OpenHoops Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 27, 2026 · Contact: support@timbuilds.dev

OpenHoops ("the app") helps basketball players find gyms and outdoor courts, and see activity at nearby courts. This policy explains what information the app handles and why. The short version: we collect the information the app needs to work, plus optional profile details you choose to add; we don't sell your personal information; your location is never read in the background; and the parts of the app that show you to other players are described plainly below.

Using OpenHoops also means agreeing to our Terms of Service. You must be at least 16 years old to use OpenHoops.

What other players can see about you

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the point of the app.

Other players cannot see your email address, your historical Activity list, which courts you visit most, your favourite courts, expired plans, your settings, or the list of people you have blocked. Other players cannot directly read your complete account profile. The app gives them only the roster, player-card, plan, Friends-presence and picture details described above, through specific lookups that apply the visibility and block rules. The two court numbers are the one deliberate exception. The count of players at a court, and the count of players heading to it, both still count everyone — including players whose names are hidden from you and players either of you has blocked. You see the number; you do not see the name.

Friends, visibility and blocks

You can add another player as a friend by exact username or their in-app QR code, which contains the player's current username in an add-friend link. Hidden mode does not prevent a request from an exact username or QR code, but a block in either direction makes that request unavailable. We store pending and accepted friend relationships. Accepted friends see each other's usernames in Friends. When both players' settings allow it, Friends also shows a friend's current venue and rounded arrival age for an active check-in confirmed nearby within the previous three hours.

The "Show me on rosters" setting starts at Visible for a new account. Visible shows your username, picture and rounded arrival time to any signed-in player whose own setting is Visible, whether or not they are at the court, and to your accepted friends set to Friends only. Friends only shows those details to accepted friends whose own setting also permits it. Hidden leaves you in the court's headcount but removes your name from these presence views. It also hides other players' roster names and removes friends' live venues from your Friends list. The same two-sided rules apply to "heading there" plans. New accounts also start with Check-in mode set to Instant, so after you allow precise location, opening the app at a venue can start a named check-in without a separate tap unless you change one of these settings.

Blocking ends any friendship and removes both players from each other's rosters, plans and Friends presence. One exception remains only for the person who set the block. If the blocked player is set to Visible, the person who set the block can still open the player's card so the Unblock button remains available. A player who blocked you is not revealed to you through that exception.

What we collect

Account information. When you sign up we collect your email address and a username you choose. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and the name on your Google account. Our sign-in provider keeps that name with your sign-in record; the app does not use it and never shows it to anyone. Your email is used for signing in, account recovery, and verifying an email deletion request. Other players never see it.

Optional profile details. You may choose a profile picture. It is optional and leaving it blank changes nothing about how the app works. The app does not ask for your real name. Names saved by earlier versions of the app were deleted in October 2026, and remain only in our encrypted backups until those expire.

Your profile picture. Your profile picture is one of 12 pictures built into the app. We store only which one you picked. You can't upload a photo, and we collect no photos.

Location (while using the app). The app uses your device's precise location to show venues near you on the map, to place your own marker on it, to tell you how far away a venue is, and to manage check-ins: confirming that you are close enough to a venue to arrive or check in, renewing an active check-in while you remain nearby, and detecting when you leave for automatic check-out. The check-in ring is about 50 metres for an outdoor court and 200 metres for a gym; gyms use a wider ring because GPS is less accurate inside large buildings. Location is read only while the app is open, never in the background. To load nearby venues, the app queries our server with the latitude and longitude edges of a search box around your location or the part of the map you are viewing. The box's centre is first rounded to a grid of points about 5 km apart, so the request does not carry your exact position. It sends a foreground position for manual and automatic check-in or arrival attempts. While the app is open and you have an active check-in, it can also send a fresh position that confirms you are within the check-in ring to renew that check-in; regular renewals are spaced at least ten minutes apart after a successful nearby check. The server uses the coordinates to measure distance, but the current check-in and arrival database records contain account and venue IDs, relevant times, active or pending status and an internal request number — not the coordinates. The departure test runs on the device, and its check-out request does not send your position. This describes what the current database records store, not how long temporary network handling may last.

Using OpenHoops in a web browser. The web app at openhoops.timbuilds.dev handles the same information as the phone app, with these differences. Your browser asks before sharing your location, and the web app reads it only while the page is open. Your browser keeps your sign-in on your device until you sign out. Cloudflare hosts the web app, so, like any website host, it receives your network address and the pages your browser loads. If you turn on notifications in the web app, your browser maker's push service (for example Google for Chrome, Apple for Safari or Mozilla for Firefox) delivers them; it receives the alert text and a random push address for your browser, not your name or email.

