InsideTheNinety LLC: Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Information you give us

• When you upload a photo or video: your name, email address, and optionally your Instagram handle and a caption. We do not ask your age when you upload; instead you confirm that you are at least 13 and, if you are under 18, that a parent or guardian has agreed.
• The file itself, plus its size, format, dimensions or duration, and the date you sent it.
• A record that you accepted our upload terms, when, and which version.
• When you create an account: whatever your sign-in method passes us, and then the age range you tell us on the first step after joining. Google and Microsoft give us your name, email address, and profile picture. An emailed sign-in link gives us only your email address.
• What you tell us about yourself afterwards: optionally your gender, what you are to the sport (coach, parent, player, photographer, or something else in your own words), and a phone number. Every one of these can be left blank, and every one can be changed or cleared from your account page whenever you like. We ask because knowing whether we are talking to a coach or to a photographer changes how we handle a clip, and because a phone number is sometimes the faster way to reach someone about one.
• Which kinds of coverage you want: if you tell us which sorts of stories you are interested in, we store that so your home page can reflect it.
• The schools you follow: if you follow a school, we store which one and when, so we can put its results and fixtures at the top of your home page. Nobody but you sees your list, we do not sell it, and you can remove any of it at any time from your account page.
• If you sign up for the newsletter: the email address on your account, where you signed up (the newsletter page, the pop-up, the box when joining, or your account page), when you agreed, and which version of our terms was in force. We also record whether you are subscribed, have unsubscribed, or are no longer mailed because an issue could not be delivered or was reported as spam.
• When you email us: whatever you put in the message.

We never collect a password, because there is no password here to collect. Signing in happens through Google, through Microsoft, or through a single-use link sent to your email address, so your credentials stay with whoever already holds them and never reach us.

1.2 Information we collect automatically

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand which pages people read. It is cookieless: it does not set an identifier in your browser, does not follow you across other sites, and reports only aggregated figures such as page views and referrers. We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, or any cross-site tracking.

Our hosting provider processes standard server request data, including IP addresses, in order to serve the site and protect it from abuse.

If you are signed in, each sign-in creates a session record that stores the IP address and browser user agent it was created from, alongside when it was made and when it expires. That is what lets us tell one sign-in apart from another. Sessions expire 30 days after their last use, and are deleted when you sign out or when your account is deleted.

1.3 Information we collect from public sources

To build schedules, results, standings, and team pages, we collect data published by the CIF and its sections. This includes information about identifiable people:

• Coach names, and where published, their school email addresses and phone numbers.
• Athletic department and school staff names, roles, and published contact details.
• School details such as address, enrollment, mascot, and colours.

We use this to attribute teams correctly and to be able to reach schools about our coverage. If you are a coach or staff member and you would rather we did not hold your contact details, email us and we will remove them.

1.4 Content metadata

Photos and videos may carry embedded metadata such as timestamps, device model, or location. We do not extract or use location metadata, and we do not publish it. Note that we read image dimensions and video duration in your browser before upload, which does not involve reading location data.

For photographers’ galleries, we read the time each photo was taken so a gallery shows in shooting order. Every copy we publish or deliver to a buyer has its embedded metadata removed, location included. The original file, as the photographer sent it, is kept in private storage that only we can reach.

1.5 Photographers and photo sales

• When you apply as a photographer: the name you want to be credited as, your age, a note about your experience (read by us and never published), optionally your Instagram handle, website, and one to three sample photos (also never published), and a record of which version of the photographer terms you accepted and when.
• If you are under 18: that you confirmed a parent or guardian knows and agrees, each time you accept our photographer terms. We do not ask for their name or contact details, and we do not contact them.
• Once you are approved: the public profile you write and its photo, and the galleries you upload, with their titles, descriptions, and the games and teams you tag.
• Before your first gallery: when you accepted the Photo Sales Terms, and which version. When either set of terms changes, each new version you accept is recorded too, alongside the earlier ones. You also set up payouts with Stripe, and your identity and bank details go to Stripe, not to us. We keep only the identifier Stripe gives your account and whether Stripe says it can receive payments. If you are under 18, Stripe may ask for a parent’s or guardian’s details, at setup or later as your sales grow, and we do not receive them.
• When you buy a photo: which photos and sizes you bought, what you paid, when, the email address you gave at checkout, and your account, which you need in order to buy. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach us.
• Each sale and payout: the photographer’s share, when it was sent, any refund, and, if the buyer disputes the payment with their bank, where that dispute stands, as Stripe reports it.

