Privacy Policy

Information we collect

• Accounts: your email address, username, display name, password hash, account role and status, verification information, and account creation date. We store account confirmation, password-reset, and session records to support sign-in and account recovery.
• Preferences and activity: teams, leagues, and sports you follow; newsletter frequency and notification settings; and community posts, replies, subscriptions, votes, and predictions associated with your account.
• Messages: your name, email address, message, and other information you choose to provide when contacting us or submitting an inquiry or story tip. Avoid sending passwords, financial details, or sensitive information that is not needed for your request.
• Advertising interactions: the advertisement clicked, the page where the click occurred, browser User-Agent information, and the time of the click. A click can be linked to your account when you are signed in. Advertisement impressions are recorded as aggregate counts per ad per day, rather than individual visitor records.
• Usage and technical information: analytics information about visits, pages viewed, traffic sources, and engagement, together with technical records needed to operate and troubleshoot the service. Service records can include processing status, duration, usage, and errors.

How we use information

We use information to operate accounts and sign-in, personalize sports feeds, provide community and prediction features, deliver newsletters and notifications according to your settings, respond to inquiries, and administer advertising. We also use it to understand site usage, diagnose problems, protect the service, moderate content, and address complaints or legal obligations.

Information you provide for a contact or advertising inquiry is used to respond to and manage that inquiry. It does not automatically enrol you in a newsletter.

Public posts and sports coverage

Community posts and replies, your public username or display name, and activity displayed by public features can be visible to other visitors. Public information may be copied, indexed by search engines, or shared by others. Do not post private contact details or another person's sensitive information without appropriate permission.

We obtain sports news and information from publishers, leagues, teams, public sports sources, and community submissions. Coverage can include athlete names, team affiliations, results, and statistics, including those of athletes in youth competitions. Information being publicly available does not eliminate the privacy interests of the people it concerns.

If coverage contains incorrect information or raises a privacy or safety concern, including a concern about a young athlete, contact us with the page address and the issue. An athlete, parent, guardian, or authorized representative can make a request. We assess correction and removal requests in light of the circumstances and applicable law; we cannot remove copies controlled by other websites.

Cookies, analytics, and third-party media

We use a session cookie to keep you signed in. Blocking this cookie can prevent account features from working. Google Analytics uses cookies and processes usage and technical information through Google to help us understand how visitors use the site. Analytics runs on production public pages only after you choose "Accept analytics". It remains off if you reject it or have not made a choice. Admin pages are excluded. Accepting analytics is optional and is not required to browse the site or use your account.

Our analytics events do not intentionally include account email addresses or account details. Page-view events omit URL query strings and fragments. Analytics is used for site measurement, not Google Ads remarketing.

The cookie banner offers "Accept analytics" and "Reject analytics". Use "Cookie settings" in the footer to change your choice or withdraw consent. We remember acceptance or rejection in a first-party preference cookie, spbc_cookie_consent, for 182 days (about six months). It records your choices, consent-notice version, consent and update timestamps, expiry, language, and a random consent identifier. We do not create a server-side visitor consent log or link this choice to your account. Your browser sends this first-party cookie with requests to our site; it is not a Google Analytics cookie.

If the choice expires or the consent-notice version changes, we ask again before enabling analytics. Withdrawal stops future analytics and clears analytics cookies we can control. If analytics has already loaded, the page refreshes to stop its script, so save any unfinished form before changing your choice. Withdrawal does not automatically erase information already sent to Google; contact us about requests relating to previously collected information.

You can also manage or block cookies in your browser and use Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on where supported. Browser cookie settings may not block every network request or all technical data collection. Google describes its handling of information in its Privacy Policy.

Images, fonts, podcast audio, embedded players, and other resources may load directly from third-party servers. Loading them can disclose your IP address, browser information, and request details to the provider, even if you do not have an account here. Following an external link takes you to a service with its own privacy practices.

Email preferences and withdrawal of consent

Account digest emails are off by default. You can choose a digest frequency and change it later through your preferences or the manage-preferences and unsubscribe links in digest emails. Community reply notifications and automatic thread subscriptions have separate settings; reply notifications are enabled by default. The one-click unsubscribe option turns off both digest and reply emails.

Account confirmation, password-reset, and other necessary service messages are separate from optional newsletters. Turning off newsletters does not prevent a requested password-reset or account-confirmation message.

You can also contact us to withdraw consent to a use of your personal information. Withdrawal is subject to applicable legal or contractual restrictions and may affect features that need the information. We will explain relevant consequences when addressing your request.

Service providers and other disclosures

Service providers process information for functions such as email delivery, storage, search, analytics, content retrieval, and automated article classification. Depending on the feature and processing path, these services include Resend, Cloudflare R2, Meilisearch, Google, Firecrawl, OpenRouter and the model providers it routes to, Exa, and Apify. Wikimedia and other external content hosts may receive requests when their resources are retrieved or displayed. This does not mean every provider receives your account record.

Automated article classification sends article titles and a limited portion of cleaned article text to OpenRouter and its model providers. Firecrawl can process source article pages on a fallback retrieval path. Those materials may contain personal information about people mentioned in the coverage.

Providers may process or store information outside British Columbia or Canada, where it may be accessible to authorities under local law. We have not yet verified all provider locations, onward transfers, or retention and AI-training settings. We cannot promise that all processing remains in Canada or that every provider excludes submitted material from training.

We may disclose information when legally required or permitted, including to respond to lawful requests, protect people or the service, or address a legal claim. Public content is also disclosed through the public features described above.

Retention, account closure, and security

Account information is kept while the account is maintained. You can request account closure or deletion through the contact form. Disabling an account is not the same as deleting its information. Community moderation uses soft deletion, so removing a post from public view does not necessarily erase the stored record.

Stored article text used for processing is deleted after successful classification or rejection as off-topic; failed or retrying items can remain longer. We do not yet have fixed retention periods for all operational logs, advertising records, social-post records, or retrying article text. Backup and provider retention periods are not fully verified, so we cannot promise immediate or complete erasure from every system.

Some information may need to be retained to meet legal obligations or address disputes, security incidents, or moderation issues. We will explain applicable limits when responding to a deletion request. Passwords are stored as hashes and session tokens are stored in hashed form. No online service can guarantee absolute security or that information will never be accessed without authorization.

Young people

Accounts are for people aged 13 or older, and signup requires confirmation of that age. The service is not directed at children under 13. This account rule does not mean that every person mentioned in sports coverage is 13 or older, or that an age confirmation establishes valid consent in every circumstance.

If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, or that information about a young person should be corrected or removed, contact us. Do not send identity documents unless we ask for information needed to verify the request.

Access, corrections, and privacy complaints

Subject to applicable law, you may request access to your personal information, information about its use and disclosure, correction of inaccuracies, or withdrawal of consent. You may also request deletion or raise a complaint. These requests are available to people mentioned in coverage as well as account holders, but deletion and access can be subject to legal exceptions.

Use the contact form, select "General Questions & Feedback", and begin your message with "Privacy request" or "Privacy complaint". Identify the account or page concerned, what you are requesting, and how we can reach you. We may need to verify your identity or authority without collecting more information than necessary.

We will address requests within the timelines required by applicable law and explain a refusal or limitation where required. If a concern remains unresolved, you may contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia or, where federal privacy law applies, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Changes and contact

We may update this policy as the service or our practices change. The date above identifies the latest revision. For material changes, we will provide an appropriate notice on the site or through another suitable channel and obtain additional consent where required by law. Publishing a revised policy does not itself authorize a new use that requires consent.

For questions about this policy or our handling of personal information, use the Sports Page BC contact form and mark your message for privacy matters.