Check-in mode defaults to Instant. While the app is open, Instant can use your precise location to check you in when it places you at a venue. Ask first waits for your tap. Off disables automatic location use for check-in; a manual check-in still uses location to verify that you are near the venue. Change this at Profile → gear icon → Check-in mode.

The auto check-out window starts at 2 hours and can be set anywhere from 1 to 3 hours at Profile → gear icon → Advanced → Auto check-out timer.

Check-ins and your activity history. When you check in we store which venue and when. While it is live, permitted players can see the venue and rounded arrival age as described above. Only you can read the historical Activity list and the "gyms you frequent" list on your profile. A nightly job creates personal day and week summaries before deleting detailed check-in records that are no longer active and started more than 90 days earlier. Those summaries record only the day or week, not the venue or exact time; they remain while your account exists and are deleted with it. The same job separately creates venue-level busy-time statistics. Those statistics combine check-ins by venue and time block, contain no account ID, are kept on a rolling 52-week basis, and are not deleted when an individual account is deleted. Any signed-in player can ask our server for a venue's busy-time statistics, although no screen in the app shows them today.

Once a week, a job also counts check-ins across all players so we can tell whether the app is working: for example, how many check-ins joined a court where someone was already checked in, and how many players checked in again the following week. It produces only totals for the whole app, with no account ID, name or venue, and only the OpenHoops team sees them.

Reps. When you give another player a Rep, it is stored. The recipient's Activity list can show when and where the Rep was received, but not who gave it. Other players see the recipient's Rep total only, subject to the visibility rules above.

"Heading there" plans. If you announce you're heading to a court at a certain time, we store that plan (venue and estimated arrival) and show it, with your username, to permitted players looking at that court. Other players receive an arrival time rounded up to the next 15 minutes. Once the time passes the plan stops being shown, and you can cancel it at any time. A nightly job deletes the underlying record seven days after its estimated arrival time.

Favourite courts. Courts you star are stored so the app can alert you when players show up there. Your favourites list is visible only to you.

Notification token and court-alert log. If you allow notifications in the store version of the app, your device's push-notification token (a random address for delivering notifications — not your phone number or any hardware ID) is stored so server alerts can reach your device with the app closed. The registration stays active only if renewed within 24 hours. A confirmed online sign-out closes that sign-in's registration and removes its tokens. If you choose the local sign-out fallback after the server cannot confirm closure, alerts can continue until the 24 hours expires; an alert already selected for sending can still arrive. Account deletion removes the registration.

Court-alert text can name the venue. Crowd-size alerts can include the active-player count; a plan alert can say anonymously that someone is heading there with an approximate arrival time. These court alerts do not name the player who checked in or announced the plan. A friend request alert is different: it shows the sender's username (for example, "hooper23 wants to add you"), and you can turn it off in Settings → Notifications → Friend requests. To avoid duplicate alerts, we store your account, the venue, alert type and the time the alert was selected for sending. This log does not prove that delivery succeeded. A nightly job removes entries older than seven days, and account deletion removes entries linked to that account. For friend request alerts, we store who sent the request, who received it and when, so the same player can't alert you more than once a day. A nightly job removes entries older than 24 hours, and deleting either account removes them.

Time zone. If you set quiet hours, or leave friend request alerts on, the app saves your phone's time zone (for example, "America/Toronto") to your profile, so quiet hours follow your local clock. Other players can't see it, and it is deleted with your account.

Sign-in identifiers. Each time you sign in, that sign-in gets an internal identifier. It is stored alongside your notification registration and your presence bookkeeping so that signing out closes exactly that sign-in and no other, and so a stale device cannot keep a check-in alive. It is an internal number, not anything about your device or you. These identifiers are deleted with your account.

Abuse-prevention counters. For actions with limits, we store your account, the action, its time window and a count. Each time a limited action runs, it removes that account's counter rows whose windows began more than two days earlier. Account deletion removes the account's counters too.

Reports and blocks. If you report a player, we store your account as the reporter, who you reported, the category — including a child-safety option — the venue if supplied, the time, and any optional note you choose to add. The note can contain up to 500 characters and is private to report reviewers; do not include contact details or other sensitive information. Reports are not shown to the reported player. Filing a report can send a notification to an account marked as a moderator; that notification carries only the report category, never the note, your username or the reported player's. A report is available for possible review, but this policy does not promise that it will be reviewed or acted on. The note is kept and deleted with the report: deleting the reporter's account deletes both the report and its note, while deletion by the reported player leaves the report and note with that player's account link removed. Blocking works as described in the first section.

Feedback. If you send feedback from the app, we store it with your account so we can read it and fix things. We read it with help from an AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic), which receives the message text, the app version and when it was sent, but not your username or email address. We delete our copy after 90 days, or sooner with your account. Anthropic keeps what it processes under its own data retention terms, which can be longer.

