Privacy policy

Last updated: 12 August 2026

v1.1 — prepared without external counsel; review recommended

Who we are

PlayNow is software for grassroots children's sports clubs. Clubs use it to manage registrations, take payments, and keep staff pay records. Parents and guardians use it to register their children with a club and pay for membership, kit and fees.

The service is operated by PlayNow Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17390200. Our registered office is 1B Monson Road, London NW10 5UR. Our website is playnowclub.co.uk.

You can contact us about anything in this policy at hello@playnowclub.co.uk.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) as a fee payer under the Data Protection (Charges and Information) Regulations 2018. Our fee was paid and our registration filed in August 2026. The ICO has not yet issued the certificate that carries our registration number, so there is no number to print here yet — we will publish it on this page as soon as the certificate arrives, rather than show you a placeholder that looks like one.

The most important thing to understand: who is responsible for what

Two different organisations are responsible for data in PlayNow, and it matters which one you need for any given question or request.

Your club is the controller of member records. When you register a child with a club through PlayNow, the club decides what information to collect and why — the child's details, medical information, and emergency contacts. PlayNow processes that information on the club's documented instructions, as the club's processor. If you want to see, correct or remove your child's record, your club is the right first door to knock on — though you are welcome to contact us and we will help route your request.

PlayNow is the controller of account and billing data. We decide how sign-in works, how accounts are secured, and how we bill clubs for the software. For that data, come to us directly.

What we collect and why

Data we control

Account data — your email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), two-step sign-in settings, and your appearance preferences.

Why: to create and run your account.

Lawful basis: performance of a contract with you (our terms of use).

Security and audit logs — records of sign-ins, of who viewed sensitive information and when, and request identifiers attached to errors. These logs record identifiers, never the sensitive content itself.

Why: to keep accounts secure, detect misuse, and be able to show a club exactly who accessed a child's medical details.

Lawful basis: our legitimate interests, namely keeping the service secure and maintaining an accountable record of access to children's data. We have balanced this against your rights; these logs are minimal by design and we believe the balance clearly favours keeping them.

Billing records — invoices, subscription and commission records for the club as our customer.

Why: to bill clubs and meet our accounting obligations.

Lawful basis: performance of our contract with the club, and legal obligation for the records tax law requires us to keep.

Website analytics, only if you say yes — counts of page visits, which page was viewed and which page sent you there, and coarse device and country information. It sets no cookie, builds no profile of you, and follows you nowhere else on the internet. If you have not agreed to it, the code that measures it is not sent to your browser at all.

Why: to see which pages actually help a club decide, and which are wasting everybody's time.

Lawful basis: your consent, and only your consent — see Cookies, below, for how to give it or take it back.

Data we process for clubs

When a parent registers a child, the club collects (through our software): the child's name and date of birth, medical conditions and notes, emergency contact details, and the parent's contact details. Clubs also keep staff pay records, staff bank details, and a diary of DBS check dates and levels.

For all of this, the club is the controller and sets the purposes. In particular, a child's medical information is special category data, and it is collected under the club's consent framework: at registration the parent is shown the exact consent wording, and we store a versioned snapshot of precisely what was agreed and when. That consent is the club's to rely on and the club's to honour — PlayNow processes the data only on the club's instructions and does not use it for any purpose of its own.

Two things we deliberately do not hold: we never store DBS certificate numbers or check results (only the date and level the club attests), and we never see full card numbers (payments go directly to Stripe).

Where the information came from

Most of what we hold about you, you typed in yourself. Two important categories did not come from the person they describe, and the law says we should tell you where they came from rather than leave you to work it out:

• If you are a child registered with a club: your name, date of birth, any medical conditions or notes, and who to call in an emergency were given to us by your parent or guardian when they registered you, and by the club that entered or updated them afterwards.
• If you are a member of club staff or a volunteer: part of your record came from the club rather than from you — your role, the engagement type the club attests to (employed, self-employed or volunteer), the amounts the club records as due to you, and the date and level of any DBS check the club has entered. Your account itself — your email address, your password, your two-step sign-in settings — comes from you.