2. How We Use Information

• To review, publish, and caption submitted photos and videos
• To credit and, where you have asked, tag contributors
• To contact you about your submission
• To produce editorial coverage of high school soccer
• To operate, maintain, and improve the site
• To keep you signed in, and to put the schools you follow and the coverage you asked for at the top of your home page
• To send the weekly newsletter, if you signed up for it, and to stop sending it when you unsubscribe or an address stops accepting mail
• To confirm that an account holder is old enough to have one
• To review photographer applications and galleries, and to tell photographers what we decided
• To take payment for photos, deliver the downloads you bought, pay photographers their share, and handle refunds
• To keep the financial records that tax and accounting law requires
• To detect and prevent abuse, including upload rate limiting

We do not sell or share your personal information for advertising, and we do not use it to build profiles of you.

3. How We Share Information

3.1 Service providers

We use third parties to run the site. Each receives only what it needs:

• Vercel for hosting, file storage, and cookieless analytics
• Neon for the database
• Sanity for stories and images
• Mux for video encoding, hosting, and automatic captions
• Google and Microsoft for sign-in, if you choose one of them. They tell us your name, email address, and profile picture. We tell them nothing about what you read here.
• Resend for sending sign-in links, emails to photographers about their application and galleries, and the weekly newsletter, which means it handles your email address and, if you subscribe, holds it on our mailing list
• Google Drive, where the original file of every approved submission is archived
• Stripe for photo payments and photographer payouts. Stripe receives a buyer’s card and email address, and a photographer’s identity and bank details, under its own privacy policy. We tell Stripe what was bought and how much each photographer is owed. When the law requires it, Stripe, for us, reports a photographer’s yearly sales and the tax details they gave Stripe to the IRS and state tax agencies, and sends them their tax form.
• Telegram for our internal review queue, which is how submissions get approved or rejected

3.2 In published content

Content you submit may be published on this site and on our social channels, along with your name or Instagram handle if you gave us one. Photographers are credited by the name they chose, on their galleries, their profile page, and a mark on each preview and thumbnail. Your email address is never published.

3.3 For legal reasons

We may disclose information where required by law, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation, enforce our Terms, or protect the safety of any person.

4. Content Featuring You or Your Child

Content submitted here is published publicly and may show faces, names, jersey numbers, and school affiliations. Anyone shown in it, or their parent or guardian if they are under 18, can ask us to take it down.

We act on those requests without requiring a reason. See remove my content for how to ask and how quickly we respond.

5. Cookies

We do not use tracking or advertising cookies, and our analytics sets no cookies at all. Because of that, this site does not show a cookie consent banner. Nothing described below can follow you to another site.

If you only read the site, you are given no cookies at all. The ones we do set exist to make signing in work, and you get them only once you start signing in:

• Your session, which is how the site knows you are signed in. It expires 30 days after its last use, and is cleared when you sign out.
• A five-minute sign-in cookie that protects the trip out to Google or Microsoft and back from being tampered with by someone else. Without it that round trip could be forged.
• A 30-minute joining cookie that marks the trip out to your sign-in provider as joining rather than signing in, and whether you ticked the newsletter box, so that we still know when your provider sends you back.

Separately from cookies, if you are not signed in and the newsletter pop-up appears, your browser’s own storage keeps a note that you signed up or said “No thanks,” so we do not keep asking. It is never sent to us, and clearing your site data removes it.

Your photo cart is kept the same way, in your browser’s own storage rather than on our servers, until you check out or clear it. So is a note of the galleries whose copyright notice you have read, so it is not shown to you again.

Do Not Track. We do not track you across other websites, and we do not let anyone else collect information about your activity here to follow you elsewhere. Because of that, a browser’s Do Not Track signal does not change how the site works, and we do not treat it differently.

