Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your data

Groundhopper (groundhoppermap.com) is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS], company number [COMPANY / VAT NUMBER]. We are the data controller for the personal data described here.

For anything about your data, write to privacy@groundhoppermap.com.

2. What we collect, and why

Your account

When you register we store your username, your email address, a hashed password (we never store or see the password itself), the date you signed up, and whether you have confirmed your email. We need this to give you an account and to let you sign back into it.

What you choose to add

Optionally, you can add a home city and its coordinates, a favourite team, a travel scope and an avatar image address. These exist so the map can measure distances from home and draw your journey. You can leave them empty and the service still works.

The matches and trips you log

Everything you record — matches, teams, dates, stadiums, competitions, your stadium bucket list, planned trips and your own notes — is stored against your account. This is the service itself; without it there is nothing to show you.

Ticket photos

If you attach a photo of a ticket, the image is stored in our database, attached to that match. Tickets often carry your name, a seat number or a booking reference. We do not read them for any purpose other than showing them back to you and, if you ask for it, letting the AI feature fill in the match details. You never have to upload a ticket — every match can be added by hand.

Payment

Payments are handled entirely by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own pages and never reach our servers. From Stripe we store only two identifiers — your Stripe customer ID and subscription ID — so we know which plan your account is on.

Visit measurement

We count how the site is used with our own counter. For each event we store the event name (for example “signup started”), a random session identifier that lives only until you close the tab, your user ID if you are logged in, and a few small values such as which button was pressed.

We do not store your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string, or anything that follows you to other websites. The counter is entirely first-party: no data from it goes anywhere except our own database.

Protection against abuse

When someone registers, we briefly keep a one-way hash of the connecting IP address so that a script cannot create hundreds of accounts. The address itself is never written down, and the hash cannot be turned back into it.

3. Cookies and data stored on your device

If you are not logged in, we set no cookies at all. Nothing is written to your device by us on the landing page, the Academy or a public profile beyond the items listed below.

None of these are advertising or cross-site tracking technologies. Fonts and map libraries are served from our own server, so opening a page does not disclose your address to any third party.

4. Your public profile

5. Artificial intelligence features

Some features — finding a stadium from a club name, reading a ticket, the trip assistant — send data to Anthropic (the Claude API), acting as our processor. What is sent is only what the feature needs: the text you typed, or the ticket image you chose to upload.

We keep a record of these calls for cost control, and that record contains only counts — model name, number of tokens, estimated cost. The content of your requests is not stored in our logs.

AI output can be wrong. Treat suggested stadiums, distances and trip advice as a starting point, not as fact.

6. Who else processes data, and what they receive

Anthropic and Stripe are established outside the European Economic Area. Transfers to them rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

7. Why we are allowed to do this

• To perform our contract with you — your account, the matches you log, your subscription.
• Our legitimate interests — keeping the service secure, preventing automated abuse, and measuring how many people use the site so we know what to build. We chose the least intrusive method we could find for the last one.
• Legal obligation — keeping invoices for as long as tax law requires.

8. How long we keep things

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, hand it over in a portable form, restrict what we do with it, or object to processing based on legitimate interests.

Export is built in — you can download your matches from the app at any time.

Deletion is built in. Go to Settings → Delete my account, confirm with your password, and everything attached to your account — matches, trips, ticket photos, bucket list, measurement events — is removed straight away. If you have a paid plan, we cancel the subscription with Stripe first, so you are not charged again. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. If you would rather we did it for you, write to privacy@groundhoppermap.com from your registered address.

If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority. In Poland that is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO).

10. Security

The site is served only over HTTPS. Passwords are stored hashed, never in readable form. Poster exports use single-use signed tokens that expire in three minutes rather than exposing your session. Access to the server is by SSH key only.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we will tell you and the supervisory authority as the law requires.

11. Children

Groundhopper is not intended for anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.

12. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so on the site and, for changes that affect you materially, by email before they take effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.