Privacy Policy

OUR COMMITMENT TO PRIVACY

Fanstake, Inc. (“Fanstake”, “we”, “our”, or “us”), know that you (“User”, “you”, or “your”) care about how your personal information is used and shared, and we take your privacy seriously. Our primary goal is to provide you with exceptional Services (as defined herein below) and we understand that you may have questions or concerns regarding your personal information and how it will be used. To make this privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”) easy to find, we make it available at https://www.fanstake.com (“Website”) or through our mobile application (“App”, together with the Website, “Platform”).

Fanstake, Inc. provides a team specific sports-fan platform where people can access features including Takes, Polls, Rankings, Ratings and Predictions and related features (collectively, the "Services"). This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use and disclose it, how long we keep it, and the choices available to you.

This Privacy Policy applies to the Fanstake website, any Fanstake mobile application, and other online services that link to it. It does not apply to third-party websites, applications, or services that have their own privacy policies.

If you have questions or want to exercise a privacy right, contact us at privacy@fanstake.com.

For purposes of this Privacy Policy, our services include any access, use, interaction, or engagement you have with us via our Platform, online features, dashboards, or customer service channels (“Services”). By using our Services, you acknowledge that you have read and understand this Privacy Policy.

1. Our core privacy commitments

• We do not sell or use your direct identifiers—such as your name, email address, telephone number, government identification, authentication credentials, or payment credentials—for targeted advertising.
• We do not include direct identifiers in commercial fan-data products.
• We do not use Fan DNA values, observations, histories, or derived traits for advertising, and we do not include them in commercial datasets.
• We do not use a private individual's Take answers for advertising or include them in commercial datasets.
• We do not use private Chat or private Group message content for advertising or include it in commercial datasets.
• The current Takes, Fan DNA, Huddle, Group, and Chat experience does not collect Social Security numbers, financial-account or payment-card information, biometric identifiers, or precise geolocation.
• Government-issued identification reviewed for athlete verification is used only for that verification and is deleted immediately after verification is completed.

These commitments do not prevent us from using the information necessary to create and secure your account, provide features you request, enforce our rules, comply with law, or communicate with you. They also do not prevent the permitted uses of pseudonymous, deidentified, aggregate, or deliberately public information described below.

2. Important terms

For clarity, this Policy distinguishes among the following types of information:

• Direct identifiers identify you by themselves or provide direct access to you or your account. Examples include your name, email address, telephone number, government-identification number or image, account password, and bank or payment-card credentials. Encoded or hashed versions of direct identifiers may remain personal information and are not treated as anonymous merely because they have been encoded or hashed.
• Pseudonymous information is associated with a cookie, device, account, or stable fan identifier instead of your name or contact details. It may still be personal information under applicable law because it can relate to a particular user, device, or household.
• Deidentified information is processed so that it cannot reasonably be linked to you. When we disclose deidentified information, we take reasonable measures to prevent reidentification, publicly commit to maintain it in deidentified form, and require recipients not to reidentify it, as applicable.
• Aggregate information describes a group or category of users and is not reasonably linkable to a particular user or household. Aggregate information is different from a dataset containing separate pseudonymous or deidentified fan-level records.

In this Policy, "personal information" means information that identifies, relates to, describes, or can reasonably be linked to a person or household. Depending on applicable law, this can include direct identifiers and pseudonymous information.

3. Information we collect

A. Account, profile, and authentication information

When you create or use an account, we may collect:

• your email address, telephone number, username or handle, display name, password or authentication token, and account preferences;
• your profile photo or avatar, school or team affiliation, badges, credentials, and other profile details you choose to provide;
• your age or date-of-birth information used to confirm eligibility;
• information provided through an authentication provider, such as Google or Apple, consistent with your settings and the provider's authorization screen; and
• security and login information, such as session identifiers, login time, IP address, browser, device, and user-agent information.

We use direct identifiers in this category to create, authenticate, support, secure, and communicate about your account. We do not use or sell those direct identifiers for targeted advertising or include them in commercial fan-data products.

B. Takes and other responses

When you answer a Take, we collect the option or response you select and may associate it with your account, the relevant Take, the time of your response, and contextual information such as your school or team affiliation at the time of submission. We may also collect feedback, comments, reactions, and other information you choose to submit.

An individual user's nonpublic Take answer is not used for advertising and is not included in a commercial dataset. We may use individual answers to provide and improve the Fanstake experience, calculate results, build your Fan DNA, prevent manipulation, conduct internal analytics, and enforce our rules. We may publish or commercialize aggregate Take results that do not reveal an individual's answer. If you deliberately share a particular answer publicly, that shared content is public as described in Section 6.

