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FinishLine

Delete your data

You can ask us to delete the information FinishLine holds about you, or about an athlete you are responsible for. This page explains how to ask, what gets deleted, and what we keep. It sits alongside the Privacy Policy, which is the document that governs.

To make a request, email support@finishlinetimer.com from the address you want us to act on, and tell us which of the situations below applies. We will respond within 45 days of receiving your request.

If you have a FinishLine account

You can delete your account yourself, from inside the app, without contacting us. Deleting your account permanently purges the data it owns, including:

  • Teams you created, and every meet and result published under them
  • Your rosters and athletes, and your private full-name copy of every meet you published
  • Your saved setup, your subscription record, and your beta sign-up if you have one
  • The photo-finish strips and bib-capture photos from your meets, which are removed immediately rather than left to expire

Teams you adopted from the public school and club directory are not deleted, because they are shared public records rather than yours. They are detached from your account instead, so the directory entry survives and nothing of yours remains attached to it.

You can also email us and we will do it for you. The in-app route and the route we run by hand use exactly the same purge, so neither leaves more behind than the other.

If you joined someone else’s meet without an account

You do not need an account to help time a meet. If you joined with a code and never signed up, there is no account to delete, and most of what you see on your device is simply stored on your device: uninstalling the app removes it.

Two things do reach our servers from your device, and you can ask us about both:

  • A random identifier for your device. The app generates one so the meet host’s device can recognise yours across a reconnect. It is not tied to your name, your email, your phone number, or any advertising identifier, and it is stamped on the result rows your device recorded so a correction can be traced to a source. It is cleared if you uninstall the app or clear its data.
  • Times, places, and photos you recorded. These are stored as part of the meet, which belongs to the account of the person who hosted it, not to you.

Because the meet belongs to the host, we cannot delete their results on your request. What we can do is remove or de-identify the record of your device’s involvement, and tell you who published the meet so you can ask them directly. Email us with the meet name and date and we will help.

If you are a parent or guardian

If you want an athlete’s information removed from or restricted on published results, you have three routes, and any of them is enough:

  • Use the “Report this page” link that appears on every public results page
  • Email us. We can remove the affected meet’s public results in full, or restrict the information shown
  • Contact the team owner who published the results. They can correct what they entered and change how much of an athlete’s name their team shows publicly

By default, athlete names on public results, in the follower view, and through the public results interface are shortened to initials, and that shortening happens before results are published rather than when they are displayed. A full name is not sent to or stored on those public surfaces unless a team owner has chosen a fuller display for their own team.

What is deleted automatically, without asking

  • Bib-capture photos are deleted 30 days after they are taken
  • Photo-finish images are deleted 30 days after they are taken. The order of finish determined from them stays with the meet results; the photographs themselves do not

Both windows are enforced by the storage itself, not by a cleanup job that could silently stop running.

What we keep after a deletion, and why

A deletion request is not a request to erase the fact that it happened. Two things outlive the data they refer to:

  • A record of the administrative action, kept so we can demonstrate that a deletion was actually carried out. It records what was done, when, to which record, and by whom. These entries cannot be anonymous, because a record whose whole purpose is to show that a particular person’s information was erased has to identify whose information it was. They are readable only by our administrators, are never published, and are deleted automatically after 24 months
  • Server logs kept for security monitoring and troubleshooting, for up to 24 months

We may also need to keep specific information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. Where that happens we keep only what is necessary for that purpose.

Verifying who you are

We may need to confirm your identity before acting on a request, so that one person cannot delete another person’s data. Emailing from the address on the account is usually enough. For a request about a meet you helped time without an account, the meet name and date is usually enough. We will only ask for what we need to find the information your request is about.

Questions about any of this, or about the Privacy Policy, go to support@finishlinetimer.com.