1. Information We Collect
We collect the information needed to operate PingPongPal:
- Account information, including your name and email address
- Profile information, including your photo and biography
- Precise device location, when you grant permission, for map features
- Tables, challenges, match results, ELO ratings, and game history
- Chat messages and safety reports, including the identifiers and message evidence described below
- Device and service information, such as push notification tokens, App Check integrity signals, crash diagnostics, notification-delivery records, and limited product-use events
2. How We Use Your Information
We use this information to:
- Provide, secure, troubleshoot, and improve PingPongPal
- Show nearby ping pong tables on the map
- Coordinate accepted challenges and provide match directions
- Calculate ratings and maintain game and leaderboard integrity
- Deliver challenge, message, game, and account notifications
- Enable chat, investigate reports, prevent abuse, and enforce our rules
- Understand feature reliability and aggregated product usage through canonical events that exclude user identifiers, message content, coordinates, and device identifiers
3. Location Data and Your Choices
With device permission, PingPongPal uses your precise location to center the map and show nearby tables. You can deny or revoke device-location permission in your operating-system settings.
Live match-location sharing is a separate choice. PingPongPal can track your own position locally for match navigation without publishing it. Your coordinates are published to the current opponent only after you select the in-match sharing action. A match share expires after twenty minutes and is removed when you opt out, the sharing session ends, or either player blocks the other.
4. Data Visibility and Sharing
We do not sell your personal information. Your public profile information, such as your display name, rank, photo, and biography, can be visible to other PingPongPal users. Chat messages are visible to chat participants, subject to the safety-report process below.
We use service providers, including Firebase on Google Cloud, to host and operate the service. We may use aggregated or de-identified information to understand service performance. We may disclose information when required by law or when reasonably necessary to protect users, the service, or the public.
5. Safety and Message Reports
When you report a chat message, the server verifies that the message exists and that you are a participant. The report stores your user identifier, the reported user's identifier, the chat and message identifiers, the report time, and up to 2,000 characters of the message text as immutable evidence. Authorized moderators may review this information for safety and enforcement. We also keep limited report-rate metadata to prevent duplicate and abusive submissions.
6. Data Storage and Security
Your data is stored using Firebase on Google Cloud, and profile photos are stored in Firebase Storage. We use safeguards including encryption in transit and at rest, authentication, App Check, access rules, and server-side validation. No method of storage or transmission can guarantee absolute security.
7. Your Rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to:
- Access and export your data through the app settings
- Correct profile information by editing your profile
- Delete your account and associated profile data
- Receive portable data in a standard format
- Object to or restrict non-essential processing by contacting us
8. Data Retention and Account Deletion
We generally retain account data while your account is active. Match-location shares expire after twenty minutes; disabling sharing makes those records inaccessible immediately while deletion completes.
When you delete your account, a deletion job removes your authentication account, private and public profiles, active location shares, owned tables, reports, ratings, notification records, and private storage objects. Shared chat content may remain for the other participant, and game history may remain for ranking and dispute integrity; direct participant fields in retained records are replaced with a deleted-player identifier. Generated data exports are marked for deletion after 24 hours. Notification-delivery logs and table-deletion receipts containing the table ID and requesting account ID expire after 30 days.
9. Children's Privacy
PingPongPal is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected such information, we will take steps to delete it.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. We will update the date above and provide additional notice in the app when a change is significant. Continued use after an update is subject to the updated policy.
11. Contact
For privacy-related questions or requests, contact privacy@pingpongpal.app.