Privacy Policy

In short

We collect what PlayChale needs to work, we don’t sell your data, and there’s no advertising or tracking. Your phone number and email are never shown on your public profile.

What we collect

To sign you in: your phone number (sign-in by text is for Ghanaian numbers), your email address, or your Google account if you choose it (the account’s ID and email address, which Google gives us), and the one-time codes we send.

Your profile: your name, username, picture or face, country, area, the sports you play and your positions.

What you do in PlayChale: the games you host and join, results and stats, teams and competitions, events, venues and bookings, and the notifications we send you.

Events: the names organisers type in for the people taking part, and their groups; for each person, the games they’re in, their results, and whether they’ve paid the entry fee.

If you join a game as a guest, without an account: your name, your phone number and, if you give it, your email address.

Places: where a game or venue is, as a name or a pin on the map. If you let the app use your location, to drop a pin or list games nearest first, it’s used for that and not kept.

Payments: a record of what was paid, for what and when. Card and mobile money details are handled by Paystack; we never see or store card numbers.

If you turn on phone notifications: the address your browser gives us to deliver them.

For security: basic technical details such as your IP address, kept briefly to stop abuse.

What others can see

Your public profile shows your name, username, picture, country, area, sports, positions, stats and match history.

People in a game you host see the number you set for receiving payments, so they can pay you. Venues show the phone number their owner adds.

Private games aren’t listed anywhere: only the people in them, and anyone they share the link with, can see them.

A guest’s phone number and email are seen only by the host of their game.

In an event, everyone taking part sees the names of the others, their groups, the games and the results. Whether you’ve paid an event’s entry fee is seen only by its organisers and you.

If an event’s organisers turn on its public page, or show its board on a screen, anyone with that link sees the names, games and results, and never anyone’s phone number, email, account or payments. Public event pages are kept out of search engines.

When you add an event to your account with the link its organisers send you, your games and places in it show on your public profile once it’s over.

Who we share it with

Only the companies that help us run PlayChale, for that purpose: our hosting provider, Cloudflare (which delivers files like pictures and videos), Resend (which sends our emails), Rancard (which sends sign-in codes, and a reminder the evening before a game you’re in, by text in Ghana), Paystack (payments, where available) and the browser companies that deliver phone notifications.

Google, when you use it: Google sign-in if you choose it, and Google Maps, which finds places when you search for one and draws the maps in the app. What you type into a place search and the maps you view go to Google, under Google’s own privacy policy.

We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t share it for advertising.

Cookies and your browser

We use one cookie, which keeps you signed in. Your browser also remembers a few preferences on your device, such as whether you dismissed a message. There are no advertising or analytics cookies. Google sign-in and Google’s maps may set Google’s own cookies when you use them.

Your choices

You can see and change your details in your profile at any time, and choose which notifications reach your phone and which reach your inbox. In Ghana we text you a reminder the evening before a game you’re in; you can turn that off in your notification settings, and a guest stops getting them by leaving the game.

We email you about things you are part of — your sign-in code, a game you joined, a league you entered. We only email you about PlayChale itself if you ask us to, you can stop that whenever you like, and every one of those emails carries a link that stops it without you having to sign in.

You can delete your account from your profile settings. Your personal details are then removed. Results of games you played stay, so the other players’ records still add up, but they show as “Deleted player”. In an event you joined yourself, your name becomes “Former participant”; a name the organisers typed in stays on their record of the event.

To ask what we hold about you, or anything else about your privacy, write to [email protected]. These rights come from Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843).

How long we keep it

Sign-in codes expire within minutes. Your account stays until you delete it. Security logs are kept for a short time only.

A guest’s phone number and email are removed 90 days after their game, unless they’ve signed up and the spot is theirs. Their name stays on the game’s list.

Names in an event stay with it, for its results, until its organisers remove them.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll ask you to agree to it again the next time you open the app.