Privacy Policy

Rockland Connected ("we," "us") is a community directory and newsletter for Rockland County, NY. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have. The short version: we collect only what we need to run the site, we don't sell your information, and you can ask us to remove it at any time.

What we collect

• Newsletter signups — your email address and any interests or town preferences you choose during signup.
• Accounts — your email address and any profile details you add (display name, bio, avatar, town, links). During onboarding, we also ask for your full date of birth. It is stored separately from your public profile and used only to determine whether your account can post and participate. For an account under 13, we also keep a private record of whether and how parent or guardian consent was verified. We do not show these records publicly or include them in analytics.
• Listings and submissions — business, event, class, club, and similar listings you submit are public by design, including the contact details you include in them.
• Groups activity — the groups you join and posts you publish are public by design, along with the public-facing parts of your profile such as display name, avatar, profile link, and town. We do not show your account email in group rosters or conversations.
• Community sports— player and team profiles, accepted roster memberships, private invitation status, public challenge matchups, accepted game dates and times, participants, scores, period-by-period results, player statistics, self-reported performances, recaps, and RSVP status. Pending roster invitations are not shown as accepted memberships, and proposed challenge times remain private until accepted. Kids Sports does not publish a child's exact age, body measurements, or street address; public game cards use a general area instead.
• Sports media and community activity — uploaded or linked videos, thumbnails, titles, descriptions, captions, tags, comments, mentions, nominations, votes, and Play of the Week badges. Uploaded media may be processed to check its format, duration, and safety, remove embedded metadata, and prepare a playback version before it appears publicly.
• Sports email preferences — the address on your account and your choices for game updates or the combined weekly Play of the Week voting and winner email. A separate welcome email may be sent when you subscribe.
• Contact messages — the name, email, and message you send through our contact form.
• Bucket List progress — if you submit the checklist, we store which fixed items you marked complete. This progress is private to your account.
• Basic usage data— pages visited and approximate traffic sources, used in aggregate to understand what's useful. We record this in our own database alongside a one-way identifier derived from your IP address and browser, which changes daily. We do not store your raw IP address, and we strip everything after the "?" in a web address before saving it, so unsubscribe and sign-in links never land in analytics.

Location for nearby results

We request your location only after you choose the "Near me" button and allow access in your browser. For the business directory, your coordinates are rounded to about 100-meter precision and sent to our server only long enough to rank the matching businesses by distance. We do not store or log those coordinates, add them to the page URL, or include them in analytics. The result sent back to your browser contains distances only for visible listings with a public physical location; listings without a location and service-area businesses receive no distance. It does not include the directory's full location data.

How we use it

• To send the newsletter you signed up for.
• To publish and maintain the listings you submit.
• To operate public local groups, membership rosters, and conversations.
• To apply the minimum age for posting and participation.
• To operate player and team discovery, roster invitations, scheduling, the public calendar, game books, leaderboards, community sports history, highlights, comments, mentions, Play of the Week, email preferences, moderation, and age-based contact restrictions.
• To save and restore your private Bucket List progress.
• To respond when you contact us.
• To keep the site working and improve what we publish.

We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we don't share it with third parties for their own marketing.

Service providers

We rely on a small set of providers to operate the site: hosting (Vercel), our database and authentication (Supabase), email delivery for the newsletter and contact messages, embedded maps (Google Maps), and measurement and advertising (Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads). Each receives only what it needs to do its job and handles it under its own privacy terms.

Cookies and consent

Essential cookies and browser storage support authentication, security, requested preferences, and your privacy choice. Optional Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads storage starts disabled and is enabled only after you accept optional cookies.

You can reject optional cookies without losing access to the site and change your choice later from our Cookie Policy.

Your choices

• Every newsletter includes an unsubscribe link, and you can manage preferences from the newsletter settings page.
• You can edit or delete your profile and listings from your account.
• You can edit your own personal performances and sports media, remove your own uploaded videos, and unsubscribe from sports email. Deleting a profile does not erase historical game books, scores, statistics, nominations, votes, or archived attribution that the service needs to preserve community sports history; the public record may instead identify a former community player.
• You can leave a local group at any time and delete your own group posts. Group owners can edit or remove groups they created.
• You can change or clear your Bucket List selections at any time by updating the checklist.
• You can ask us to access, correct, or delete information we hold about you through our privacy request form.

Children

People under 13 may browse Rockland Connected. They remain browse-only until we verify consent from a parent or guardian. After that verification, they may use Kids Sports with other approved under-13 accounts, including teams, games, and direct messages. They cannot privately contact or compete with an account age 13 or older, and regular community posting remains unavailable. Kids can block another account or send a safety report at any time. A parent or guardian may contact us to access, correct, or request deletion of the child's account information.

How long we keep information

• Account and profile information is kept while your account is active and removed or de-identified after a valid deletion request, except where a limited record is needed for security, legal compliance, or public community history.
• Newsletter subscription information is kept until you unsubscribe. We may retain a minimal suppression record so we do not accidentally email you again.
• Public listings, posts, projects, and media remain until they are removed, expire, or are archived. Historical sports results and attribution may be preserved in de-identified form as described above.
• Contact, moderation, consent-verification, and safety records are kept only as long as reasonably needed to resolve the request, protect users, document consent, or meet legal obligations.
• First-party analytics identifiers rotate daily. Event-level analytics is periodically deleted or aggregated when it is no longer reasonably needed to understand and improve the service.
• Backups and service-provider logs may persist for a limited period after deletion before normal rotation removes them.

Changes

If we make meaningful changes to this policy, we'll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions or requests? Reach us through the contact page.