C. Fan DNA

Fan DNA is a profile generated from eligible activity on Fanstake. We may collect or derive observations about the teams, topics, behaviors, preferences, and participation patterns reflected in that activity. Fan DNA may include scores, values, classifications, milestones, history, and explanations about how an observation was generated.

We use Fan DNA to provide the feature to you, personalize your in-product experience, explain scores or observations, maintain integrity and security, and conduct internal product analytics. We do not use Fan DNA values, observations, histories, or derived traits for advertising, and we do not include Fan DNA in commercial datasets.

Fan DNA is a core part of the authenticated Fanstake experience and cannot currently be disabled separately. A visibility control such as Blind mode changes what other users can see; it does not stop eligible activity from contributing to your private Fan DNA. If you do not want Fanstake to build Fan DNA from eligible activity, do not submit that activity or use the authenticated Services. You may also delete your account as described in Section 11.

D. Huddles, Groups, Chats, and other user submissions

We collect messages, replies, reactions, attachments, and related metadata that you submit through Huddles, private Groups, Chats, or similar features. More generally, content you choose to provide may include:

• text, photographs, images, video, audio, documents, links, and other attachments;
• school, athletic, educational, professional, credential, team, or affiliation information;
• information included in applications, contests, promotions, surveys, feedback, support requests, reports, or verification requests; and
• information you choose to place on a profile or otherwise make public.

We do not necessarily request or verify every piece of information a user voluntarily includes in free-form content. Please do not submit sensitive personal information unless it is specifically requested for a stated purpose.

Public Huddle content is public and may be viewed, copied, reshared, or indexed by search engines. Private Groups and private Chats are limited to their intended participants and are not intended for search-engine indexing. They are not necessarily end-to-end encrypted, and authorized Fanstake personnel and service providers may access them when needed to operate the feature, investigate reports, protect safety and integrity, or comply with law.

We do not use private Chat or private Group message content for advertising or include that content in commercial datasets.

E. Athlete verification

If you request athlete verification, we or a verification provider may ask you to present a government-issued identification document and related information solely to confirm your identity and eligibility for an athlete credential. The identification image and information taken from the document are deleted immediately after verification is completed. We do not use facial recognition or extract, create, or retain biometric identifiers or biometric templates from an athlete-verification document.

We may retain a minimal verification record, such as verification status, the date completed, the verification method or provider, and an audit or fraud-prevention reference. That record does not include the identification image or identification number.

F. Information collected automatically

When you use the Services, we and our providers may automatically collect:

• IP address and broad location inferred from it, such as city, region, or country;
• browser, operating system, device type, device or advertising identifiers, and language;
• pages and features viewed, links clicked, searches, referring page, dates and times, session duration, and other interactions;
• cookies, pixels, local storage, SDK data, and similar technologies; and
• diagnostic, performance, crash, fraud-prevention, and security information.

The current Services do not collect precise geolocation, such as GPS-level or similarly precise device location.

G. Device-integrity, network, fraud, and abuse-prevention information

When reasonably necessary to secure the Services, verify eligibility, prevent fraud, or detect manipulation and abuse, we and our security providers may process device-integrity and network signals. Depending on the technology in use, these signals may indicate device configuration, emulator or automation use, suspicious account relationships, proxy or VPN use, network reputation, unusual activity patterns, or attempts to interfere with location, identity, authentication, voting, or other integrity controls.

This provision does not mean that Fanstake currently collects every technically available device or carrier attribute. If a security feature begins collecting a materially different category of information—such as carrier subscriber data, SIM information, hardware addresses, or precise location—we will provide notice before or at collection and obtain consent where required.

H. Support, promotions, and other information you provide

We collect the information you send when you contact support, respond to a survey, apply for a credential, enter a contest or promotion, report content or another user, or otherwise communicate with us. We may collect eligibility, entry, contact, and delivery information when reasonably necessary to administer a promotion or award a prize, subject to any feature-specific notice. Any financial-payment or legally required tax-identity workflow would be separately activated and governed by Section 14. Please do not send sensitive information that we have not requested.

I. Information from other sources

We may receive information from authentication providers, verification providers, analytics and security vendors, advertising partners, schools, teams, leagues, organizations, publicly available sources, and other users—for example, when an organization confirms a credential or another user reports content. We use that information in accordance with this Policy and applicable law.

