Privacy Policy
Last updated 14 October 2026
Watch Party helps football supporters find and organise watch parties at venues. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what control you have over it. It covers the Watch Party mobile apps and thewatchpartyapp.com.
The short version. We collect what we need to run watch parties: your account details, the events you RSVP to, and — only when you tap "check in" — your location at that moment, to confirm you are at the venue. We do not sell your data, we do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not run advertising.
Who we are
Watch Party is operated from Texas, United States. For any privacy question, or to exercise any right described below, contact privacy@thewatchpartyapp.com.
What we collect
| Category | What it is | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Email address, password (stored only as a salted hash — we never see it), display name, and optionally a bio, avatar image and links you add to your profile. | To create and secure your account and show you to other supporters. |
| Location | Your device's coordinates at the moment you tap "check in" at a venue. We use them to measure your distance from that venue and then store the check-in result. | To verify attendance. We do not track your location in the background, we never collect it while the app is closed, and we do not take it from the photos you upload — see Content below. |
| Content | Posts and images you publish, and likes you give. Photos usually arrive with hidden metadata attached by the camera, which can include the exact coordinates where the photo was taken. We remove that metadata on our servers before the image is stored, so it is never published and we never keep it. The only thing we keep from it is which way up the photo should be shown. | To show your posts to other supporters. |
| Activity | RSVPs, check-ins, watch parties you host or request, and which club or venue pages you administer. | To run the core features and show organisers expected turnout. |
| Social graph | Teams you follow, clubs and venues you follow or join, and friendships. | To personalise what you see. |
| Notifications | If you allow notifications on your phone: a push token, which is an identifier for your device issued by Apple's push service, and your notification settings. We also keep the notifications we create for you, such as someone following you or a party you are going to changing, so they show in your in-app list, and a short record of each push we send. | To alert you and to show your activity list. Notifications are optional: nothing else in the app depends on them. |
| Safety | Reports you submit about content, and accounts you block. | To keep the service usable and to meet app store requirements for user-generated content. |
| Technical | IP address and device and browser type, in short-lived server logs. | Security, abuse prevention, rate limiting and fixing bugs. |
Club and venue contact details — such as a booking email or phone number — are stored separately from the public page and are visible only to people who administer that club or venue. They are not exposed to anonymous visitors.
What is public
Your display name, profile photo, bio, profile links, posts, and the clubs, venues and teams you follow are visible to other users, and pages for clubs, venues and watch parties are publicly viewable on the web. Your email address, your precise check-in coordinates, your blocks and your reports are never public. When you check in at a watch party, the venue hosting it can see your check-in, including the location it was made from. Other users never see your location or which event you checked in at. They can see how many times you have checked in at a club's watch parties, through that club's leaderboard (below).
Club leaderboards. A supporters club's page can show a leaderboard of the fans with the most verified check-ins at that club's watch parties. For each of the top ten it shows your username and how many times you checked in, to other signed-in users only. Your username identifies your profile, so anyone who can see it can open your profile and see what else is visible there. The leaderboard does not show where you were or which event. Check-ins at a party are only counted from a day after it started, so the leaderboard never shows who is at a venue right now. You can leave every leaderboard at any time in Settings (“Show me on club leaderboards”); that setting is stored on your profile and other signed-in users can see whether you have turned it off. A club can also turn its own leaderboard off.
Images you upload are served from a long, unguessable web address. Nobody can browse or list them, but anyone given the address can open it, so treat sharing the address as sharing the image.
Legal bases (UK/EU users)
- Contract — running your account, RSVPs, check-ins and hosting requests.
- Consent — access to your device location, which you grant per-device and can withdraw at any time in your system settings. Withdrawing it means you cannot check in, but everything else keeps working. The same applies to push notifications: you choose whether to allow them, and you can turn them off at any time in your phone's settings or in Settings inside the app.
- Legitimate interests — security, preventing abuse, and keeping the service working.
- Legitimate interests — showing clubs' most loyal fans on the club's leaderboard (your username and a count of check-ins), which lets clubs recognise their supporters. You can object at any time by switching it off in Settings, and your username and count are then removed from the leaderboard.
- Legal obligation — where we must retain or disclose something by law.
Who we share it with
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small number of service providers who process data only on our instructions:
- Supabase — database, authentication and file storage.
- Vercel — hosting and delivery of the website.
- Apple Maps — maps in the iOS app. Apple receives map requests from your device and handles them under its own privacy policy.
- Expo and Apple's push notification service — delivering push notifications, only if you allow them. Expo receives your device's push token and the text of each notification and passes it to Apple, which delivers it to your phone.
- Google Maps Platform — maps and venue search on the website. Google receives map requests and is an independent controller for them; see Google's own privacy policy.
- Our email provider — sending account confirmation and password reset emails.
We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or to protect someone's safety.
How long we keep it
We keep your account data while your account exists. When you ask us to delete your account there is a 30-day grace period during which you can cancel — this protects against an accidental or malicious deletion. After that window your account and its data are permanently erased, including your posts, images, RSVPs and check-ins. Aggregate counts that do not identify you may remain.
A push token stops being used when you sign out of the app on that device. Records of the push notifications we have sent are deleted after 30 days. The notifications in your in-app list are kept for as long as your account exists.
Your rights
You can, from inside the app and without contacting us:
- Access and export a copy of your data.
- Correct your profile information.
- Delete your account, with the 30-day grace period described above.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to or restrict processing, or to complain to your data protection authority. Email privacy@thewatchpartyapp.com and we will respond within 30 days. We will not treat you differently for exercising any right.
Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to data is enforced at the database level with row-level security, so one club or venue cannot read another's private information. Passwords are hashed, never stored in readable form, and are checked against known breach databases at sign-up. No system is perfectly secure, but we treat this seriously and design for it.
Children
Watch Party is not intended for children under 13, and under 16 in the UK and EU. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.
International transfers
We operate from the United States and our providers may process data there. Where data is transferred out of the UK or EU we rely on appropriate safeguards, including Standard Contractual Clauses.
Changes
If we make a material change we will update the date at the top and notify you in the app before it takes effect.