Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Football Institute (“we”, “us”), based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, collects, uses, and protects your personal data when you use our website and services (the “Service”). We are a nonprofit, we do not sell your data, and we do not run third-party advertising.

1. Information we collect

• Account information — your name, email address, and any profile details, photo, bio, or links you choose to add.
• Onboarding answers — what you tell us about your role in the game, what you want to improve, and how you found us. Used to tailor recommendations and understand our audience in aggregate.
• Learning activity — courses you enrol in, lesson progress, quiz results, notes, and certificates or diplomas you earn.
• Community content — posts, comments, reactions, and direct messages you create.
• Analyst tools — the reports, session plans, video analyses, and datasets you save to your libraries.
• Technical and usage data — device and browser information, approximate country (derived at the network edge, not from stored IP addresses), pages viewed, and clicks on outbound links, collected to keep the Service secure and to improve it.
• Donations — if you donate or subscribe, our payment provider processes your payment; we receive confirmation, the amount, and the name you choose to display — never your full card number.
• Notification tokens — if you enable push notifications, a device token so we can deliver them.

2. How we use your information

• to provide and personalise your learning experience and track your progress;
• to issue certificates and diplomas and enable their verification;
• to operate community features and send you notifications you have asked for;
• to keep the Service safe — including detecting spam, abuse, and safeguarding risks — and to comply with the law;
• to understand, in aggregate, how the Service is used so we can improve it;
• to process donations and any optional paid features.

Where the law requires a legal basis (for example in the UK/EU), we rely on: performance of our agreement with you (running your account and courses), our legitimate interests (keeping the Service safe and improving it), your consent (push notifications and optional communications), and legal obligations.

3. Community safety and automated review

To protect members — particularly young people — new public posts and comments may be reviewed by automated tools, including an AI model, that flag possible harassment, scams, or safeguarding concerns for a human moderator to assess. These tools only flag; decisions to hide content or suspend an account are made by a person. Private messages between members are not scanned by this review. We may also act on reports submitted by members.

4. Sharing your information

We do not sell personal data. We share it only with service providers who help us run the Service, under agreements that require them to protect it:

• Google Firebase — authentication, database, file storage, and push delivery;
• Vercel — website hosting;
• Stripe — donation and subscription payments;
• Anthropic — the AI model used for community-safety review and in-product assistance;
• our email provider — account emails such as sign-in codes and digests;
• analytics providers — Google Analytics and Rybbit, for aggregate usage measurement.

We may also disclose information where required by law, or where necessary to protect someone’s safety — including reporting a safeguarding concern to the appropriate authorities.

Some information is public by design: your profile, posts, comments, and any credentials you choose to share. If you opt in when donating, your display name may appear on our supporters wall — the amount is never shown.

5. Cookies and similar technologies

We use cookies and local storage to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences (such as language, theme, and text size), and analytics that measure usage in aggregate. You can control cookies through your browser settings; disabling them may affect how the Service works.

6. Data retention

We keep your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. You can delete your account at any time from your settings, after which we remove or anonymise your personal data, except where we must retain it to meet legal obligations or to resolve a safety matter. Encrypted backups are retained for up to 98 days before being overwritten.

7. Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest with our infrastructure providers, access to member data is restricted to the people who need it to operate the Service, and administrative actions on member accounts are recorded in an audit log. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your data and will notify you and any relevant regulator if a breach affecting you occurs.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent. You can do much of this directly in your account settings, or by contacting us. Residents of California, the UK, and the EEA have specific rights under their local laws — including, in California, the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. If you are in the UK or EEA, you also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

9. Children

The Service is intended for people aged 16 and over, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. If you believe a child under 16 has created an account or provided us data, please email privacy@footballinstitute-bqfvhggnbcg6g5a9.canadaeast-01.azurewebsites.net and we will delete it promptly. Because our community discusses youth football, we also ask all members to avoid posting identifying details about young people.

10. International transfers

We operate globally and our providers process data in the United States and elsewhere, so your data may be processed in a country other than your own. Where we transfer data out of the UK or EEA, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the Service and update the date at the top of this page.

12. Contact

Questions or requests about your data? Email us at privacy@footballinstitute-bqfvhggnbcg6g5a9.canadaeast-01.azurewebsites.net. For safeguarding concerns, email safeguarding@footballinstitute-bqfvhggnbcg6g5a9.canadaeast-01.azurewebsites.net.