Privacy policy

The short version. We hold swimmers' names, ages, clubs and times so we can publish meet results and run entries — that is what this service is for. The same applies to our MDO Swimmer app: it shows meet information, and watching a meet in it needs no account at all. We publish results; we never publish dates of birth or registration numbers. Most of the swimmers here are children, and section 5 is about them. We do not track you, advertise to you, or sell anything about you to anyone.

1. Who this is from

MeetDirector Online is operated by Sports Timing, Inc. of 3537 Ashwycke Street, Mount Pleasant, SC 29466. This policy covers meetdirector.online and our MDO Swimmer app for iPhone and Android. Questions, requests and complaints: support@meetdirector.online, or 843-628-5486.

2. What we hold

About people with accounts — coaches, meet directors, parents, swimmers, timing vendors:

• Name, email address, and phone number if you give one.
• A one-way scrambled version of your password. We never hold the password itself.
• If you sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple: the account identifier they give us, and the email address and name they pass on. We never receive your password for those accounts.
• Your roles — which clubs or organizations you act for.
• Times you signed in, and things you did that changed data.

About swimmers — usually supplied by their club, not by them:

• Name, date of birth, gender, club, and USA Swimming registration number where the club records one.
• Entries, swims, times, splits, places, disqualifications and records.
• Any goals or journal entries a swimmer writes for themselves, and who they have chosen to share them with.
• Contact details a club holds for the swimmer or their family.

About using the service:

• The meet files you upload, kept as you sent them.
• Emails we send you, including their content, so we can show you what was sent.
• Errors and page-not-found events, which may record who was signed in.
• Support sessions: which pages our staff opened while helping you (section 8).
• For timing vendors: business details, and payment records.

About using the MDO Swimmer app:

• Watching a meet needs no account and no code. The app asks our meet server for information that is already public — the order of events, heat sheets, entries and results. It does not tell us who you are.
• The profile you enter — name, email, and phone if you give one — stays on your device. The app uses it to recognise you on a club's roster. It reaches us only if you sign in to a meetdirector.online account, and then section 2's first block applies.
• Swimmers you star stay on your device, unless you turn notifications on. If you do, we receive the device's notification token, which app it is, the swimmers you follow — their identifier and their name — and which alerts you want, because our server needs them to write the alert. Turning notifications off removes that registration.
• "Use my location" never sends us your location. The app reads a coarse position, turns it into a state on the device itself, and remembers only the two-letter state. The position is not sent to us and we do not store it. Turning it into a state uses your phone's own map service — Apple's or Google's, depending on the phone — under their privacy policy, not ours.
• The app does not track you. No advertising, no analytics, no third-party software development kits, and no profiling. It talks to our servers and to nobody else.

We do not run advertising, analytics or tracking of any kind. There is no tracking pixel, no advertising network, and no profiling. Every file your browser loads comes from us, so no other company learns that you visited. We do not sell or rent personal information, and we never will.

3. Where it comes from

Some of it you give us. Much of it we get from your club, in the entry and results files they upload — that is how a swimmer's name, age and times reach us, usually without the swimmer having any account at all. A results file for a meet contains every club that was there, so a file uploaded by one club brings information about swimmers from others. We tell those clubs when it happens.

4. What we publish

Results are public. Meet results, rankings and records show a swimmer's name, age, club, event, time and place. That is the purpose of the service, and clubs and meet hosts supply the information on that basis.

These are never published: dates of birth (age is shown, the date is not), USA Swimming registration numbers, email addresses and phone numbers other than ones somebody has deliberately chosen to publish, and anything in a swimmer's goals or journal.

A swimmer or their guardian can ask us to withhold their name from the public site. The swim still counts — for places, scoring, records and rankings — but is shown without identifying them.

5. Children

Most swimmers on this site are under 18, and much of what we hold is about them. We build for that rather than around it:

• Swimmers under 18 do not create their own accounts. A parent or guardian links to a swimmer through an invitation we send them, and can unlink at any time.
• A guardian has to confirm outward sharing. If a swimmer under 18 shares goals or a journal beyond their own account, we email their guardian a code and nothing is shared until it is used.
• We do not open support sessions on a child's account. Where one needs help, we work with the parent or guardian.
• A journal is private. It is not visible to coaches, to us, or to support staff, unless the swimmer shares it.

A parent or guardian can ask us what we hold about their swimmer, ask us to correct it, ask for the name to be withheld from the public site, or ask us to delete what we can delete — see section 10.

