Privacy policy

We collect what an account needs and what the games record. We do not sell it. We do not pass it to anyone except the services that make the site run, which are named below. We do not use it to train language models, and we do not give it to anyone else to train theirs.

You can read almost all of TopBin9 without an account. An account exists so that what you create - a guessed lineup, a saved simulation, a comment - is still there when you come back.

When you create an account: your email address, a display name, and a profile picture if you sign in through Google. If you set a password we store only a cryptographic hash of it, never the password itself.

What you do on the site: the lineups you guess, the simulations you save, the teams and players you follow, the comments you write, and the points those earn you. This is the material the site exists to keep for you.

Technical information that any web server sees: your IP address, browser and device type, and the pages requested. Your timezone is stored in a cookie so kick-off times are shown in your local time.

We do not ask for your date of birth, your address, your phone number, or any payment details, because nothing here costs money.

To let you sign in and to keep your account attached to your own guesses, saved simulations and points. Without this the games cannot work at all.

To show football at the right time and in the right language for you.

To understand roughly how many people use which parts of the site, so that the parts nobody uses can be removed. This is the only purpose that is optional, and it is the one the cookie banner asks about.

Some cookies are needed for the site to function: they keep you signed in, remember your language and your timezone, and record your cookie choice itself. These are set whatever you answer.

Google Analytics is used to count visits and see which pages are read. It runs only if you accept analytics cookies, and it is switched off by default until you do. Advertising and personalisation signals are refused unless you accept them separately; the site currently shows no advertising.

You can change your answer at any time by clearing the site data in your browser, which brings the banner back.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else to market to you.

It reaches three kinds of company, and only as far as it must: Google, if you choose to sign in with a Google account or if you accept analytics cookies; our hosting and database provider, on whose servers the site runs; and nobody else.

We will disclose data if a court or a law with authority over us requires it. If that ever happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

Parts of this site are written by language models: match previews, transfer analysis, tactical notes after a match. They read published football material - fixtures, scores, squads, reported news - and nothing else.

Your account, your guesses, your saved simulations and your comments are never sent to a language model for training, and never sold or given to anyone else for that purpose. This is not a preference we might revisit quietly; if it ever changed, this page would say so before it happened and you would be asked.

Your account and what you created with it are kept while the account exists. Delete the account and they go with it.

Server logs are short-lived and are kept only long enough to investigate errors and abuse.

Match data, squads and results are not personal data. They stay, because they are the archive the whole site is built on.

A copy of what we hold about you. A correction, if something is wrong. Deletion of your account and everything attached to it. Withdrawal of your consent to analytics, at any time, without giving a reason.

Ask through the feedback form at the bottom of any page and say which of these you want. We do not require a reason and we will not try to talk you out of it.

TopBin9 is not built for children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has created an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored as hashes and cannot be read back, by us or by anyone who obtained the database. Access to the production database is limited to the people who run the site.

No site can promise it will never be breached. If one happens and your data is affected, we will say so plainly rather than quietly.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, the date above changes and the change is described here rather than folded silently into the text.