Privacy Policy

Version 2026-08-13

This describes what Branded collects, why, who else sees it, and what you can do about it. Much of what Branded holds is information you deliberately publish to be found by coaches and recruiters — this page is clear about which parts those are.

1. What we collect

Information you give us

Account: name, email address, password (held by our authentication provider, never by us in readable form), date of birth, and account type.
Profile: photo, biography, sport, position, graduation year, school and club team, location, height, weight, gender, social links, and the division levels you are open to playing at.
Athletic and academic records: statistics, measurables such as forty-yard dash and vertical jump, achievements, game film, highlight tape, GPA, SAT, NCAA Eligibility Center ID, and any resume or transcript you upload.
Coach and recruiter details: current school, title, years of experience, program level, conference, what you are recruiting for, and the contact details you choose to publish.
Content: posts, comments, messages, references you write or receive, and reports you submit.

Information we generate

Who you follow and who follows you, what you save and like, who has viewed your profile, and activity used to order your feed and suggest people.
Subscription state, plan tier, trial dates, and identity verification status.
Technical records needed to run and secure the service, including IP address and request logs.

2. Identity verification, ID documents, and selfies

Identity verification is optional. If you start it, our payment and identity provider, Stripe, collects a photo of your government ID and a selfie, and compares them. That comparison uses biometric information.

We ask for your explicit consent before verification begins, and you can decline — declining costs you nothing but the blue check.
Branded never receives or stores your ID image, your selfie, or any biometric identifier derived from them. They go directly to Stripe. We receive only the outcome: verified or not, and when.
Stripe's retention of those images is governed by Stripe's own policies. We do not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from biometric information, and we do not disclose it to anyone except as required by law.

3. What other people can see

Branded requires an account to view anything — profiles are not open to the public internet or to search engines. Within the signed-in community:

Visible to other users: your name, photo, role, sport, position, school, location, biography, graduation year, stats, measurables, achievements, media, and any references you have chosen to display.
Visible only to you: your date of birth, email address, billing details, verification status details, saved posts, and who has viewed your profile.
Gated: some fields, including published contact details and game film, are shown only to viewers on qualifying plans or on request.
Messages are visible to you and the person you are messaging. A message from someone you are not connected to arrives as a request you can decline.

4. Under-18 accounts

Branded is not for children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them, and if we learn we have, we delete the account and its data. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, tell us at nilbranded@gmail.com and we will act on it.

Accounts belonging to people aged 13 to 17 are treated as minors' accounts. At signup, we ask for a parent or legal guardian's email address and send them a one-time link to confirm. Until confirmed, and in every case beyond that for anyone who is not a mutual connection, we hide the account's GPA, height and weight, other measurements, and precise location — search and discovery only ever show the name, photo, sport, position, school, class year, and highlight film that recruiting needs. A date of birth is never displayed on a profile, and a minor's account email is never shown to anyone but the account holder.

A parent or guardian may contact us at nilbranded@gmail.com at any time to review, correct, or delete their child's information, or to request a new confirmation link.

5. Why we use it

To run your account, profile, and messaging.
To help the right people find each other — search, discovery, and suggestions.
To take payment and manage subscriptions.
To keep the platform safe: preventing impersonation, spam, abuse, and harm to minors.
To meet legal obligations and to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

6. Who else processes it

We use a small number of providers to run the service. They act on our instructions and may only use the data to provide their service to us.

Clerk — account creation, sign-in, and session management.
Stripe — subscription payments and optional identity verification.
Amazon Web Services (S3) — storage of uploaded photos, video, and documents.
MongoDB Atlas — the application database.
An AI provider — where you use an AI feature to draft a message, the relevant text is sent to that provider to generate a suggestion. Do not put anything in an AI feature you would not want processed by a third party.

7. Cookies and analytics

Branded uses cookies that are strictly necessary to run the service: keeping you signed in, keeping your session secure, and remembering interface preferences such as whether the filter panel is open. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not sell or share data with advertisers. Blocking essential cookies will stop you being able to sign in.

We use Google Analytics to understand product usage — which features get used, how often, and by which plan tier — so we can decide what to build next. We send it an anonymous account identifier and your plan/account type, never your name, email, or anything else that identifies you. Google Analytics sets its own cookies to do this.

8. How long we keep it

We keep your information while your account is open. When you delete your account we remove your profile, posts, messages, notifications, and references, and we remove your saved and liked records from other users' accounts. Backups are overwritten on their normal cycle. We keep the minimum needed for legal, tax, and fraud-prevention purposes — for example, records of payments.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access your information, correct it, delete it, obtain a portable copy, object to or restrict certain processing, and — in the United States — to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information in the sense those laws use, so there is nothing to opt out of.

You can delete your account and download a copy of your data from your settings. For anything else, write to nilbranded@gmail.com. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.

10. Security

Access is authenticated on every request, uploads are stored in access controlled buckets, and we store an irreversible digest of your authentication identifier rather than the raw value. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we will notify you as the law requires.

11. Changes and contact

We will post any update here and, for material changes, ask you to accept the new version before continuing to use your account. Questions or requests: nilbranded@gmail.com. See also our Terms of Service.