Privacy

In the Stands exists so a youth leader knows which students are competing this week and can commit to being there. That needs a small amount of information about a small number of people. This page says exactly what, and who can see it.

What we store about students

For each student a ministry adds to its roster:

• Name, grade and school
• The teams they play on
• Which games they are competing in, and where and when those games are
• An optional note written by a leader — context like “started coming in March”

Students do not have accounts. They cannot sign in, they are never sent anything by this app, and they cannot be messaged through it. Nothing here is collected from the student — it is entered by the ministry’s leaders from schedules the school already publishes.

We do not store addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, photographs, grades, health information, or anything else about a student. There is nowhere in the app to put them.

What we store about leaders

• Name and email address
• Which ministry they belong to and what they can do in it
• Which games they have committed to attending
• Sign-in sessions, including the IP address and browser the session was created from
• If they turn on notifications, the browser’s push subscription for their device

There are no passwords. Signing in works by emailing a single-use link that expires after 15 minutes, so there is no password for us to store or for anyone to steal.

Who can see it

Roster information is visible only to leaders that ministry has approved and invited by email address. An address that has not been invited never receives a sign-in link, and the sign-in page deliberately gives the same response either way so it cannot be used to discover who is a leader.

Leaders see only their own ministry. An account holding the owner role — used to administer this installation — can see every account across every ministry.

Who else is involved

The app runs on its own server and its own database. Three outside services are involved:

• Resend delivers sign-in and invitation emails, and therefore handles the recipient’s email address.
• Google Fonts serves the two typefaces the site uses. Your browser fetches them from Google, which means Google can see your IP address when a page loads.
• Google Maps or Apple Maps open only when a leader taps a venue for directions. Nothing is sent to them until that tap.

There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts beyond the fonts above. We do not sell or share any of this with anyone.

Shared game links

A youth pastor can create a public link to a single game — for a team group chat, or for parents who are not leaders. Anyone holding that link can see that one game: the sport, the opponent, the time, the venue, and the first names of the students competing in it. It never shows grades, schools, notes, or anyone’s contact details, and it is marked so search engines do not index it.

The link stops working by itself three hours after the game starts, and the youth pastor can take it down at any moment before that. If the link invites replies, whoever replies is asked for a name and may optionally leave an email or phone number; those contact details are visible only to signed-in leaders of that ministry and never appear on the public page. A person can remove their own reply from the same browser they left it on.

How long it is kept

Roster and attendance records are kept for as long as the ministry uses the app, because a student’s record over a season is the point of it. Sign-in sessions expire after 30 days. Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes and work once.

Removing a student

A parent or guardian can ask for a student to be removed at any time, for any reason, without explanation. Contact the ministry’s youth pastor, or write tohello@ourstands.com. The student and their schedule are taken off the roster. We will confirm when it is done.

A leader can close their own account by asking their youth pastor or the address above.

Security

• Every page is served over HTTPS, with HSTS.
• A Content Security Policy restricts what a page is allowed to load or run.
• Session cookies are HTTP-only and same-site, and requests that change data check their origin.
• Pages containing roster information are marked never to be stored in a shared cache.

A note on this page

This describes what the software actually does, written against the code as it stands. It is not legal advice. If your ministry is subject to particular obligations — a denominational policy, a state law, an insurer’s requirements — have someone qualified read this alongside them before you rely on it.