J. New features and supplemental notices

The Services will evolve. A new or optional feature may require information not specifically described in this Policy. Before or at the time Fanstake begins collecting a materially different category of personal information, we will provide an updated Privacy Policy, an in-product or just-in-time notice, or another supplemental notice describing the information and its purpose. We will request an affirmative choice when required by law.

A supplemental notice becomes part of this Privacy Policy for the feature it covers. Listing a possible future feature does not mean Fanstake currently collects every category of information that the feature could use.

4. Information the current core experience does not collect

The current Takes, Fan DNA, Huddle, Group, and Chat experience does not request or collect:

• Social Security numbers or similar government tax identifiers;
• bank-account, debit-card, credit-card, or other payment credentials;
• biometric identifiers or biometric templates;
• precise geolocation; or
• government-issued identification, except for the limited athlete-verification process described above.

Do not provide this information in a public post, private message, profile field, support request, or other free-text field. If you voluntarily place sensitive information into content, we will process it as part of that content and may remove it under our rules.

The conditional staking and payment provisions in Section 14 describe information that may be collected only if those services become available and you choose to use them. Those services are not currently active.

5. How we use information

We may use information to:

• create, authenticate, administer, and secure accounts;
• provide Takes, Fan DNA, Huddles, Groups, Chats, athlete verification, and other requested features;
• calculate and display Take results and other platform statistics;
• personalize the in-product experience, subject to the advertising and commercial-use limits in this Policy;
• communicate about your account, security, support requests, promotions, policy changes, and features;
• send marketing communications where permitted and honor your communication preferences;
• measure, analyze, troubleshoot, and improve the Services;
• develop new products, features, and automated or artificial-intelligence systems;
• generate Takes and summaries, including summaries based on verified data;
• detect spam, fraud, abuse, coordinated manipulation, and violations of our terms;
• moderate content, investigate reports, resolve disputes, and protect users, Fanstake, and others;
• comply with law, legal process, and regulatory requirements; and
• establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

Where required, we rely on consent or another legally recognized basis for a particular use.

6. Public and private information

Your handle, avatar, primary school or team, and credentials or badges may be visible to other users according to the feature and your available settings. Public profile pages may be visible to people without a Fanstake account. We do not enable external search indexing of detailed Fan DNA profiles. If Fanstake later offers an option to make a detailed profile searchable on the open web, we will identify that choice separately.

Public Huddles are designed for public discussion. Their messages may appear in search-engine results and may be copied or reshared by others. Deleting or expiring a message from Fanstake does not guarantee that copies made by other users, search-engine caches, archives, or independent third parties will disappear at the same time.

Private Group content, Group membership, detailed Fan DNA, and private Chats are not intended for public search indexing. Please remember that participants may still copy or share content they can access. Fanstake cannot control what another participant does with a copy.

Your submission and our handling of user content are also governed by the Fanstake Terms of Service. The Terms contain the public-content license that authorizes Fanstake to host, display, analyze, distribute, and make the disclosed commercial uses of public content, while preserving the private-content limitations in this Policy.

7. Advertising, targeted advertising, and commercial data

We may work with advertising networks and other advertising partners to select, measure, and deliver advertising on Fanstake or on other services. They may use cookies, pixels, SDKs, advertising identifiers, pseudonymous account or fan identifiers, and information about browsing, device, affiliation, interests, or interactions. Depending on applicable law, these activities may be called targeted advertising, cross-context behavioral advertising, "sharing," or a "sale" of personal information even when a user's name or email address is not disclosed.

We may also create, disclose, license, or sell commercial datasets or insights containing:

• aggregate statistics about audiences, Takes, engagement, or fan communities;
• deidentified fan-level records that are not reasonably linkable to an individual; and
• pseudonymous fan-level records, such as records associated with a stable fan ID rather than a name or contact detail, where permitted by law and subject to the privacy choices in Section 11.

Eligible advertising or commercial signals may include page views, public activity, general engagement, device information, and stated school or team affiliation. The exclusion for Fan DNA does not by itself exclude an independently generated signal from one of these permitted sources, but every exclusion below still applies. In particular, we do not derive an advertising or commercial signal from an individual's private Take answer, Fan DNA, or private message content.

Commercial use is always subject to these exclusions:

• no direct identifiers, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, government identification, authentication credentials, or payment credentials, including encoded or hashed versions used to match a person to an advertising profile;
• no Fan DNA values, observations, histories, or derived traits;
• no private individual Take answers;
• no private Chat or private Group message content; and
• no moderation or report records.

