Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

CurlingZone Inc., 91 Beechbank Crescent, London, Ontario, Canada N6E 2P1 (“CurlingZone”) operates curlingzone.com, home.curlingzone.com and related services (the “Site”) and is responsible for personal information under its control. Our Privacy Officer can be reached at privacy@curlingzone.com. This policy is written to comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial privacy laws.

2. What we collect

3. Why we collect it and how we use it

1. To operate the Site: publish results, schedules, rankings, streams and team/player pages; run registrations, ticketing and team/event management tools; keep you logged in; remember preferences.
2. To communicate: service messages about your account, registrations or tickets; replies to your enquiries.
3. To keep the Site secure and reliable: detect abuse, fraud and outages; apply rate limits and human-verification checks; authorize score entry from recognized devices.
4. To detect, investigate and prevent unauthorized automated access and copying of our data (“scraping”), which is prohibited by our Terms of Use. For this purpose we analyse request logs (for example request frequency and regularity, whether a browser executed our JavaScript, and access to disallowed paths), we may serve delayed data to a suspected automated requester, and we may embed identifiers in the content served to a requester so that copies found elsewhere can be traced to the request that received them. We may retain and use these records, and the identifiers, as evidence in enforcing our rights, including in correspondence with the person responsible, their service providers, and in legal proceedings.
5. To improve the Site: aggregate, de-identified statistics about which pages, streams and features are used.
6. To display advertising through third-party networks (section 6) that funds the free Site.
7. To comply with law and respond to lawful requests.

Where PIPEDA requires consent, we rely on the consent you give when you register, submit information or use the Site, and on the reasonable expectations of users of a public sports-results website. Purpose (d) is a use a reasonable person would consider appropriate to protect the Site and its data; you consent to it by accessing the Site.

4. Public information about players and teams

CurlingZone is a public sports record. Names, teams, clubs, home city/province, competitive results, rankings, statistics and photographs of competitors are published on the Site because they relate to participation in public competitions and are submitted by event organizers, teams or the players themselves. If you are a player and want information about you corrected, or a photograph removed, contact us (section 10); we will act on reasonable requests while preserving the integrity of the competition record. Youth players: organizers who enter rosters including minors are responsible for the consents required; a parent or guardian may contact us at any time about a minor’s information.

5. When we share information

• Service providers who host the Site, deliver email, process payments for tickets, or provide analytics, under confidentiality obligations and only for our purposes. [Counsel/ops: list hosting and payment providers and their locations.]
• Event organizers, teams and clubs receive the registration, roster and ticket information that relates to their own event or team.
• Enforcement of our rights: we may disclose request logs, account information and the results of the measures described in section 3(d) to our legal advisers, to a court, tribunal or regulator, to the hosting, network or payment providers of a party we reasonably believe is misusing the Site, and to the party itself, where reasonably necessary to investigate or stop a breach of our Terms of Use or of the law, or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
• Legal requirements: where required by law, subpoena or court order, or to protect the safety of any person.
• Business transfers: if CurlingZone or the Site is sold or merged, information may be transferred to the successor, who will be bound by this policy.

We do not sell personal information and do not share it with third parties for their own marketing.

6. Cookies, advertising and embedded services

Our cookies: a session cookie (required for login and for remembering that you passed a human-verification check) and preference values. Blocking them will stop you logging in.

Advertising: the Site displays ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners may set cookies and use identifiers to show ads based on your visits to this and other sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising at google.com/settings/ads and learn more at Google’s partner-sites policy.

Embedded video and social content: pages that embed YouTube video, or link to social platforms, load content from those services, which may set their own cookies and collect your IP address and usage under their own privacy policies.

Our JavaScript beacon: score pages send a tiny request back to the Site when the page finishes loading in a browser. It carries no content beyond the page name; it exists so we can tell browsers from programs (section 3(d)).

Your choices: the cookie notice you see depends on your region (section 11). In opt-in regions no advertising cookie is set until you accept; in the United States you may opt out at any time. Change either at Cookie Settings. Your choice is stored in a cookie named cz_consent (one year) and, as a record of your consent, in our acceptance log with the date, version, IP address and browser.

7. Retention

• Account information: while your account exists and for up to [12] months after deletion, except as needed for legal, accounting or dispute purposes.
• Competition data (results, rankings, rosters, photos of competitors): retained indefinitely as part of the historical record.
• Request logs used for security and anti-scraping: routinely deleted after 30 days, except that logs relating to a suspected breach of the Terms of Use, and identifiers embedded in content, may be retained for as long as needed to investigate, pursue or defend a claim.
• Terms-of-Use acceptance records: for the life of the account plus the applicable limitation period.
• Ticketing and payment records: as required by tax and accounting law.

8. Security

We protect personal information with safeguards appropriate to its sensitivity: passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes; access to administrative tools is restricted to authorized staff; connections are encrypted (HTTPS); third-party integrations use revocable tokens rather than your passwords. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach creating a real risk of significant harm we will notify affected individuals and the Privacy Commissioner as the law requires.

9. Where information is stored

The Site is hosted in [country/region]. Some service providers (for example Google, for advertising and video) may process information in the United States or elsewhere, where it is subject to local law and lawful access by local authorities.

