Privacy

You sign in with Google first. From your Google account we take your name, your email address and your profile picture — nothing else, and we never see your Google password. The picture becomes your photo in the app; you can replace or remove it from your profile at any time.

Then, when you ask to join, you tell us your phone number and optionally your building and apartment, which side you prefer to play, and a note to the committee.

Your phone number is required for one reason: so a member of the committee can reply to you personally — usually a WhatsApp message, sent by a person from their own phone. The app itself never sends WhatsApp messages and never gives your number to Meta or to anyone else. The apartment is optional and tells the committee you live in the community. Nothing else.

Once you are a member, the app also keeps what you do in it — your games, scores, rating and the partners you mark.

If you turn on notifications, your device gives the app an address to send them to. We store that address for each device you turn them on for, so we can reach that phone or laptop. It identifies the device, not you, it cannot be used to read anything on it, and it stops working the moment you turn notifications off.

Your contact details are for the committee only. Your email, phone number and apartment are visible on the committee’s admin screen and nowhere else in the app.

Other members see your name, your photo, your member number, your level and rating, and the games you have played. They never see your email, your phone number or where you live.

The app is invite-only: every screen that shows member information requires you to be signed in and approved. Even your own application is only visible to you once you are signed in — there is no public link to it. The only pages open to anyone at all are the front page, the sign-in screen and this one.

The one exception is the companies that carry our messages to you. To send you an email, our email provider is given your name and your email address. To send a notification to your phone, it goes through the push service your own device already uses — Apple’s for an iPhone, Google’s for an Android — and the contents are encrypted, so that service delivers it without being able to read it. Each of them handles what it is given in order to deliver the message and for nothing else. Nobody else outside the club sees any of it.

No advertising, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no selling or sharing your details with anyone. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to — the only cookie is the one that keeps you signed in.

The app messages you about your own games — an invitation you have been sent, a reminder the evening before you play, a score someone has entered that needs your eye, and anything to do with your membership. That is the whole list. It never sends you anything about somebody else’s games, and it never sends advertising.

They arrive two ways, both at once: as a notification on your phone if you have added The Point to your home screen and allowed them, and by email. Notifications are the ones you will actually notice; email is there so nothing important depends on having installed the app.

To stop the notifications, turn them off for The Point in your phone’s own settings — that takes effect immediately and we stop being able to send them. To stop the emails, use the link at the bottom of any of them — it opens a page with a button, and nothing changes until you press it. The same page turns them back on. A fuller set of preferences inside the app is coming. Messages about your membership itself — that a payment has failed, say — are the exception: if we stopped sending those you would lose your access without warning.

Nothing is sent between 10pm and 8am.

The app runs on Railway and stores its data with Supabase. Email is sent through Resend. Notifications go through Apple’s or Google’s push service, depending on your device. All of them are on servers outside the UAE. They each handle the data on our behalf, for that one job, and do not use it for anything else.

The Point is new and still being tested with a small group. Data may be reset while we are testing — including your games and rating. Please do not treat it as a permanent record yet.

Ask the committee and we will delete your membership and everything attached to it — your details, your photo and your match history. No form, no waiting period. A message is enough.

The same goes for anything you want corrected, or if you would rather we did not keep your phone number or apartment at all.