We do not buy personal data, and we do not collect it from data brokers, public registers, social media or any other outside source. If it is in PlayNow, either you or your club put it there.

Children's data

PlayNow exists for children's sports, so we have designed it with the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code in mind:

• The product is used by adults on behalf of children. Parents and guardians register children and manage their records; club staff and admins run the club. Children do not use PlayNow directly and do not hold accounts.
• No profiling, ever. We do not profile children, build behavioural pictures of them, or make automated decisions about them.
• No advertising. There is no advertising anywhere in PlayNow, and no data about anyone — child or adult — is used for marketing to third parties.
• Measurement is optional, and it is about pages rather than people. The only measurement anywhere on the site counts page visits, sets no cookie, and runs only for a visitor who has agreed to it. Children do not hold accounts and do not use PlayNow, so nothing here measures a child.
• Data minimisation. We collect the least we can: lists of members show an age band, not a full date of birth; medical details are hidden behind a click that is recorded; a bank statement reference, not a bank feed.
• High privacy by default. Sensitive information is masked unless someone with a reason to see it deliberately reveals it, and every reveal of a child's medical detail is written to an audit log the club can read.

How long we keep data

• Identifiable child records: kept for 24 months after a registration ends, then anonymised.
• Financial records: kept for 6 years, as UK tax and accounting law requires, and then deleted or irreversibly anonymised — the append-only ledger is anonymised rather than physically deleted.
• Account data: kept while the account exists, then removed or anonymised.
• Security and audit logs: the audit log is append-only and kept for as long as the record it protects, so a club can always show who accessed a child's data; it contains identifiers only, never the sensitive content itself.

Erasure means anonymisation, and here is why. Our financial ledger is append-only — payment records legally have to be kept for six years, and those records reference the registration they were paid against. So when a child's record is erased, we remove everything that identifies the child and the family, but the financial skeleton — that a registration existed and an amount was paid — must remain so the club's accounts still add up. The record is anonymised so that no one can reasonably be identified from what remains.

Who we share data with

We share data only where the service needs it to work:

• The club you registered with. This is the point of the product — the club sees the registrations, payments and records it controls.
• Stripe — our payment processor. Each club has its own Stripe account and payments are made to the club's account directly; Stripe processes payment data under its own privacy policy. Where a family chooses Klarna at checkout, Klarna is the lender and runs its own checks under its own terms — PlayNow does not provide, arrange or advise on credit and receives no commission from Klarna.
• Postmark — sends our transactional email (sign-in codes, receipts, confirmations).
• Railway and Vercel — host the service: Railway runs the application and the database, Vercel serves the website. Vercel also provides the optional analytics described under Cookies, served from our own domain rather than from anybody else's.
• Cloudflare — sits in front of our API. Every request to PlayNow's API passes through Cloudflare, which ends the secure connection, filters bots and absorbs attacks before the traffic reaches us. That means it processes connection data — including your IP address — and, in transit only, whatever the request itself contains. It keeps no member records. Cloudflare's network is worldwide, so a request may be routed through a location outside the UK; that is covered by the transfer safeguards described below.
• Sentry — receives error reports so we can fix faults. These reports contain identifiers only (a request id, an account id, the route that failed) — never names, message contents, or anything about a child.

We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. There are none to share with.

International transfers

The service is hosted in the UK and EU. Where a processor we use (such as Stripe, Postmark, Sentry, Cloudflare or our hosting providers) transfers data outside the UK, or routes it through a location outside the UK, that transfer is protected by the safeguards in that processor's data processing agreement — the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or an adequacy decision, as applicable to each provider.

