Privacy Policy

Welcome to Club Mates HQ (“we”, “our”, “us”). This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect personal information when using the Club Mates HQ platform and related services, including our mobile app and this website.

By using our platform, you agree to this Privacy Policy.

1. About Our Platform

Club Mates HQ is a sports club management platform designed for clubs, coaches, players, parents, and administrators. Features may include:

• Team management
• Fixtures and schedules
• Player statistics
• Lineups and match information
• Club and team chat
• Optional player profile images
• Leaderboards and performance tracking

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following.

Account Information

• First and last name
• Email address
• Password (stored by our authentication provider as a hash — we never see it)
• Phone number, if you choose to add one to your profile
• Your role (coach, player or parent) and preferred sport
• Optional profile photo
• A record that you accepted our Terms and this Privacy Policy, and when

We do not ask for or store your date of birth or your age.

Team and Player Information

• The teams you coach, manage or belong to, and your role in each
• Join requests you send, including the name, position, jersey number and message you provide
• Availability and attendance responses for matches and events, and any comment you add
• Player-of-the-match votes. These are recorded against your account and are not anonymous
• Match reports, scoring events and statistics entered by your coach or team manager
• Squad records created by coaches, which may include a player’s name, preferred name, jersey number, position, a short bio, a photo, and contact details the coach enters

Availability and Injury (Sensitive Information)

You can optionally mark yourself unavailable through injury, set a date you expect to be back, and write a short note. Because that note can describe your health, we treat it as sensitive information under the Privacy Act.

• Marking yourself injured is always optional, and you write the note yourself
• Teammates see only that you are unavailable and your expected return date
• The note is visible to the coaches of the teams you play for, and to you
• The note is never included in a push notification
• The note is deleted automatically once your return date passes or you mark yourself available again, and you can clear it yourself at any time. We keep no injury history

Content You Create

• Chat messages, replies, announcements and polls, including who voted for what
• Emoji reactions, which are recorded against your account
• Images you upload — profile photos, squad and player photos, club emblems, chat images
• GIFs you send, and the search terms you type into the GIF picker
• Events, venues and locations you add, including map coordinates you pin
• Reports you make about a message, and members you block

Device and Technical Information

• A push notification token, if you allow notifications, so we can send you team alerts
• Your notification preferences
• Server logs recording which parts of our API were called, when, and whether they succeeded. These are filtered to strip out email addresses, passwords, tokens and chat message content
• The IP address of anyone using our internal administration endpoints, recorded in an audit log

The mobile app contains no analytics, advertising, tracking or crash-reporting software. We do not build advertising profiles, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

Location

If you tap “use my location” when setting an event venue, your device provides your current coordinates so the app can suggest an address. We store the venue location you choose. We do not track your location in the background, and we do not store your device’s location history.

3. Children and Junior Players

Club Mates HQ is used by junior sporting clubs and teams.

• You must be at least 13 to hold your own account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to you using Club Mates HQ. We ask you to confirm this when you create an account.
• A parent, guardian, coach, or authorised club administrator must provide consent before an account is created for, or player information or images are uploaded about, a child under 13.
• Club administrators and coaches are responsible for ensuring they have appropriate permission to upload and manage junior player content, including photographs.

Because we do not collect dates of birth, we cannot tell how old an individual user is. We identify junior teams from the competition or age-group name (for example “U14”), or from a setting a coach applies to the team. Chat in a junior team runs in a youth-safe mode: players and parents can read messages and react to them, but only coaches and team managers can post.

If we become aware that information has been uploaded without appropriate consent, we may remove the content or suspend access. A parent or guardian can contact us at admin@clubmateshq.com.au to access, correct or remove a junior player’s information.

4. Optional Player Images

Player and profile images on Club Mates HQ are optional and are intended as a fun club and team feature.

No user is required to upload a personal image to use the platform.

Where images are uploaded:

• The uploader confirms they have permission to upload and share the image within their club environment.
• Additional care should be taken for junior player images.
• Clubs, coaches, parents, and guardians are responsible for ensuring appropriate consent has been obtained for players under 18.

Images are stored in a private bucket and are served to signed-in members through short-lived links. They are not published on the public internet.

Users may request removal of uploaded images at any time through their club administrator or by contacting platform support.

5. How We Use Information

We use information to:

• Operate the platform
• Manage club accounts and team data
• Display fixtures, player stats, and schedules
• Deliver team and club chat
• Send the push notifications you have not switched off
• Improve platform performance and security
• Respond to reports about content and to moderate the platform
• Prevent abuse and unauthorised access
• Communicate important service updates

We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not disclose it to advertisers or data brokers.

We do not use artificial intelligence to analyse, profile or moderate your messages, photos or personal information, and we do not send your information to any AI or machine learning service.

6. Service Providers

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, unauthorised access, modification, or disclosure.

Measures we use include:

• Encrypted connections (HTTPS)
• Password authentication handled by a specialist provider
• Role-based access controls, so members only see teams they belong to
• Private file storage with short-lived access links
• Restricted administrator access, with administrative actions logged

No online service can be guaranteed to be completely secure, and we cannot promise that.