10. Your rights

You may ask to see the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, withdraw consent for uses that depend on consent (which may limit what the Site can do for you), or ask us to delete your account. Write to privacy@curlingzone.com; we will respond within 30 days and may need to verify your identity. Competition records and information we must keep for legal reasons (including records relating to a breach of the Terms of Use) may be retained after an account is deleted. If you are not satisfied with our response you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

11. Region-specific information

CurlingZone serves visitors in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The consent notice you see, and the defaults we apply, depend on your location (detected from your connection; you can correct it on the Cookie Settings page). Where a local law gives you additional rights, this section applies in addition to the rest of this policy.

11.1 European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (GDPR / UK GDPR)

• Controller: CurlingZone Inc., 91 Beechbank Crescent, London, Ontario, Canada N6E 2P1, Canada. [Counsel: CurlingZone has no EU/UK establishment; confirm whether an EU representative (GDPR art. 27) and/or UK representative must be appointed and name them here.]
• Lawful bases: performance of a contract (your account, registrations, tickets — art. 6(1)(b)); our legitimate interests in operating, securing and improving the Site, publishing the public competition record, and detecting, evidencing and pursuing unauthorized copying of our data (art. 6(1)(f)); your consent for advertising cookies and any other non-essential cookies (art. 6(1)(a), ePrivacy Directive art. 5(3) / UK PECR reg. 6); and compliance with legal obligations (art. 6(1)(c)).
• Cookies: only strictly necessary cookies are set before you choose. Rejecting non-essential cookies is as easy as accepting them, no box is pre-ticked, and you can withdraw consent at any time in Cookie Settings with the same ease. Where we use an IAB Transparency & Consent Framework consent manager provided by Google, your choices are stored by it in a TC String and shared with Google and the ad-technology vendors listed in the consent manager; we keep a record of the outcome (personalized advertising on/off) in our acceptance log.
• Your rights: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection (including to processing based on legitimate interests and to any direct marketing), and the right to withdraw consent without affecting prior processing. We respond within one month. You may lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority; in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office.
• International transfers: your information is processed in Canada (recognised by the European Commission and the UK as providing adequate protection for organisations subject to PIPEDA) and by Google (United States) for advertising and video, under Google’s EU–US Data Privacy Framework certification and standard contractual clauses / the UK International Data Transfer Addendum as applicable.
• Retention and automated decisions: as set out in sections 7 and 3; we make no decisions with legal or similarly significant effects by automated means.

11.2 United States (California CCPA/CPRA and other state privacy laws)

• Categories of personal information collected in the last 12 months: identifiers (name, username, email, IP address, account identifiers); internet/network activity (pages requested, User-Agent, referrer, request timing, beacon and honeypot signals); commercial information (event registrations, tickets); audio/visual (photos of competitors); inferences for advertising (by Google, through ad cookies); and, for competitors, professional information (competition results and rankings). Sources, purposes and recipients are described in sections 2–5.
• “Sale” / “sharing”: we do not sell personal information for money. Allowing Google AdSense advertising cookies may be a “sale” or “sharing” for cross-context behavioural advertising as those terms are defined by California and other state laws. You can opt out at any time via Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information (also linked in every page footer). We honour the Global Privacy Control browser signal as a valid opt-out. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes requiring a right to limit.
• Your rights (California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon and other states as applicable): to know/access, to delete, to correct, to opt out of sale/sharing and of targeted advertising, to data portability, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. Submit requests to privacy@curlingzone.com [Counsel: add a toll-free number if the business meets the CCPA threshold]; we will verify your identity and respond within 45 days. You may designate an authorized agent. Deletion is subject to the exceptions in section 10 (competition records, legal retention, evidence of a breach of the Terms of Use).
• Notice at collection: sections 2–3 and 7 constitute our notice at collection. [Counsel: confirm CCPA applicability thresholds; if applicable, add the required disclosure metrics for the prior year.]

11.3 Canada (PIPEDA and provincial laws, including Quebec Law 25)

• Our Privacy Officer (section 1) is the person in charge of the protection of personal information. Consent for advertising cookies is requested before they are used; withdrawing it is available in Cookie Settings. Quebec residents may request that their information be de-indexed or ceased to be disseminated in the circumstances Law 25 provides, and may complain to the Commission d’accès à l’information; all Canadians may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (section 10).
• [Counsel: a French version of this policy and of the consent notice should be published for Quebec (Law 25 / Charter of the French Language). Une version française de cette politique doit être publiée.]

11.4 Asia-Pacific

• Where the laws of your country apply (including Japan’s APPI, South Korea’s PIPA, Singapore’s PDPA, Australia’s Privacy Act, New Zealand’s Privacy Act, India’s DPDP Act, and China’s PIPL), we request consent for advertising cookies before use, tell you that your information is transferred to and processed in Canada and by Google in the United States, and you may exercise the access, correction, deletion, withdrawal and complaint rights those laws provide by contacting our Privacy Officer (section 12). [Counsel: confirm whether any local registration, representative or standard-contract requirement applies (e.g. Korea, China) given the volume of traffic from each country.]

12. Changes

We may update this policy; the effective date and version at the top will change, and material changes will be announced on the Site. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated policy.

13. Contact

Privacy Officer, CurlingZone Inc.
91 Beechbank Crescent, London, Ontario, Canada N6E 2P1
privacy@curlingzone.com