How we protect data

• Two-step sign-in is mandatory on every account — parents, staff and admins alike. There is no way to opt out of it.
• Staff bank details are encrypted at rest with strong encryption, and revealed only to authorised club admins, with every reveal recorded.
• Access to a child's medical details is audit-logged, every time, with who, what and when — and the audit log itself cannot be edited or deleted, which is enforced at the database level.
• The financial ledger is append-only, also enforced at the database level: a payment record can never be silently altered.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the rights below. For member records (child details, medical information, emergency contacts), your club is the controller, so requests are ultimately the club's to answer — but you can always send a request to us at hello@playnowclub.co.uk and we will help, or pass it to the club with the tools to act on it.

Right of access

You can ask for a copy of the personal data held about you or your child. We provide clubs with a subject access export for exactly this.

Right to rectification

If something is wrong — a misspelt name, an out-of-date emergency contact — you can have it corrected. Most of it you can correct yourself in the app.

Right to erasure

You can ask for personal data to be deleted. As explained above, erasure works by anonymisation where financial records must legally be kept: everything identifying is removed, the required accounting skeleton stays.

Right to restrict processing

You can ask for processing of your data to be paused while a dispute about it is resolved.

Right to data portability

You can ask for the data you provided in a structured, machine-readable format.

Right to object

You can object to processing based on legitimate interests. If you object, we will stop unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override your rights — for these security and audit logs, protecting accounts and children's data will usually be that ground, but the burden of showing it is ours, not yours.

Right to withdraw consent

Where the club relies on consent (the registration consents, including for medical information), the parent can withdraw it at any time by contacting the club. Withdrawing does not undo processing that already happened lawfully.

Automated decision-making

We do not make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about anyone, and we do not profile anyone.

How to complain

If you are unhappy with how your data has been handled, please tell us first at hello@playnowclub.co.uk — we would genuinely rather fix it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time: ico.org.uk, or 0303 123 1113.

Cookies and what we store on your device

There is no advertising anywhere in PlayNow and no third-party tracker on any page. What there is, we publish in full: the complete table, with what each key is for and how long it lasts, is at playnowclub.co.uk/cookies. That page is the one place we maintain the list, so it and this policy cannot drift apart.

What we store because the service cannot work without it. Four keys, all our own, none of them shared with anyone:

• pn_token — keeps you signed in. It lives in your tab's session storage and is gone when you sign out or close the tab.
• pn_consent — a cookie remembering the answer you gave about analytics, so we stop asking. It lasts six months. It is exempt from needing consent itself, because it is the record of your answer.
• pn_theme — your colour and dark-mode choice inside the app, for the length of the tab.
• pn_signin_audience — remembers whether you last signed in as a parent or as club staff, so the right tab opens first. Being straight about this one: it is kept in local storage and stays until you clear your browser, and a strict reading of the rules would call it a convenience rather than a necessity. So: it is written only after you have chosen to sign in, it holds no personal data — just which of two tabs to open — and it is never read for anything else.

What we ask permission for. One thing: the optional analytics described further up this page. Our lawful basis for it is your consent, and only your consent — we do not rely on legitimate interests here, because the rules that govern storing or reading anything non-essential on your device (the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) require consent, and a banner that has quietly answered its own question is not worth putting on a page. Nothing is pre-ticked, saying no is exactly as easy as saying yes, and until you say yes the measuring code is not sent to your browser at all.

Changing your mind costs one click, the same click in either direction: the button at playnowclub.co.uk/cookies reopens the choice and applies your new answer straight away.

Stripe sets its own strictly necessary cookies on payment pages, to process the payment and to spot fraud. A payment cannot be taken without them, so those are not something we are able to offer to switch off.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and if a change is significant we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

Contact us

PlayNow Ltd

1B Monson Road, London NW10 5UR

hello@playnowclub.co.uk

Registered in England and Wales, company number 17390200.

Registered with the Information Commissioner's Office; our registration number will be published here when the ICO issues our certificate.