Your Privacy, Explained

The short version

SportNet is for getting noticed. Coaches and scouts use it to find athletes, and that only works if they can see you. Because you are under 18, your account starts private so you can decide when — and if — you are ready to be found.

What does "public" actually mean?

If you switch your account to public, anyone using SportNet can find your profile and look at it. That is the point of it — it is how a coach who has never heard of you ends up on your page.

Things on a public profile can include your name, your photo, videos of you playing, your club, your school, the area you live in, your age, and your sporting stats. Put together, that is enough for a stranger to work out who you are and where to find you. That is not us trying to scare you. It is just true, and it is the reason we are telling you plainly instead of hiding it in a long document.

One thing is different for you. If you are under 18, you cannot create a link to your profile to share outside SportNet. Adults can. You cannot, and there is no setting that turns it on.

What information we collect

Things you tell us

Your name, email, date of birth, sport, position, club, school, area, and anything else you type into your profile.

Things you upload

Photos, videos, and anything you post or write.

Your sporting information

Your stats, personal bests, achievements, and if you choose to add them, things like your height and weight.

Health and fitness information

Only if you choose to add it — things like injury history, resting heart rate, VO₂ max, body fat percentage and sleep. This counts as health information, so the law treats it more carefully than the rest. We ask you to tick a box agreeing to it before you fill it in, and you can delete it or take that agreement back at any time.

Your grades

Only if you choose to add them. This is for the university filter. You can leave it blank.

Your messages

Messages you send and receive on SportNet.

Do I have to give you all of it?

No. You need an email, a date of birth and a name to have an account. Almost everything else is your choice.

Who can see it

Anyone on SportNet

Nobody, while your account is private — only your connections. If you switch to public, anyone using SportNet can find and view your profile.

Coaches and scouts

Only if your profile is public, or if you have accepted them as a connection. If your account is private they cannot see it, and there is no way around that — being a verified coach does not let anyone past your settings.

People in your teams

Team stuff — fixtures, the calendar, team messages.

People you message

Only what you send them. Messages are not public.

The AI assistant

When you use the assistant in the app, what you type goes to Anthropic, the company that built it, so it can answer you. If something on your profile helps answer your question, that can go too — including your health information if it is relevant. The same AI also helps us sort reports when something is reported to us. It is deleted after 30 days.

Us

We only look at your messages if someone reports a problem, or if we have to for safety or legal reasons. We are not reading them otherwise.

Companies that help us run SportNet

Companies that store our data, send our emails and check coaches' ID. They can only use it to do that job for us.

The police and child protection services

If we think someone is at risk of harm, or something illegal has happened.

The AI assistant

There is an AI assistant in the app you can ask questions. It is made by a company called Anthropic, and it is worth understanding what happens when you use it.

When you send it a message, that message goes to Anthropic so their AI can write you an answer. If information from your profile would help answer your question, that gets sent too. If you have added health or fitness information and it is relevant to what you asked, it can be part of that.

Anthropic are not allowed to use anything you send to train their AI, and they are not allowed to use it for anything except answering your question. That is written into our contract with them. They keep what you send for up to 30 days and then delete it.

You do not have to use it. If you would rather not have your information sent anywhere, just do not use the assistant — everything else in the app works the same.

The same AI helps us with reports

There is one other time it gets used. When someone reports a message or a post, that report is sent to the same AI so it can help us work out which reports are the most urgent and need looking at first.

What gets sent is the thing that was reported, the conversation it was part of, the display name and username of the account being reported, and whether that account belongs to someone under 18.

The AI never decides anything. It sorts the queue so the serious reports reach us faster. A person on our team reads every report and makes the actual decision.

One thing to know: because a reported message is part of a conversation, other messages in that conversation get sent too — including ones from people who have not been reported. If you report someone, that means some of your own messages in that chat go as well.

Messages from people you do not know

If someone you are not connected to messages you, it goes into a separate request inbox. It does not land in your normal messages. You do not have to open it, and you do not have to reply.

When should I be worried about a message?

Some things are not normal, even from someone who says they are a coach. Tell us, and tell an adult you trust, if anyone:

• asks you to keep talking to them a secret;
• asks for photos, especially photos that are not about sport;
• wants to move the conversation to a different app;
• offers you a trial, a place, or sponsorship in exchange for something;
• asks where you will be, or when you are on your own;
• says anything that makes you uncomfortable, even if you cannot explain why.