Aggregate Take results may be included because they do not reveal any individual's answer. Content that a user deliberately makes public—including public Huddle content or a Take answer the user publicly shares—may be analyzed, disclosed, or included in commercial products while it is public, subject to applicable law, the Fanstake Terms of Service, and any express product controls. The 90-day Huddle expiration rule governs Fanstake's display and active storage of ordinary Huddle content; it cannot recall copies previously made by users, search engines, or lawful recipients.

We maintain safeguards appropriate to the type of data. For deidentified information, these include reasonable measures designed to prevent the information from being associated with an individual and contractual restrictions against reidentification. Aggregate information is reported at a group level rather than as separate fan-level rows. Agreements with advertising and commercial-data recipients will define permitted purposes, require appropriate security and applicable privacy-right handling, and prohibit reidentifying deidentified information.

Your rights to opt out of targeted advertising and the sale or sharing of personal information are described in Section 11.

If applicable law restricts targeted advertising, sale, or sharing based on a user's age, we apply the legally required restriction or obtain the legally required authorization.

8. Analytics

We may use analytics providers and our own systems to understand how the Services perform and how people use them. General product-analytics events may be associated with a pseudonymous user, device, or session identifier.

We configure general analytics to avoid intentionally sending direct contact details, private individual Take-answer content, private Chat or private Group message bodies, detailed Fan DNA values or observations, and moderation or enforcement notes. This does not prevent limited, access-controlled processing of those categories in systems necessary to provide their specific feature, investigate abuse, or fulfill a user request.

9. Artificial intelligence and automated systems

Fanstake may use artificial intelligence and other automated systems to generate or help generate Takes, prepare verified-data summaries, recommend or organize content, detect abuse, assist moderation, and develop or evaluate features. These systems may produce inaccurate or incomplete results, and we may use human review where appropriate.

We may send information to AI providers acting on our behalf when necessary to provide an AI-enabled feature or perform moderation. We require service providers to handle that information under agreements and instructions appropriate to their role.

As of the effective date of this Policy, Fanstake does not make private messages, individual Take answers, or Fan DNA available to third parties to train their general-purpose models. This describes our current practice and is not an irrevocable promise about future product development. If we materially change how these categories are used for model training, we will update this Policy and provide additional notice, choices, or obtain consent when required by applicable law.

10. How we disclose information

We may disclose information to:

• Service providers and contractors that provide cloud hosting, authentication, search, communications, analytics, security, fraud prevention, moderation, customer support, identity verification, AI processing, and other services on our behalf;
• Advertising and measurement partners as described in Section 7;
• Commercial-data customers and business partners for the permitted datasets and insights described in Section 7;
• Other users and the public when you use a public feature or direct us to share information;
• Group or Chat participants when you communicate in a private Group or Chat;
• Schools, teams, leagues, and credentialing organizations when you request or authorize verification or when reasonably necessary to protect credential integrity;
• Affiliates under common control with Fanstake, subject to this Policy;
• Authorities and other parties for legal, safety, or integrity reasons when we reasonably believe disclosure is necessary to comply with law or legal process; investigate fraud, abuse, or security incidents; enforce our agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Fanstake, our users, or others; and
• Parties to a corporate transaction in connection with an actual or proposed merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, bankruptcy, receivership, sale of assets, or transfer of the Services, subject to customary confidentiality protections where appropriate.

Our providers may process information only as permitted by their agreements with us and applicable law. The specific providers we use may change as the Services evolve.

11. Your rights and choices

Fanstake offers the following core rights to all account holders, subject to identity verification and legal exceptions:

• Access: request the personal information associated with your account and information about how we use it.
• Download: request a portable copy of your profile and other eligible account information.
• Correction: correct inaccurate profile or account information.
• Deletion: delete your profile and account and request deletion of eligible personal information.

Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to:

• opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information;
• opt out of targeted advertising or certain profiling;
• limit certain uses of sensitive personal information;
• withdraw consent where processing is based on consent;
• appeal our response to a privacy request; or
• use an authorized agent to make a request.

How to submit a request

You may submit an access, download, correction, deletion, or appeal request through:

• the controls available in your account;
• Email to privacy@fanstake.com.

We will verify requests using information already associated with your account when reasonably possible and may request additional information only when needed to verify the request. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right.

Advertising, sale, and sharing opt-outs

Where required by law, we process recognized browser-based opt-out preference signals, such as Global Privacy Control, as a request to opt out of sale, sharing, or targeted advertising for the browser or device sending the signal and, when we can associate it, the relevant account. We will display or otherwise make available the status of the choice where required. A browser's general "Do Not Track" signal may not have a standardized meaning, but legally recognized opt-out preference signals will be handled as required.

