How we handle your data.

Contents

Your privacy is critically important to us and we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
• We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our website cuesportsafrica.com
• Our mobile applications
• Our other products and services that are available on or through our website

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so—for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a CueSports Africa account to provide phone number, email, first and last name, birthdate, gender, and location (country and geographic area).

Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a CueSports Africa account, your name is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo, nickname, or rating. Your public profile information is just that—public—so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

We do NOT consider your birthdate part of the public information. The birthdate is merely used as part of an age check when entering a tournament (or other age-related operations), because they can have age limitations.

Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us—a subscription to a CueSports Africa plan or tournament entry fees, you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, mobile money or card information, and contact information. This information is NOT stored in our services but handled by our payment service provider.

Organizer Information: If you become a tournament organizer on our platform, you will need to provide an organization name and optionally a description. Your existing account contact details (phone and email) will be used for tournament communications.

Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content. For example, if you write a comment that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the content publicly. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!

Communications With Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, or post a question in our public forums.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services—for example, when you create or make changes to your content on CueSports Africa.

Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on CueSports Africa—in other words, who did what, when and to what (e.g., [username] reported a match result at [time/date]).

We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, features used, tournaments joined) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.

Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (when, for example, you tag a venue location) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.

Stored Information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile app. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a profile photograph.

Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. We use cookies and other technologies to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services. For more information about our use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log into your CueSports Africa account through another service (like Google or Facebook), we will receive information from that service (such as your username and basic profile information) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services—for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your tournaments, calculate your rating, track match results, or charge you for any of our paid Services.
• To further develop and improve our Services—for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to manage their tournaments more efficiently.
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use.
• To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition.
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of CueSports Africa and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services.
• To communicate with you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on CueSports Africa.
• To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, and target our marketing messages to groups of our users.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

Our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

• The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account—for example, in order to enable access to our platform on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or
• The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
• The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
• We have a legitimate interest in using your information—for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, and to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; or
• You have given us your consent—for example before we place certain cookies on your device.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell or give away our users’ personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

Employees and Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our employees and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our employees and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.

Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your transactions, email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer support services that help us communicate with you, and analytics providers that help us understand and enhance our Services). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

Tournament Organizers: When you register for a tournament, the organizer can see your name, rating, and contact information necessary to manage the event.

Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.

To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of CueSports Africa, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.

Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that CueSports Africa goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.

With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.

Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is—you guessed it—disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, match results, tournament participation, rating, and ranking are all available to others.

For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile will display alongside your name and rating on leaderboards and tournament brackets.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it—which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information—and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to CueSports Africa, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to CueSports Africa and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our site.

As another example, when you delete a tournament or comment from your CueSports Africa account, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days just in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

Match results and tournament participation are kept as part of the permanent competitive record to maintain the integrity of the rating system.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.

Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features.

Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account, tournaments you’ve registered for, and legal notices.

Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can close your CueSports Africa account. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above—for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with legal obligations or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

Data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data.
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data.
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data.
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data.
• Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to find out how to reach us.

Upon valid termination of your registration, your account will be anonymized. This means that your user name is changed to include just your first name and the first character of last name. The information on country and gender is kept in order not to distort any statistics and history. Your full last name and contact details, as well any other personal information other than competition-related data, will be deleted from our database.

How to Delete Your Account

You can delete your CueSports Africa account using either of the following methods:

• In the app: Go to Profile → Settings → Delete Account → Confirm
• By email: Send a request to support@cuesports.africa with your registered phone number. We will process it within 48 hours.

What Gets Deleted

When you delete your account, the following data is permanently removed:

• Personal information (name, email, phone number, date of birth, gender)
• Profile photo
• Chat messages
• Push notification tokens
• Login credentials

What We Retain

For competitive integrity and tournament record-keeping, we retain:

• Match results and scores (anonymized)
• Tournament participation history (anonymized)
• Player ratings (anonymized)

This data is kept in anonymized form and cannot be linked back to you.

Data Deletion Contact

If you have questions about data deletion, contact us at support@cuesports.africa.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

CueSports Africa Services operate across the African continent. CueSports Africa is the controller (or data-processor) of personal information, which means that CueSports Africa is the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services.

Organizations within CueSports Africa can create their own member listings, which means that they will be the responsible controller for those datasets. In those cases CueSports Africa will be the data-processor only. Requests about member data within such an organization should be directed to the organization in question.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us at privacy@cuesportsafrica.com.

Other Things You Should Know

Transferring Information

Because CueSports Africa’s Services are offered across the African continent, the information about you that we process when you use the Services may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating in different countries who work for us or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities in other jurisdictions, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law.

Analytics Services Provided by Others

Other parties may provide analytics services via our Services. These analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage and determine the popularity of certain content. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by CueSports Africa and does not cover the collection of information by any third party analytics providers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time. We encourage visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to the Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.