Telltale — Privacy & Terms

Privacy

Who we are

Telltale is a free watersport racing tracker and results platform. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who can see it, and your choices. We aim to collect as little as possible.

What we collect

• Account details — the name/username you give when you register, and an optional email (or the email from Google sign-in). We only email you Telltale news & the occasional promotion if you tick the opt-in (your club handles its own race notices) — it is off by default, and you can turn it off anytime in the Crew Room. We never sell it.
• Boat & race data — boat name/sail number, GPS tracks from your phone, and any instrument data (NMEA/GPX) you choose to upload.
• Live position — while you are actively tracking a race, your real-time location.
• Participation tags — races, boats and roles you (or coaches) tag yourselves to, and your club.

Why, and who can see it

• Public (visible to anyone): season results, champions, the participation board, club branding — the "shop window" that helps grow the sport.
• Club-only (signed-in members): the detailed race replays and raw GPS/instrument tracks.
• Live tracking is public by default so parents and spectators can watch — unless the organiser marks a race private, in which case only signed-in club members can view it.

How we protect it

Passwords are stored only as salted hashes (never in plain text). Access to detailed tracks requires signing in. We keep data for as long as it is useful for results and history; you can ask us to delete yours.

Your data, your rights

• Access & correct — see and fix your information.
• Delete — ask us to remove your account and data (and a parent can ask for a child's).
• Take it with you — export your tracks as GPX (an open format) any time, from the phone tracker or a replay. Your data is yours; there is no lock-in.

Crowdsourced environmental data

When you contribute on-the-water observations — tidal streams, currents, depths, wind, and local-knowledge pins — you grant Telltale a licence to aggregate that data into a shared, de-identified community dataset. That combined dataset (e.g. crowdsourced tidal-stream and depth maps) is owned and maintained by Telltale, and may be used to build tools that help sailors, divers, fishers and search-and-rescue — kept free for the community, and never tied back to you personally. This does not affect your own data: you still own your individual tracks and can export or delete them any time (below).

Third parties & data credits

We use a small number of open services to make Telltale work, with thanks: map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors and LINZ (CC BY 4.0); weather & historical wind from Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0); ocean currents/tides from Copernicus Marine Service; public AIS vessel positions via aisstream.io; and optional “Sign in with Google”. We display these under their respective open/attribution licences and do not resell or redistribute third-party data as a standalone dataset. We do not sell your personal information.

Cookies

We use a single sign-in cookie to keep you logged in. No third-party advertising trackers.

Terms of use

• Fair use — tag only yourself and boats/races you took part in; don't impersonate others or upload data that isn't yours to share.
• Accuracy — results and tracks are provided as-is with no warranty; official club records prevail.
• Your content — you keep ownership of your tracks and tags; you grant Telltale permission to display them per the visibility rules above.
• Free to use — Telltale is free to use today, and our aim is to keep the core community experience free and accessible for sailors and clubs. To keep the platform running and growing we may introduce optional paid features, premium tools, or club/partner-supported tiers in future. Whatever we do, we’ll be upfront about it — and we’ll always let you export your own data and never sell your personal information.
• Changes — these terms may change from time to time. We’ll post updates on this page and flag material ones where we can; continuing to use Telltale means you accept the current terms. Please check back.

Protecting the platform & other people’s data

You are always free to access Telltale and to export your own tracks and data (see “Take it with you”). What you may not do is take everyone else’s. Specifically, you must not:

• use bots, scrapers, crawlers, spiders or any automated means to bulk-download, harvest, index or copy data from Telltale, its pages or its APIs (other than exporting your own data through the tools we provide);
• reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell, license, sublicense, publish, redistribute or resupply all or part of Telltale’s content, results, replays, GPS/instrument tracks, or aggregated / community datasets — or another user’s data — to any other person or service, whether for payment or free of charge, except through Telltale’s own sharing features;
• access, probe or use any undocumented or private endpoint, or reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, adapt or tamper with any part of Telltale or its data feeds;
• remove, obscure or falsify any attribution, source or ownership notice, or misrepresent where the data came from.

These protections exist so the community dataset stays a shared community asset and so individuals’ tracks aren’t harvested by third parties. They do not limit your right to take your own data with you. Data and content on Telltale (including aggregated environmental datasets) remain the property of Telltale and/or its contributors, and are provided for your own personal, recreational use only. We may suspend or remove access for anyone who breaches these terms.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or removal requests: [contact email] — or ask your club.