Fanstake will not begin an activity requiring an opt-out mechanism until the applicable mechanism is operational.

You may opt out of promotional email or text messages by using the unsubscribe instructions in the message or contacting us. We may still send non-promotional account, safety, legal, and service communications.

Fan DNA is a core feature and does not currently have a separate stop-processing control. Blind mode affects visibility only. As explained in Section 3(C), a user who does not want eligible activity to contribute to Fan DNA should not submit that activity or use the authenticated Services and may delete the account.

Deletion is subject to legal and operational exceptions. For example, we may retain security logs, transaction or compliance records, and the moderation and report records described in Section 12. Information that has been aggregated or properly deidentified so that it is no longer linked to you may also be retained. Public content copied by others or indexed outside Fanstake may remain outside our control.

12. Retention

We retain information only for the period described below or as otherwise reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, subject to legal requirements and the exceptions in this Policy.

Copies may remain for a limited period in encrypted backups and disaster-recovery systems until overwritten through the normal backup cycle. If a backup is restored, we will take reasonable steps to reapply applicable deletion requests. Retention outside Fanstake by other users, search engines, lawful data recipients, or independent third parties is not controlled by this schedule.

13. Cookies and similar technologies

We and our partners may use session and persistent cookies, pixels, SDKs, local storage, and similar technologies to:

• keep you signed in and remember settings;
• operate and secure the Services;
• measure performance and understand usage;
• personalize features and content; and
• deliver and measure advertising, including targeted advertising where permitted.

You can adjust browser or device settings and use any cookie-management controls we provide. Blocking necessary technologies may prevent parts of the Services from working. Advertising choices and opt-out preference signals are described in Section 11.

14. Staking and payment services

Fanstake's staking and payment services are not currently active. The collection and processing described in this section applies only if Fanstake offers those services in the future and you affirmatively choose to use them. We will provide any additional notice or consent required when those services are activated.

To provide staking, payments, withdrawals, or related financial services, Fanstake and its financial, payment, identity-verification, or compliance providers may collect information such as your legal name, date of birth, physical address, email address, telephone number, Social Security number or other tax or government identifier, a photograph of a passport, driver's license, or national identity document, bank-account or payment-card information, transaction history, source and destination of funds, and other information required to verify identity, prevent fraud, process transactions, or satisfy legal obligations.

This information would be used to process financial and payment activity; verify identity and eligibility; prevent fraud and misuse; comply with tax, sanctions, anti-money-laundering, know-your-customer, and other legal requirements; resolve disputes; and provide support. It may be disclosed to payment processors, financial institutions, identity-verification providers, compliance vendors, government authorities, and other parties as required to provide the selected service or comply with law.

Financial information, government identification, Social Security numbers, and payment credentials collected under this section will not be used for targeted advertising or included in commercial fan-data products.

15. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal information. No security program, network, storage system, or transmission is completely secure. You are responsible for protecting your credentials and should notify us if you believe your account has been compromised.

By using the Services or providing contact information, you agree that we may communicate with you electronically about security, privacy, administrative, and service matters. If required to provide a security-incident notice, we may do so electronically, through the Services, by mail, or through another legally permitted method.

16. Users must be at least 16

The Services are intended only for people who are at least 16 years old. We do not knowingly permit an individual under 16 to create an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close the account and delete eligible information, subject to safety, moderation, security, and legal-retention requirements. If you believe someone under 16 has provided us with personal information, contact privacy@fanstake.com.

Some public Fanstake pages may be viewable without an account. This does not make the Services directed to children under 16. Where applicable law imposes additional advertising, sale, sharing, profiling, design, or consent restrictions for users under 18 or another age, we apply those restrictions.

17. International use

Fanstake is based in the United States. If you access the Services from another country, your information may be processed in the United States and other countries where we or our providers operate. Where required, we use appropriate safeguards for cross-border transfers.

18. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as the Services, our business, or applicable law changes. We will post the updated Policy and revise its effective date. We may also provide notice through the Services, by email, or by another appropriate method. If applicable law requires a different form of notice, an opt-in choice, or consent for a material change, we will provide it.

To the extent permitted by law, your continued use of the Services after an updated Privacy Policy takes effect means that you acknowledge and consent to the revised Policy and the practices it describes. If you do not agree with an updated Policy, you should stop using the Services and may delete your account.

19. Contact us

For questions or privacy requests, contact:

Fanstake, Inc.
Email: privacy@fanstake.com