FAR Privacy Policy

FAR Privacy Policy

Last updated: 13 August 2026

FAR ("the app") is a place where football fans log refereeing and VAR decisions during matches, vote on them, and see how their judgement compares with the officials and with other fans. Protecting your data matters to us. This policy explains what we collect when you use FAR, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.

Who we are

FAR is operated by Marcus Burnett, trading as MRB Creative, based in the United Kingdom. For data-protection law, Marcus Burnett t/a MRB Creative is the controller of your personal data.

Contact for anything in this policy, including privacy requests and complaints: marcus@marcusburnett.com. A postal address is available on request.

Consent

Where we rely on your consent (for personalised advertising and for push notifications) you can withdraw it at any time (in your device settings for notifications and tracking, or through the ads consent options described under Advertising) without losing access to the app.

Accounts and how you sign in

You can use FAR in four ways:

• Without signing up. You can browse matches and vote on decisions straight away. We create an anonymous account for you automatically. It has no name or email attached, but it does hold your votes, your settings, and, if you allow notifications, your device's push token.
• With an email address and password. We store your email address so we can verify it and let you sign back in.
• With Google or Apple. We receive your email address and name from that provider. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address.

If you start out anonymous and later sign in, we link your existing anonymous account to your new one so your voting history carries over.

Creating decisions or posting comments requires a verified email address. Voting and browsing do not.

Information you give us

• First name and last name.
• Email address.
• Your favourite team, if you choose to set one.
• Decisions you log: the match, the team, the type of incident, the minute, and the outcome you record.
• Your votes on other users' decisions.
• Comments and replies you post, and the comments you like.
• Photographs you attach to a decision.
• Reports you make about other users' content (we record which user made each report so that each person can report a given item only once).

Information we collect automatically

• A device push token, if you allow notifications, so we can send you alerts about matches you follow.
• Your device's advertising identifier, used to serve ads (see Advertising).
• Crash reports and error diagnostics, which may include your user ID, device model, and operating system version.
• Standard log data (IP address, timestamps, and request details) recorded by our hosting provider when the app talks to our servers.
• Usage events: that a feature was used (for example, an account created, a decision logged, or a vote cast), collected through Google Firebase Analytics so we can see which parts of FAR are working. We look at these in aggregate; we do not use them to build a profile of you as an individual.

Information we do not collect

We do not collect your precise location, your contacts, your photos library (only the individual images you choose to attach), or any biometric data. We do not run analytics profiles of your browsing outside the app.

How we use your information

• To run the app: showing matches, decisions, votes, comments, and your statistics.
• To verify your email address and keep your account secure.
• To send you push notifications about matches and decisions, according to the notification preference you choose in the app (everything, your favourite team, only matches you select, or nothing). You can also turn notifications off entirely in your device settings.
• To grade votes once a decision's official outcome is recorded, which produces the aggregated statistics shown in the app.
• To enforce our rules: rate limits, duplicate detection, report handling, and the content screening described below.
• To show you advertising, which is how the app is funded.
• To diagnose crashes and fix problems.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your content or photographs to train artificial-intelligence models.

Content screening and moderation

Because anyone can post to FAR, we screen user content automatically before or shortly after it appears:

• Comments are checked for slurs and threats against a word list held on our own servers. The text is not sent to any third party. Comments that fail are refused.
• Photographs attached to decisions are sent to Google's Gemini API, which checks that the image relates to football and does not contain explicit content. Photos stay hidden from other users until they pass. Photos that fail are deleted.

These checks are automated. If content you posted is wrongly removed, or content you reported is wrongly kept, you can ask for a human review by emailing marcus@marcusburnett.com, and an administrator will look at it.

Advertising

FAR is free and funded by advertising. We show banner and interstitial ads through Google AdMob. AdMob may use your device's advertising identifier to show you relevant ads and measure their performance.

• In the UK and Europe, we show you a consent message before any personalised advertising. If you decline, you still see ads, but they are not personalised. You can change your choice from the app's settings.
• On iOS everywhere, we additionally ask your permission before any tracking, using Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt. You can change this at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.

Who we share your information with

We use the following processors. Each receives only what it needs:

• Google Firebase (Google LLC / Google Ireland Ltd): Authentication, database, file storage, push notifications, serverless functions. Receives: account details, your content, push token
• Google Firebase Analytics: Aggregate usage statistics: Device identifiers and the usage events described above
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.): Crash and error reporting: User ID, device and OS details, error diagnostics

We will disclose personal data where the law requires it (for example in response to a valid request from law enforcement) and we may share it as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business, in which case this policy would continue to apply to it.

Some of these providers are based outside the UK and EEA. Where data is transferred internationally, it is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or an adequacy decision, as applicable.

Match data is provided by football-data.org.

Legal basis for processing

Where UK or EU data-protection law applies, our legal bases are:

• Performance of a contract: running your account and providing the app under our Terms of Use.
• Legitimate interests: content screening, abuse prevention, security, service analytics in aggregate, and fixing crashes. We have balanced these against your interests and consider them proportionate to running a platform that accepts public contributions.
• Consent: personalised advertising and push notifications.
• Legal obligation: where we must retain or disclose data by law.

How long we keep your information

• Account data (name, email, favourite team, settings, push token) is kept while your account exists and deleted when your account is deleted.
• Decisions, votes, and comments are kept as part of the public record of a match. If you delete your account, they remain but are anonymised: your name and account link are removed and they can no longer be connected to you.
• Photographs you attached are deleted when your account is deleted. Photographs that fail screening are deleted immediately.
• Reports and moderation records are kept for as long as the content they concern exists, so we can handle appeals and repeated reports fairly.
• Crash reports are retained by Sentry for its standard retention period (currently 90 days) and then deleted.
• Residual copies in backups are overwritten in the ordinary cycle of our systems within a short period after deletion.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from within the app (Profile → Delete account), or by emailing marcus@marcusburnett.com from the address on your account. Deletion removes your profile data and photographs and anonymises your contributions, as described above.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• correct it if it is wrong;
• delete it;
• restrict or object to how we use it;
• transfer it to another service in a portable format;
• withdraw consent where consent is our basis for processing.

To exercise any of these rights, email marcus@marcusburnett.com. We will respond within one month. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). If you live in the EEA, you can also complain to your national data-protection authority.

If you live outside the United Kingdom

FAR is operated from the United Kingdom and your data is processed under UK data-protection law, alongside the EU GDPR where it applies to you.

• EEA residents: you have the rights listed above under the EU GDPR. Where your country sets a higher age of digital consent than 13 (up to 16 in some countries), that higher age applies to you.
• United States residents: we do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising beyond the AdMob processing described above, which you can limit through the consent and tracking controls in the app and your device. If a US state privacy law grants you rights over your data, email us and we will honour the request to the extent the law applies.

Children

FAR is not intended for children under 13 (or the higher age of digital consent where you live), and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact marcus@marcusburnett.com and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page when our practices change. If a change is significant, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date of the most recent revision always appears at the top.

Marcus Burnett, trading as MRB Creative

Email: marcus@marcusburnett.com

Postal address available on request.