Privacy Policy

Sideline Headset is an iOS app that lets a high school football coaching staff talk to each other during a game — a press-box coordinator and the coaches on the field, on the same line, over their own phones. It is developed and operated by Jeffrey Feely as an individual developer.

What happens to your voice

This is the part that matters most, so it is stated plainly.

Nothing you say is recorded, stored, or sent to a server. When you are on the line, your phone opens a direct connection to each of the other coaches' phones and sends audio straight to them. The audio is encrypted end to end using DTLS-SRTP, an internet standard, and it is decoded on the other coach's phone and played. Then it is gone.

• Nothing is written to your device's storage.
• Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
• There is no server in the middle of the audio, so there is no copy of it to keep.
• There is no feature anywhere in the app that plays a conversation back, because there is nothing to play back.

This is a fact about how the app is built rather than a promise about how it is operated. There is no recording capability in the app at all — not one that is switched off, not one reserved for later. If a school, a parent, or a court asked for a recording of what a staff said on the line, there would be nothing to produce.

One coach can keep a one-way ear on another channel of his own staff — he hears it and cannot talk on it — and everyone on that channel sees his name on their screen for as long as he is listening.

Information the app collects

1. Account information

Headset has no sign-up of its own. You sign in with the account you already use for Sideline SideKick Tracker, and the app reads from that account:

• Email address
• Display name
• A user ID assigned by Firebase Authentication
• Which coaching staffs you belong to, so the app can put you on the right team's line

You can sign in with an email and password, with Google, or with Sign in with Apple. Passwords are handled by Firebase Authentication and are never stored by the app or visible to the developer. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email address, Apple gives the app a relay address instead and the app is happy with that.

The app reads your team's name, its colors, and the list of coaches on its staff. It does not read the roster, the playbook, or any game data from the tracker, and it never writes anything back to them.

2. Who is on the line

While you are on the line, the app keeps one small record about you so the other coaches' phones know you are there and can connect to you. It contains:

• your display name and your user ID;
• the role you picked for yourself — head coach, coordinator, position coach;
• which channel you are on, and whether you are muted;
• whether you are currently on the line, and the time your phone last checked in, which is how the other coaches can tell a coach who stepped away from one whose phone died;
• your device model, as a bare string like "iPhone15,2" — no serial number and nothing that identifies your particular phone.

This record is visible only to the coaching staff of your own team, and to the developer in the limited circumstances described under Access by the developer below. It is the whole of what the app stores about you.

3. Connection setup messages

Two phones cannot start talking directly without first exchanging a short set of technical messages describing how to reach each other. Those messages go through the same Firebase database, addressed from one coach to one other coach, and each is deleted by the receiving phone as soon as it has been read.

The app also uses a public STUN server run by Google to discover its own public address. That is a single lookup that carries no account information, no name, and nothing about your team.

4. Crash and error reports

There is no crash-reporting service in this app. No crash reporter, no error-reporting SDK, nothing that watches for a failure and sends a report about it. When the app crashes, or when a connection drops and will not come back, nothing about it is sent to us.

If your iPhone is set to share analytics with Apple, iOS may send Apple its own crash log, which Apple may pass on to developers. That is a setting on your phone, between you and Apple, and you can turn it off in Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements. It is not something this app switches on or reads.

The only diagnostic information that ever leaves your phone because of this app is the technical log you choose to send — see sending a diagnostic log, which describes what is in it. Nothing goes automatically, and the button has to be tapped by a coach.

5. That is the whole list

The app does not collect:

• any recording or transcript of anything said on the line;
• location, in any form, including from the IP addresses described above;
• contacts, photos, health data, or files;
• the device's advertising identifier, or any other advertising identifier;
• usage analytics — which screens you open, which features you use, or how long you spend in the app;
• any information about student athletes. There is no roster in this app.

Permissions the app asks for

Microphone

Required, for the obvious reason: it is a headset. The app asks for it at the moment you first go on the line, not when you open the app, so that the question arrives when it makes sense. If you refuse, the app cannot carry your voice; you will still hear everyone else.

Local network

Asked for once, and the reason is worth knowing because it looks surprising. When the signal at a field is unusable, a staff's common fallback is for everyone to join one coach's phone hotspot. Every phone is then on the same small network, and the app connects them to each other directly across it — which is faster and more reliable than going out to the internet and back. iOS classifies that as local network access. The app looks for other coaches' phones and nothing else; it does not scan for, catalogue, or report any other device on the network.