You will not get in trouble for reporting someone, and your account will not be closed for it. If you are wrong about them, nothing bad happens to you. If you are right, you might have stopped something serious.

Report using the report button on their profile or message, or email main@thesportingnetwork.com. If someone is in danger right now, call 999.

What you can control

Who sees your profile

Private by default for under-18 accounts. You can switch to public in your privacy settings at any time, and switch back whenever you like.

Individual parts of your profile

You can set any single field to public or private on its own — your school, your area, your health information, anything. This works whether your whole account is public or private, and nobody can get past it.

What is on your profile

Edit or delete any field, any time.

Your health information

Delete it, or take back your agreement to us holding it, any time in your profile settings. If you take it back, we delete it.

Your photos and videos

Delete them whenever you want.

Your whole account

Delete it in Settings → Your Data → Delete account. We remove your information within 30 days.

Account suspensions and bans

If someone breaks our rules — for example by harassing other users, posting inappropriate content, or misusing the platform — we can suspend their account temporarily or ban it permanently. This applies to any type of account on SportNet.

If your account is suspended, you will be told why and for how long. If it is permanently banned, you will be informed. You can contact us at main@thesportingnetwork.com if you believe a decision was made in error.

Your rights

The law gives you rights over your information. These are yours — not your parents' — although a parent can help you use them.

See it

Ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you.

Fix it

Tell us to correct anything wrong.

Delete it

Ask us to delete it. We usually can. Sometimes we have to keep some things — see below.

Take it with you

Ask for your information in a format you can move somewhere else. We will send you a file with everything in it.

Say stop

Object to us using it in certain ways.

Complain

Complain to us, or to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

To use any of these, email main@thesportingnetwork.com. We reply within one month. It is free.

Is there anything you will not delete?

Yes, and we would rather tell you now than surprise you later. If there has been a safety report involving your account, we keep that record even if you delete your account. We have to, by law, and so that we can help if the police or child protection services ever need it. Everything else goes.

How long we keep things

Your profile and posts

Until you delete them, or until you delete your account.

Your health information

Until you delete it or take back your agreement, or until you delete your account.

After you delete your account

30 days, then it is gone permanently. The 30 days is so you can change your mind.

Safety records

Longer. Usually until you are 25, so that you can still come to us about something that happened when you were younger. These are kept separately, so they do not disappear if someone deletes their account.

If you are a parent or carer

Your child has their own rights over their information, and from 13 they can generally use them themselves. That said, we would always rather hear from a parent with a concern than not hear at all.

Things worth knowing. Under-18 profiles are private by default when they first sign up, and a private profile is visible only to accounts your child has accepted as connections — verified coaches and scouts cannot see past that. Your child can also set individual fields to private one by one. Under-18 accounts cannot generate a shareable profile link at all, even when set to public.

Two other things. There is an AI assistant in the app, built by a company called Anthropic, and using it sends your child's messages and relevant profile information to that company — including health information where it is relevant to the question. It is optional. The same AI is also used to sort reports into order of urgency when something is reported to us, which means a reported conversation is sent to it; a member of our team makes every actual decision. Anthropic process this in the United States, and we use the standard legal safeguards required for that (the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum). They delete what is sent within 30 days, and they are contractually barred from using any of it to train their AI.

Separately, identity verification, which uses a face scan, is available to under-18s who want a verified badge but is never required — if your child is considering it, it is worth talking through together first.

Coaches and scouts must verify their identity with a government ID before they can search for athletes, but athletes are not identity-checked. Ages are self-declared, which means we cannot guarantee that everyone is the age they say they are.

If something concerns you, email main@thesportingnetwork.com. Our Designated Safeguarding Lead is Charles Heffron and our Deputy is Daniel Lindley. A named person reads it.

Questions

If anything here does not make sense, ask us. Email main@thesportingnetwork.com and we will explain it properly. There is no such thing as a stupid question about your own information.

This is a summary. Our full Privacy Policy has the complete detail, including the legal bases we rely on and the companies we work with.

Version history

The Sporting Network Limited, trading as SportNet. Registered in England and Wales, company number 16989082. Registered office: 14 Hollywell Row, London, EC2A 4JB.