6. How Long We Keep Things

• Rejected submissions: the file is deleted as soon as the submission is rejected. The record of it, including contributor details, is deleted after 90 days.
• Published media: kept while it is published. The copy in our temporary upload storage is deleted once the video has been encoded and the original has been copied into our archive. Contributor contact details are deleted 1 year after the content is taken down.
• Original files, in our archive: kept indefinitely. Once the temporary copy above is deleted, the archive holds the only remaining copy of the file you actually sent us, and what our video host keeps is a re-encoded version rather than your original. Taking a clip down removes it from the site; it does not empty the archive. If you want the original gone as well, say so when you ask and we will delete it.
• Removal and privacy requests: kept for 2 years, as a record that we acted on them.
• Your account, the schools you follow, and what you told us about yourself: kept until the account is deleted. There is no delete button on the account page yet, so ask us and we will do it, within the timeframes set out on our removal page. Deleting removes your follows and your profile answers completely. Any clip you sent in stays published, because it was licensed to us when you submitted it, but it is no longer linked to you.
• Photo orders, sales, and payouts: kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep financial records, even if the buyer’s or photographer’s account is deleted. If a buyer’s account is deleted, their orders stay but are no longer linked to it.
• Photographers’ galleries: the original files are kept while a gallery exists. Taking a gallery down removes it from the site but keeps the originals, and an original that someone has bought is kept so they can still download it. The exception is a photo we withdraw because of a copyright claim or because someone in it asked us to: nobody can download it any more, and its buyers are refunded. Ask us to delete originals that nobody has bought and we will.
• Photographer applications: what you sent when you applied, sample photos included, is kept with your application after we decide on it, so we can look back at what we reviewed and reuse it if you apply again. Ask us and we will delete the samples, or all of it if you are not an approved photographer.
• Photographer accounts: a photographer may be owed money or hold photos that buyers paid for, so closing one is done by hand rather than at the click of a button. Ask us, and we will pay out anything owed, remove your galleries and profile from the site, and delete everything we are not required to keep. The record of which terms you accepted, including any confirmation that a parent or guardian knows and agrees, is kept as long as the account is, since it is our proof of what was agreed.
• Newsletter sign-up: kept while you are subscribed. If you unsubscribe, or we stop mailing an address because issues to it bounce or it reported one as spam, we keep the address and that status so we never mail it again by mistake. Ask us to delete the record entirely and we will, and we remove the address from Resend at the same time. Deleting your account removes it from the list.
• Emails you send us: kept while relevant, then deleted.

Backups may hold copies for a short period after deletion, and get overwritten on their normal cycle.

7. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect information, including encrypted connections and access controls on the review queue. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Children

Anyone can read this site. We do not ask a reader how old they are, and no part of our coverage is withheld on the basis of age.

Accounts and submissions are different, because both involve us collecting personal information. This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. The sign-up flow asks for your age range and refuses anyone under 13. The upload form asks you to confirm you are at least 13 before you can send anything.

For accounts, the age question is the first step after joining, and a new account cannot reach any other page until it is answered. If the answer is under 13, the account is deleted at once, along with everything on it, including any newsletter sign-up, both on our side and on Resend’s mailing list.

Photographers aged 13 to 17 may apply, and tell us their age when they do. When they accept our photographer terms or sales terms, they confirm that a parent or guardian knows and agrees. Stripe may ask for a parent’s or guardian’s details when they set up payouts.

If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, email insidetheninety@gmail.com and we will delete it.

9. Your Choices and Rights

Whatever your location, and whether or not a privacy law requires it of us, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what information we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete information you gave us
• Remove content that features you or your child
• Remove your contact details if you are a coach or school staff member

Email insidetheninety@gmail.com with “Privacy request” in the subject. We aim to respond within 30 days. Requests involving minors are prioritized.

You do not need to email us to leave the newsletter. Every issue has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and signed-in readers can switch it off on their account page. Either takes effect before the next issue.

We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

10. Third-Party Links

The site links to third-party websites and services. We are not responsible for their privacy practices, and we encourage you to read their policies.

11. Changes

We may update this policy. When we do, we will revise the “Last Updated” date at the top of this page. Changes take effect when posted.

12. Contact

insidetheninety@gmail.com, or see our contact page.