How the law applies. In the United States this engages the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Information about a swimmer under 13 reaches us from their club, in the entry and results files the club uploads, and we hold and use it on that club's instructions for the purpose the club gave it to us: running and publishing their meet. We do not ask children for information. We do not let anyone under 18 open an account. We do not use anything we hold about a child for advertising, profiling, or any purpose beyond the record of the meet.

A parent or guardian can exercise everything in section 10 on their swimmer's behalf. Where a request concerns information a club supplied, we will tell the club.

Schools, districts and some leagues need a written data agreement with a service before they can lawfully use it. If yours does, write to support@meetdirector.online.

6. Who else sees it

We use a small number of companies to run the service. They act on our instructions:

• Stripe — card payments. Card numbers go to Stripe and never to us; we hold only Stripe's identifiers for a customer and a saved card.
• SendLayer — sending our email, which means the recipient address and the message.
• IONOS — our hosting provider. The servers the site, its database and its meet server run on are IONOS machines in the United States.
• Our support desk at support.meetdirector.online, which holds your tickets and the emails in them.
• Nobody else. Everything your browser loads to display this site — styling, charts, icons, fonts — comes from our own servers. No content delivery network, no font service and no third-party script sees your visit.

We also share information where the law requires it, and with the club or organization you are part of — a coach can see their club's swimmers, an organization administrator the accounts in their organization. That is the service working as intended.

7. Where it is kept

Everything described in this policy is held in the United States. Our servers and database are there, and so are the companies in section 6 that act for us.

If you use the service from outside the United States, your information is transferred to the United States and held under United States law, which may give it less protection than the law where you live. Using the service means accepting that transfer. If that is a problem for your club or your school, write to us before you upload anything.

8. How long we keep it

• Results and meet records — indefinitely. A swim that happened is part of the record of a meet, and of everyone else's results in it.
• Deleted journal entries — recoverable for 30 days, then destroyed.
• Uploaded meet files — kept so problems can be traced and corrected; deleted on a schedule we set, and permanently when they go.
• Support session records — at least two years, so you can always see what our staff looked at.
• Your account — until you ask us to close it (section 10).
• Backups of the meetdirector.online database — we take copies so the service can be restored if something goes wrong, and we keep them on our own servers. Information you ask us to delete goes from the live service at once, but a copy stays in any backup taken before you asked, until that backup is destroyed. We destroy those backups when they are more than 90 days old.

9. Cookies

We use cookies only to make the site work. None of them track you, and there are no advertising cookies.

• Signing in — a cookie that keeps you signed in, for up to eight hours of use.
• Signing in with Google, Microsoft or Apple — a short-lived cookie, ten minutes, used only while you are being handed back to us.
• Form security — a token that stops a form on another site being submitted as you.

In the app there are no cookies. If you sign in, the app keeps a sign-in token in the phone's own secure storage; your profile, your starred swimmers and a few preferences are kept on the device. Deleting the app removes all of it.

10. Your choices

• See what we hold. Ask us and we will tell you.
• Correct it. Names, ages and club details can be wrong in a file we were sent; tell us and we will fix it.
• Be left off the public site. Ask and we will withhold the name.
• Stop sharing. A swimmer can withdraw goal or journal sharing at any time; a guardian can unlink from a swimmer.
• Close your account. Ask us. Published results of swims that happened stay, because they are part of the meet's record and other people's results.
• Take the app off. Deleting MDO Swimmer removes what it kept on your device, and turns off any notification registration with it. Anything held in a meetdirector.online account is separate — close the account to deal with that.
• Support access. Refuse it, or end a running session, from your account page. See what support can and cannot do.

Where the law gives you more than a request. Depending on where you live, some of the above are rights you can require us to honour rather than ask us for: to see what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to object to a particular use. Residents of California and of a growing number of other states have some of these under state law, and a parent or guardian can exercise them for their swimmer.

Write to support@meetdirector.online. We will answer within 45 days, and tell you if we need longer than that and why. We will not charge you, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — so there is nothing there to opt out of.

If you think we have handled this badly, tell us first and we will try to put it right. You can also complain to the Attorney General of your state.

11. Keeping it safe

Passwords are stored scrambled and cannot be read back. Connections to the site are encrypted. Access to the live system is limited to the people who run it, and when support looks at an account it is recorded and shown to you.

If something does go wrong. If personal information we hold is exposed, taken, or altered by someone who should not have had it, we will investigate immediately and we will tell you. Where the law sets a deadline for that, we will meet it. Where it does not, we will tell the people affected without unreasonable delay, and in any case within 72 hours of establishing that it happened. We will say what was involved, what we have done about it, and what — if anything — you should do. We will notify regulators where we are required to.

12. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you before it takes effect.

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Related: Terms of service · When support looks at your account.