Privacy policy

Your account. When you sign up, whether with an email address or with Google or Apple, we receive your email address and, if your provider supplies one, your name. Authentication is handled by Clerk; we never receive or store your password.

What you do in a pool. The pools you create or join, the squares you claim, and the display name and initials shown on the board.

Payment records. A reference to the Stripe payment for each entry, and its amount and status. Card numbers are entered on Stripe’s own checkout page and are never sent to us or stored by us.

Nothing else. There are no analytics on this site, and nothing about you is collected anywhere you sign in, claim a square or pay. Two pages carry one advertisement each and nothing else does; see Advertising below. We do not buy or sell data about you.

Running the thing you signed up for: showing you your boards, working out who won each period, charging entries once a board fills, and emailing you when a board you are in fills or one of your squares hits.

We send transactional email only. There is no marketing list to be added to and nothing to unsubscribe from.

Other people in your pool. Your display name and initials are visible to the other members of any pool you join; that is what makes a board legible. Your email address is not shown to them.

Our processors. Each of these handles one job and nothing else:

• Clerk: accounts and sign-in.
• Neon: the database that holds pools, squares and members.
• Stripe: card authorization and payment.
• Resend: sending the transactional emails above.
• Cloudflare: hosting, and storage for images.

We also read live scores from ESPN’s public scoreboard. Nothing about you is sent when we do.

We will disclose information if the law requires it, and we will say so unless we are forbidden from saying so.

Two pages on this site carry one advertisement each, served by Google AdSense: the printable Squares grid and the printable Super Bowl Squares grid. Those are free tools that need no account, and the ad is what pays for them.

Nowhere else. There is no advertising on a pool board, on the page where you claim squares, anywhere in the payment flow, on the sheet you print, or on the page you wait on while it downloads. No ad code is loaded on any of those: not blocked, not hidden — never requested.

On those two pages Google sets its own cookies and may read a device identifier, to choose an advertisement and to count it. We do not send Google your email address, your name, your pools or anything else we hold about you; neither page knows who you are, because neither asks you to sign in. What Google does with what it collects is described in how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, you are asked before any of that happens, and refusing is one tap in the same dialog, beside agreeing — not behind a settings screen. You can change your answer later from that dialog.

Anyone, anywhere, can turn off personalised advertising for themselves in Google’s ad settings, which applies to every site using AdSense rather than only this one. Blocking the advertisement with an extension works too, and the grid generator is unaffected either way: a blocked ad never takes the sheet down with it.

If you are in California, or another US state with a privacy law, the advertising on those two pages is the only part of this site that sends anything anywhere for marketing. We do not sell your information and no data broker is involved — but a personalised advertisement is the kind of use several of those laws treat as “sharing”, separately from selling, and we would rather say so than lean on the narrower word. Turning off personalised advertising in Google’s ad settings above is how you stop it, and you can ask us to delete everything we hold about you at any time — see Your choices.

We ask Google for three things and nothing else: your email address, your basic profile (the name and picture you have made public), and confirmation that the sign-in is really you. We do not request access to your Gmail, your contacts, your Drive or anything else in your account, and we could not read them if we tried.

What we receive from Google is used only to run the things described above: signing you in, showing your name on a board, and emailing you about a pool you are in. It is not sold, not transferred to anyone else except the processors listed above, and not used for advertising.

You can disconnect Pool Prophet from your Google account at any time in your Google account settings, which stops any further sign-ins.

Apple lets you hide your real email address and give us a relay address ending in @privaterelay.appleid.com instead. That works here: our email goes to the relay and Apple passes it on. We never learn your real address, and you can stop the relay at any time from your Apple ID settings: though doing so means you stop receiving pool email from us.

Pool and square records are kept while the pool exists and for as long as we need them for financial and tax records. Payment records are kept for seven years, which is what tax law generally expects.

When your account is deleted we remove your display name everywhere we copied it: the squares you claimed, the pools you were a member of, and any settled result that named you as a winner. The squares themselves stay, and so do the two or three initials written on them, because the board belongs to everyone who played it and a grid with holes punched through it is no longer a record of anything. Initials on their own identify nobody.

We also keep the minimum payment records the law requires us to keep. Those are held by Stripe and referenced here by an identifier, not by your name.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and the data attached to it. Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to processing or to complain to a regulator.

Deleting your account does not need us at all. Do it from your account settings and Clerk removes your sign-in record; our copy of your name is erased automatically at the same time, as described under how long we keep it.

For anything else, a copy of your data or a correction, email us at the address below. We will not make you jump through hoops.

Pool Prophet involves money changing hands and is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that matters we will update the date at the top and, where the change is significant, tell account holders by email.

Questions, requests or complaints: info@poolprophet.com. Our terms of service cover the rest of the relationship.