Quick answer: Tennis Ladder is built for UK GDPR compliance — data hosted with Cloudflare, minimal collection, junior names masked, no marketing use, and full support for access/erasure requests via your club organiser or platform support.
How responsibility is split
- Your club is the data controller for its ladder — it decides who's in its leagues and can see its data.
- Tennis Ladder (the platform) processes that data on the club's behalf: hosting, standings, notifications and support.
Where your data lives
The app and database are hosted on Cloudflare, with the database in Cloudflare's Western Europe region, encrypted in transit and at rest. Nightly encrypted backups are kept for 14 days on our own server in London, where our help desk, newsletters and cookie-free analytics also run (self-hosted, not third-party services). Emails are sent via Mailgun (US-based, under UK-approved safeguards). The full list of providers, and exactly what each receives, is in the Privacy Policy. We use providers purely to run the app — they act on our instructions and don't use your data for their own purposes.
Who can see contact details: never the public. Only signed-in members of the same league (to arrange matches) and that league's organisers. Juniors appear to outsiders only as "Junior player", and their contact is always the parent/guardian's.
Data minimisation
We collect only what a ladder needs: name, email, optional phone/ratings, and match records. No marketing lists, no profiling, no selling of data — ever.
Special category data (health)
The optional watch-workout feature stores health data (duration, calories, heart rate for a match you attach it to), which UK GDPR treats as special category data. We process it only with your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)): a device permission you grant plus a per-match attach you choose. It is private to you by default, sharable per match by adults only (never juniors — enforced server-side), removable with one tap, deleted entirely with your account, and never used for ratings, rankings, marketing or profiling. Richer readings shown on the watch (sleep, HRV, blood oxygen) stay on your device and are never uploaded. Full detail in the Privacy Policy and Tennis Ladder on Apple Watch.
Juniors
Junior players get extra protection: their names are masked from public view, and we hold a parent/guardian's contact details rather than the child's. See Juniors and safeguarding for the full picture.
Your rights (and how to use them)
Under UK GDPR you can ask for:
- Access — a copy of the data we hold about you
- Rectification — fixing anything that's wrong
- Erasure — deleting your data when you leave
- Restriction / objection — limiting how it's used
- Portability — your data in a reusable format
Contact your club organiser or use the in-app support chat and we'll action it promptly. You can also complain to the ICO if you're unhappy with how data has been handled.
See also: Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy.