person checking each one, and they affect your money:

• if you're on a waitlist for a paid date and a spot opens, you're offered the spot automatically, with a time limit to confirm. Declining, or letting the offer run out, is free. You're also offered a place, rather than booked, when a club admin adds you to a paid date, when a club changes what you agreed to for a date you've booked (Terms of Use, section 7.11), or when it moves a date;
• places are allocated automatically, in the order people book, once bookings open;
• your saved card is charged automatically for sessions you're booked on, after the club's grace period or at the billing run (Terms of Use, section 7.4). Everyone still booked when charges run is charged unless the club took them off that date or waived the charge;
• late cancellations are charged automatically under the cancellation charges you accepted when you booked, and excused automatically if your spot is refilled; no-shows are charged in full automatically (Terms of Use, section 7.6);
• failed charges are retried automatically a few times over the following days, and you're automatically blocked from booking that club's paid events until a failed charge is settled; the same happens to everyone at a club if we stop the platform charging for it;
• once you accept a request to pay for someone else's sessions, your saved card is charged automatically for them (Terms of Use, section 7.5).

Entry fees are only ever charged when someone chooses to pay, though a failed saved-card entry fee payment can also block booking that club's paid events until it's settled or waived by the club.

Software makes these decisions because the event's rules require it, which the law allows where it's needed for your contract with the club. Stripe, the club's regulated payment provider, takes the charges and pays them to the club, less our commission; we never hold the club's money (Terms of Use, sections 7.1 and 7.2).

The human route exists at every step. Until charges run, the club's admin can correct the register; the admin can waive any charge or record it settled offline at any time; and you can contest a charge with your club (it took the money) or with us (Contact or enquiries@tapleagues.com). You can also ask us to have a person review an automated charge decision, and we'll look at it and tell you the outcome.

13.2 AI features

We use an AI service, in the United Kingdom (section 6), for these and nothing else. It doesn't use what we send it to train its models.

• Match analysis. A short written analysis of a match, about identifiable players, from their names, results, standings and stats, and handicaps, where the competition uses them. A club decides for each competition whether it's on, and it starts on.
• Ladder challenge predictions. Where a club leaves analysis on, a "chance of success" percentage and short analysis for a challenge, from the players' recorded results.
• Summaries of results on the home feed, written from team and player names and scores, following the competition's match analysis setting.
• Member imports. The AI flags names in an imported spreadsheet that look like junk, for the admin to check, and, where our ordinary checks can't tell which column is which, works that out. To do this, names from the import and, where the columns weren't clear, a few whole rows of the spreadsheet with every column in them, are sent to the AI service. We do this for the club (section 2).
• The help assistant. It answers from our help pages, can't see your account, results or messages, and can't act for you. It's told only whether you're a club admin and, in the app, your app version and the kind of phone you use. What you type and its answers are stored with your account (section 8), and our staff can read and export them. A notice in the chat tells you about this before you send anything. We rely on our legitimate interests for it, not your consent (section 4).

Match analysis, predictions and feed summaries are never written about a match or challenge that includes a junior. None of these features takes a decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you. An analysis, prediction or summary is information, not a decision: it doesn't change your results, standing, what you pay or what you can do. The automated decisions that do have significant effects are the payment ones in 13.1.

Skill-balanced matchmaking. Some session formats generate balanced fixtures from players' past approved results in the same sport or, for players with no results yet, a skill order the club's admin sets. We calculate this ourselves, without an AI service.

Profiling: your Tap Leagues rating. Your rating is automated profiling: a performance score we calculate from your results and show publicly on stats pages. It's worked out from your approved results and how much you play; we don't publish the exact formula. It ranks and compares players and decides nothing else about you. It applies to every player with results, juniors included.

