Privacy policy

Who is responsible

College-Soccer.org is run by Robert William Woodhouse, County Carlow, Ireland, who is the data controller for this site. Contact: robertwilliamwoodhouse@gmail.com.

Your right to object

You can object at any time to our publishing information about you, or to any other use of your data based on our legitimate interests. We will stop unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests. Email robertwilliamwoodhouse@gmail.com with the page concerned.

What we collect and why

Mailing list. If you sign up on the sign-up page, we store your email address, the name you give (optional), the country your request came from (as reported by our hosting provider at the time of sign-up), where on the site you signed up, and the dates you signed up, confirmed and unsubscribed. Confirmation and unsubscribe links are stored only as one-way hashes. We use this to send occasional site updates and requests for feedback. Giving your email address is voluntary and needed only to receive these emails. The legal basis is your consent, which you give by confirming the email we send you (double opt-in). Every email includes an unsubscribe link. Before you confirm, and after you unsubscribe, we keep the record on the basis of our legitimate interest in not emailing anyone who has not asked for it.

Bot protection. The sign-up form uses Cloudflare Turnstile, which processes your IP address and browser signals to check that a person, not a bot, is signing up. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in preventing abuse.

Hosting and security. The site runs on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and request details to deliver pages, limit abusive traffic and keep the site secure. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in running a secure, working website.

Emails you send us. If you email us, we use your message and address to reply. Our email is provided by Google (Gmail), so Google also processes that correspondence.

Advertising. Some pages show ads served by Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this and other sites. How Google uses information from sites that use its services explains this in detail. You can turn off personalised advertising in Google's ad settings, and opt out of other vendors' personalised advertising at youronlinechoices.eu or aboutads.info.

Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown Google's consent message. Until you choose, the site tells Google tags not to use advertising or analytics storage. The legal basis for personalised advertising is your consent. Even non-personalised ads use cookies or similar storage for frequency capping, ad measurement and fraud prevention. Outside these regions, Google may use advertising cookies, including for personalised ads, without asking first; you can turn off personalised ads in Google's ad settings.

Tag management. The site loads Google Tag Manager. Loading it sends your IP address and browser information to Google. At the time of writing it is configured with no analytics or marketing tags. If that changes, this policy will be updated first.

Embedded videos. Pages with highlight videos load the video player or preview images from YouTube's servers, so Google receives your IP address and browser information when the page loads. Videos use YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), in which YouTube may still store information on your device, and sets cookies when you play a video.

Information about players, coaches and teams. The site publishes sports information about college soccer programmes and the people in them: names, photos, positions, shirt numbers, school year, height, weight, hometown, high school, nationality, date of birth or age, previous clubs and colleges, rosters, results, statistics, awards and draft history. It also lists announced college commitments of high-school players, some of whom are under 18. This information comes from official team rosters, association and conference websites, and official results and statistics; from public databases such as Transfermarkt, Wikipedia, BeSoccer and playmakerstats; and, for commitments, from TopDrawerSoccer and SoccerWire. We publish it in the legitimate interest of providing accurate, freely available sports information. We do not publish personal contact details. It is kept as a historical sports record and removed if an objection succeeds. If you are a player, coach or parent and want information about you corrected or removed, email us and we will review the request promptly.

We do not make automated decisions about you, including profiling.

Cookies and storage on your device

• Preferences: a soccer_gender cookie remembers whether you are browsing men's or women's soccer (kept for one year). Your chosen time zone and your shortlist of teams are kept in your browser's local storage, and search filters for your current visit, and a short-lived note that stops pages reloading in a loop, in session storage. The cookie is sent to our server only to show the right section; none of these are used for tracking.
• Bot protection: Cloudflare Turnstile may store information needed to check the sign-up form.
• Advertising and videos: Google's cookies, described above.

Who we share data with

We do not sell personal data. Cloudflare processes data on our behalf for hosting, databases, backups, email delivery and bot protection. Google acts as an independent controller when it uses data for advertising, when you load embedded YouTube videos and when it handles our email; Google's privacy policy applies. These providers may process data outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where they do, they rely on legal safeguards recognised under the GDPR, such as the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

• Mailing list: while you are subscribed. If you unsubscribe, we keep your email address marked as unsubscribed so that we do not send you updates again. If your address is entered on the sign-up form again, you will receive a confirmation email (at most one every 10 minutes), and nothing more unless you confirm it. A sign-up that is never confirmed stays on record as unconfirmed. To have your address deleted completely, email us.
• Backups: database backups are kept for up to 90 days. Data you ask us to delete is removed from the live database promptly and from backups within 90 days.
• Hosting logs: our request logs are kept for about 7 days. Cloudflare and Google keep their own data under their own retention policies.
• Emails you send us: for as long as needed to deal with your message, and no longer than two years.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask to access the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its use, or receive it in a portable format. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time; this does not affect anything done before you withdrew it. Email robertwilliamwoodhouse@gmail.com to make a request. You also have the right to complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland (dataprotection.ie) or to the data protection authority where you live.

Children

The mailing list is not intended for children under 16. Please do not sign up if you are under 16. If you believe a child has signed up, email us and we will delete the record. Requests to remove information about a player under 18 can also be made by a parent or guardian.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal data, we will update this page and the date at the top.