Crash reports and analytics. Google Play builds with Sentry enabled, and the web app once crash reporting is turned on for it, send crash logs and diagnostics used to monitor app health and find bugs. These can include device model, operating system and app versions, the app update that was running, and technical details about where a failure happened. A report can also carry a short trail of the app events that led up to the failure, which the crash-reporting library records by default. Sentry's default personal-information option is off, and the app does not identify you to Sentry as a user or add an account ID, email address or username. The app does not turn on session recording, screenshots or performance profiling. This crash analytics is not used for advertising or player profiling. On the web, a report names the page without its address details: the part of the link after the page path, the page you came from, cookies and the text of buttons you tapped are not sent, and email addresses and sign-in codes in error text are blanked out.

What we don't collect

No contacts, payment information, health data, advertising identifiers or background location. The app does not access your files, camera or photo library. The app's own runtime dependencies include no advertising, attribution or product-analytics SDK. Sentry crash analytics is described above.

Where your data lives, and who else touches it

OpenHoops account and database data is stored with Supabase (our database and authentication provider), hosted in the United States (AWS us-east-2). The app sends its service requests over encrypted HTTPS connections. The database access boundaries for player-visible data are described in the first section.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. A small number of service providers necessarily handle some data to make the app work:

• Supabase — database, accounts, sign-in.
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your device (it receives the notification text, which can name the venue or, for a friend request, the sender's username, and your device's push token) and delivers app updates. The update component checks Expo for a newer version when the app starts unless that behaviour is switched off, and the app does not switch it off. A check tells Expo your device's network address, platform and app version.
• Google — Google Maps renders the map in the phone app and the web app, which means Google receives requests for the map area you are looking at, and that area is usually centred on where you are; "Continue with Google" verifies your identity if you choose it; Firebase carries Android notifications to your phone. When you open a court, the app may show a Google Street View picture of the nearest street. Your device loads it straight from Google, so Google sees your IP address and that court's location, as it does for the map.
• Cloudflare — hosts the web app and stores encrypted database backups.
• Sentry — receives crash reports from store builds and from the web app, where enabled; that data is hosted in the United States.
• Anthropic — its AI assistant, Claude, helps us read feedback you send from the app (the message text, app version and time only); that data is processed in the United States.
• Google Play — distributes the Android app; we never receive your payment details.

Data retention and deletion

Except for the shorter retention periods described above, and the three things named below that outlive your account, account data is kept while your account exists. You can delete in the app or request deletion by email:

1. In the app: Profile → gear icon → Delete account, then confirm twice. This removes your profile, detailed check-in records, personal check-in day and week summaries, Reps you received and Reps you gave (so other players' totals go down), plans, favourites, pending friend requests and accepted friendships, reports you filed, blocks you set and blocks set against you, notification registrations and court-alert log, sign-in identifiers, abuse-prevention counters, internal presence bookkeeping records, and your profile picture choice. Your account itself, including your email address, username and sign-in details, goes with it. In the live database this happens immediately.
2. By email: write to support@timbuilds.dev from the address you signed up with to request deletion. Our account-deletion page gives these email instructions if you do not have the app.

Three things outlive your account.

• Reports other players filed about you. These are kept, with your account detached from them, for up to 90 days after they were filed and then deleted, because a report is a record of behaviour rather than your own data — what remains is the category, the venue, the time and who filed it, with no link back to you.
• The venue busy-time statistics described above. They contain no account ID.
• Encrypted backups. We keep encrypted copies of the database so the app can be restored if the live database is lost or damaged. Each copy is a snapshot of the whole database as it stood when the copy was made — accounts included — so a copy of your information can remain in any snapshot made before you deleted your account. Deleting your account changes the live database, and it cannot reach a snapshot that was already written. Those snapshots are locked with strong encryption, the key that opens them is stored separately from them, they are kept on the operator's own computer, and they are never uploaded to the project's code repository. A backup is made once a day and only the 14 most recent are kept. A copy of your information stays in the backups until 14 newer ones have been made, and is deleted with the backup it sits in. That is usually one to two weeks — more if backups are missed, less when extra ones are taken — because it is a count and not a deadline.

Age

You must be at least 16 years old to use OpenHoops. The app is not directed at anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. When you create an account you confirm that you are 16 or older, and we store that confirmation, and when you gave it, with your account. If you believe someone under 16 has an account, email us and we will remove it. If you are under 18, please use the app only with a parent's or guardian's permission — and read the safety section of our Terms of Service together.

Changes

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we will update this page and the effective date above. Continued use of the app after a change means the new policy applies.