Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

RacketRise ("we", "us", "our") is a UK-based website that helps people find padel and pickleball courts, read guides, and discover equipment. Our website is racketrise.co.uk.

If you have questions about this policy or your personal data, please contact us.

2. What Data We Collect

We collect minimal personal data:

• Contact form submissions: Your name, email address, and message when you use our contact form.
• Newsletter subscriptions: Your email address when you subscribe to our newsletter. This is stored securely and shared with our email service provider (MailerLite) to send you newsletters. You can unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email.
• Court submissions: Venue information you submit through our court suggestion feature.
• Analytics data: Anonymous usage data collected by Google Analytics (see Section 5).
• Technical data: Your IP address, browser type, and device information — collected automatically by our hosting provider for security and performance purposes.

We do not collect payment information, passwords, or sensitive personal data. We do not require you to create an account to use RacketRise.

3. How We Use Your Data

• To respond to your contact form messages.
• To send you newsletters and updates if you have subscribed.
• To review and verify court submissions.
• To understand how people use our website so we can improve it (via anonymous analytics).
• To maintain the security and performance of our website.

We process your data under the UK GDPR lawful basis of legitimate interest (to operate and improve our website) and consent (when you voluntarily submit information via our forms).

4. Affiliate Links

Some articles on RacketRise contain affiliate links to retailers such as Amazon UK. When you click these links and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These links are clearly disclosed at the top of each article.

Affiliate links use tracking parameters (such as Amazon's Associates tag) to attribute purchases. The retailer's own privacy policy governs any data they collect during your visit to their site.

5. Cookies & Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how visitors use our website. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect anonymous information including:

• Pages you visit and how long you spend on them
• How you arrived at our website (search engine, direct, referral)
• Your approximate location (country/city level, not precise)
• Your device type and browser

This data is anonymous and aggregated — we cannot identify individual users from it. Google's privacy policy applies to data they process: policies.google.com/privacy.

Other cookies: We do not use advertising cookies, social media tracking pixels, or third-party marketing cookies. The only cookies on RacketRise are those set by Google Analytics.

How to opt out: You can block cookies in your browser settings or install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent analytics tracking.

6. Data Sharing

We do not sell your personal data. We share data only with:

• Google Analytics — anonymous usage data (see Section 5).
• MailerLite — your email address if you subscribe to our newsletter, used to send you emails. MailerLite's privacy policy applies to data they process.
• Our hosting provider (Vercel) — technical data necessary to serve web pages.

7. Data Retention

Contact form submissions are retained for up to 12 months, after which they are deleted. Newsletter subscriber data is retained until you unsubscribe. Google Analytics data is retained for 14 months (Google's default setting).

8. Your Rights (UK GDPR)

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of any personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — ask us to correct inaccurate data.
• Erasure — ask us to delete your personal data.
• Restriction — ask us to limit how we use your data.
• Objection — object to our processing of your data.
• Portability — request your data in a portable format.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us. We will respond within 30 days.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if you believe your data has been mishandled: ico.org.uk.

9. Children

RacketRise is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has submitted personal data to us, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.