14. Cookies and what's stored on your device

14.1 The website

Your cookie choice. The first time you visit, a banner asks whether you allow analytics. Refusing is as easy as accepting: the two choices are buttons of the same size. You can change your choice at any time from the cookie settings link at the foot of our website's pages, and switching analytics off stops recording and removes their cookies. Embedded widgets on other websites never show the banner. Embedded widgets and the email preferences page never load analytics.

Only with your consent (they don't load until you allow analytics):

• Google Analytics, which pages are used;
• Microsoft Clarity, how pages are used, including session recordings and heatmaps;
• Sentry session recording and page performance, which records some browsing sessions and measures how pages perform.

Whatever you choose, these load, as they're needed for the site to work or to keep it secure:

• Tap Leagues' own cookies and browser storage: keeping you signed in, remembering your cookie choice and other preferences, showing times in your local time, and caches of your messages and home feed so they load quickly;
• Sentry error tracking, which records errors only, with the pages and clicks just before each error, and sends them to the United States;
• reCAPTCHA from Google, which tells people from bots and may load on any page;
• Stripe's code and cookies, for payments and payment fraud prevention, which may load on any page, whether or not you pay;
• Google Maps, on pages with a map or place search, which sends your IP address to Google;
• sign-in code from Apple and Facebook, which may load on pages where you sign in or manage how you sign in. We don't offer Facebook sign-in, so Facebook's code serves no feature we offer.

Clearing what's stored in your browser. You can clear your messages cache in your profile's app settings; it re-downloads from our server and deletes nothing there. Signing out may not clear these caches, so on a shared computer, clear them or your browser's data for our site.

14.2 The app

Your answer about crash reports and analytics. The first time you open the app, before you sign in, it asks whether to send crash reports (Sentry) and share usage analytics (Firebase Analytics, from Google). Both start switched off, and you can change them any time in the app's settings. Your answer is also saved with your account and used on any other device you sign in on.

• Crash reports go to Sentry in the United States, with your account number. Reporting a problem by shaking your phone works only with crash reports on, and adds a screenshot, your email address and what you type (section 3).
• Usage analytics record which screens you open, some error messages, and which part of the app a link opened, and go to Google.

What happens before you answer. The app starts Google's Firebase when it opens, with analytics switched off, which creates identifiers for the app on your phone (including the one used to deliver notifications). Facebook's software may also start, with its automatic event logging and advertising identifier switched off, though the app has no Facebook feature.

What the app keeps on your phone. Your sign-in token, account details, settings and answers, the email address of the last account signed in on the phone, caches of your home feed and messages, downloaded images, and, while you keep score live, the score. You can clear the caches in the app's settings; this deletes nothing on our server. Signing out deletes your sign-in details but may not clear your cached messages, so on a shared phone clear them before you hand it over. Uninstalling the app removes everything.

14.3 What loads before you choose

On the website, Sentry's error tracking, reCAPTCHA, Stripe's code and the Apple and Facebook sign-in code load whatever you choose in the cookie banner (14.1). In the app, Google's Firebase and Facebook's software may start before you answer, with analytics and advertising switched off (14.2).

14.4 What we don't do

We don't run adverts or ad networks, sell your data, or use any of this to profile you for advertising or track you across other companies' websites. The tools above tell us which parts of Tap Leagues are used and where they break. The providers handle what they receive for us under data processing terms (section 6), and keep it for the periods in section 8.

15. Changes to this policy

We publish this policy, with our Terms of Use, as a numbered, dated edition. Each new edition of the Terms of Use and this policy is shown to you, and you're asked to accept it again the next time you use Tap Leagues. When we change it:

• Material changes (anything that changes what we collect, why, who sees it or who we share it with) get at least 30 days' notice by email or in the product before they take effect, unless the law or an urgent security risk means we must act sooner (Terms of Use, section 11). We never apply changes retroactively.

Every edition states its number and date, so you can always see when it last changed. The current edition is always at /legal/privacy.

Last updated 2 October 2026. This document replaces the previous privacy policy in full.