Background audio

The app keeps working with the screen off and the phone in a jacket pocket, which is the only way a headset is any use for three hours. It does not run in the background when you are not on the line.

Sending a diagnostic log, if you choose to

The app keeps a technical log on your phone — a record of when it connected to another coach, when a connection dropped, and what the error was. It is written on your device and stays there.

Nothing sends this log but you. Because the failures a headset actually has are usually not crashes — a coach simply stops being audible — there is a Send diagnostics button under Settings. Tapping it hands the log to your phone's normal share sheet, and you choose who receives it, the same as sharing a photo. If you never tap it, the log never leaves your phone and is deleted along with the app.

Where the data is stored, and who else is involved

The account information and the on-the-line record described above are stored with Google Firebase — Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore — on Google Cloud infrastructure. Google acts as a hosting and processing provider; the data is not shared with Google for Google's own advertising or marketing. You can read how Google handles data in that role at policies.google.com/privacy and firebase.google.com/support/privacy.

Access is limited on the server by Cloud Firestore security rules, not only in the app: only a signed-in member of a team's coaching staff can read or write that team's line, and no coach can alter another coach's record.

The app includes these pieces of third-party software:

• Firebase (Google) — sign-in and the database described above.
• Google Sign-In (Google) — only if you choose "Continue with Google".
• WebRTC — the open-source library, originally from Google and now an internet standard, that carries and encrypts the voice. It sends audio directly between phones and reports to nobody.

There is no crash or error reporting service, so there is nobody else on that list — see section 4. There are no advertising networks, no attribution or measurement services, and nothing that tracks you across other apps or websites.

How long data is kept

• Voice is not kept at all, for the reasons above. There is no retention period because there is nothing retained.
• Your on-the-line record is overwritten each time you join and is left in place when you leave, marked as off the line, so that the staff list shows your whole staff rather than only whoever happens to be on at that moment. It is deleted when you are removed from the team, or when the team is deleted, or on request.
• Connection setup messages are deleted by the receiving phone as soon as they are read, which for a connection that succeeds is a matter of seconds. A message addressed to a coach who never comes on the line is not read by anyone and is currently left in place; it contains an IP address and two user IDs and nothing else, it is readable only by the coach it was addressed to, and automatic expiry for that case is a known improvement that has not yet been made.
• Crash and error reports have no retention period because the app sends none — see section 4. The technical log on your phone is capped at roughly its most recent megabyte, and is deleted when you sign out, when your account is deleted, and when the app is removed.
• Account information is kept until you delete your account. You can do that inside Headset (on the sign-in screen, the no-team screen, or under Settings) or in Sideline SideKick Tracker, whose policy covers the tracker's own data. Either way it is the same account, and deleting it removes you from every team and every line at once.

Deleting your data

Deleting the Headset app from your phone removes the diagnostic log and every trace of the app on the device. It does not remove your on-the-line record, because that lives with your team.

To remove that record, either have your team's owner remove you from the team in Sideline SideKick Tracker, or delete your account. In Headset, Delete account is on the sign-in screen, the no-team screen and under Settings; in the tracker it is under Team → Danger zone → Delete my account. Both remove you from every team you are on and from every line with it.

If you would rather not do it yourself, or you cannot sign in, email [email protected] from the address on the account and ask for deletion. You can email the same address to ask what information is stored about your account or to have it corrected.

Who this app is for

Headset is for the adult coaching staff of a team and nobody else. You cannot use it unless someone has already added you to a team's staff in Sideline SideKick Tracker; a parent or player who follows a team in that app's read-only Fan role is refused, by design, and told so.

There is no way to discover, search for, or contact anyone outside your own staff. There are no profiles, no directory, no friend requests and no public content. A coach can reach exactly the people his school already put on his staff.

The app is not directed at children under 13, we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and it holds no information about student athletes at all. If you believe an account was created by someone under 13, email [email protected] and it will be removed.

Access by the developer

Sideline SideKick Headset is run by one person. To support the app he can, in the situations below and no others, look at what a team has stored — including the line record described above.

• to answer a support request, where looking is the only way to answer it;
• to investigate a security or abuse problem;
• where the law requires it.

It is used for nothing else, never for advertising or profiling, and nobody other than the developer has it.

Live audio is not included and cannot be. Talk between coaches goes directly between phones and is never stored, so there is nothing there for anyone to look at, including the developer.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.

Contact

Jeffrey Feely
[email protected]