We rely on the following providers to run the platform:

• Supabase — accounts and sign-in, our main database, and private photo and file storage.
• Google Firebase — team and club chat, including messages, reactions, poll votes and the member list for each room.
• Railway — hosting for our application servers, which process every request between the app and our database.
• Expo — delivery of push notifications. Expo receives your device’s push token and the notification content.
• Grafana Cloud — collection of our server logs and performance metrics for monitoring and troubleshooting.

The app also contacts these services directly from your device:

• Giphy — receives your GIF search terms when you use the GIF picker in chat.
• Open-Meteo and OpenStreetMap Nominatim — receive a venue name or its coordinates so we can show a match-day weather forecast.
• Apple Maps and Google Maps — receive a venue location when a map is displayed or when you tap through to directions.

We also collect fixture, ladder and player data from public competition sources such as league and association websites. We read that information; we do not send your personal information to them.

7. Overseas Storage and Disclosure

Your information is stored outside Australia. Although Club Mates HQ is an Australian service used by Australian clubs, our two main providers hold data in Singapore:

• Supabase — your account, profile, team data, availability and injury notes, votes, notifications and all uploaded photos are stored in Singapore (ap-southeast-1).
• Google Firebase — all chat messages, reactions, poll votes and chat member lists are stored in Singapore (asia-southeast1).

Our application servers (Railway), push notification delivery (Expo), monitoring (Grafana Cloud) and the services your device contacts directly (Giphy, Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap, Apple Maps, Google Maps) also operate from, or route data through, servers outside Australia. These providers may store or process information in other countries depending on their own infrastructure.

This applies to everyone, including junior players. It means your information — and any information a coach records about a player, including a child — is held overseas and is subject to the laws of the country it is held in. Australian privacy law will not necessarily apply to it, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner may not be able to help you enforce your rights against an overseas provider.

We choose established providers that publish security and data protection commitments, and we take reasonable steps to ensure they handle information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles. By creating an account and using Club Mates HQ, you consent to your personal information being stored and processed overseas as described in this section.

If you are a parent or guardian and you are not comfortable with a junior player’s information being stored overseas, do not add them to a squad, and contact us at admin@clubmateshq.com.au to have any existing information removed.

8. Content Standards and Moderation

Users must not upload:

• Illegal material
• Offensive or abusive content
• Nudity or explicit material
• Copyright-infringing content
• Harassing or discriminatory material

How moderation works:

• Any member can report a message. The report records who reported it, the message, and your reason
• Any member can block another member, which hides that person’s messages and stops notifications from them
• Coaches and team managers can delete messages and mute members in the rooms they run
• We may remove content and suspend accounts involved in misuse
• We may report unlawful material where required

We do not automatically scan or filter uploaded images or messages. Moderation is carried out by people — your coaches and team managers, and us in response to a report.

9. Sharing of Information

Information may be visible within a user’s authorised club environment.

We may share information:

• With the coaches, managers and members of the teams you belong to
• With the service providers listed in section 6
• When legally required
• To protect platform safety or integrity

We do not publicly expose private player data by default.

10. Deleting Your Account

You can permanently delete your account at any time from the app, under More → Delete account. You do not need to contact us first. If you cannot access the app, email us and we will do it for you.

Deleting your account removes:

• Your sign-in account, name, email address, phone number and profile details
• Your profile photo, and any squad photos, club emblems and chat images you uploaded
• Your team memberships, coach claims and join requests
• Your attendance and availability responses, including any injury note
• Your player-of-the-match votes
• The chat messages you wrote, in every room you belonged to
• Your membership of every chat room, so your name no longer appears in the member list
• Your push notification token, notification history and notification preferences
• Members you blocked, and blocks other members placed on you
• Your recorded acceptance of these policies

Some things are not removed, because they are no longer about an identifiable person, or because they belong to someone else:

• Reactions and poll votes you left on other members’ messages. These are stored only as an internal identifier. Once your account is gone there is no record left that connects that identifier to you, and no name is shown
• Reports about your content that another member raised, which we keep so we can act on safety issues
• Content created by your coach or club rather than by you — squad records, match reports and results, statistics, and events. Ask your coach to remove your details from the squad, or contact us
• Operational and administrative logs, which may contain an internal account identifier and, where an administrator granted or changed access, the email address used for that action
• Fixture, ladder and player information sourced from public league and association websites, which we do not control

11. Data Retention

We retain information only for as long as reasonably necessary to provide services, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, or protect the platform. Where we no longer need personal information, we delete it or remove the details that identify you.

Some specific periods:

• Injury notes are deleted automatically once the expected return date has passed
• Team invite links expire 90 days after they are created
• Account information is kept until you delete your account

12. Access and Correction

You can view and correct most of your information directly in the app, including your name, phone number, profile photo, availability and notification preferences.

You may also ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, by emailing admin@clubmateshq.com.au. We will respond within a reasonable period. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why.

13. Cookies

This website uses a single essential cookie to keep your session working. We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, or third-party tracking cookies on this website.

The mobile app does not use cookies.

14. Complaints

If you believe we have mishandled your personal information, please contact us at admin@clubmateshq.com.au with the details. We will acknowledge your complaint and aim to respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make a material change we will update the version number and effective date above, and app users will be asked to review and accept the updated policy the next time they open the app. Continued use of the platform after updates constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

16. Contact

For privacy-related enquiries, requests, or concerns, please contact:

Club Mates HQ
Email: admin@clubmateshq.com.au

See also our Terms of Service and how to delete your account.