V1, 23 September 2015. We welcome comments on this policy and will keep it under review.
The http://raceresults.reportlab.com/ service, which also powers the Surrey League website, is operated by ReportLab. It is part of a project we are operating called "OpenTrack: Open Standards, Open Data and Open Source in Athletics". Our goal is to make it much easier than before to organise running and athletics events.
Cookies
Our web framework uses cookies to allow registered users to log in. We do not analyse data from these cookies, nor will we share this with anyone. We may also choose to use Google Analytics cookies in future (although we don't do so now) in order to learn who uses the site and how.
Web site users
People may sign up for an account on our web site. In this case we store some basic data including their first name, last name, and an optional field to describe their role in the sport. Passwords are strongly encrypted according to best practices. People may register in order to
- set up and manage races (“Meeting Organisers”)
- enter and declare teams or fill in club data (“Team Managers”)
- enter events and pay entry fees (“Athletes”)
Open Data
We have been very fortunate to receive European Community funding for the Opentrack initiative this coming season. A key goal of this project, and a condition of our funding, is that we aim to help the sport through Open Data.
It has been generally understood that the results of sporting events are in the public domain, as they have been published and circulated since newspapers emerged. However, the rights to use that data are generally unclear.
When data is submitted here, some portions will be treated as Open Data under Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This means that anyone is free to re-use this data, redistribute it on other sites, include it in rankings sites, conduct scientific studies and so on.
For individual athletes, we will treat the following items as Open Data: We will make them available on the site, and also provide means for others to obtain them:
- first name (or nickname)
- last name
- age group, or age in years
- club membership or memberships - which clubs, and whether first or second claim
- whether the athlete has been verified with the England Athletics competition checker services
- if we can find them, their identifiers or URLs on Power of Ten and other rankings sites
Dates of birth
Unless an athlete has personally opted to display their date of birth through our site, or unless their governing body already makes such information public, we will not display their date of birth on the public (not-logged-in) site. Practically, if you want to know an athlete's date of birth, just look on Power of Ten. However, we will pass this data to any race organiser or official with a legitimate need reason to see it, including the athlete’s club officials, county and national governing bodies.
We are discussing a “global opt-in” for British Masters Athletics Federation members, because age verification is important in masters’ competitions, and it’s great to know exactly who won’t be in your age group any longer next season. So, if BMAF tell us it’s OK, we might display dates of birth for BMAF members.
Online entries and personal data
Our system allows online entries and team declarations, for individual and team events. A key feature is to remember data about the athlete, so that it does not have to be re-keyed every time.
Event organisers will decide what information they wish to capture. This may include personal information such as addresses and telephone numbers, or next of kin; as well as information needed to run the meeting the sport, such as recent personal bests or county eligibility. We will store this information and pass it to event organisers on an “as needed” basis.
Our system will use England Athletics application programme interfaces (APIs) and other sources to verify your identity and age. This has benefits for everybody:
- event organisers get checked data on who is eligible
- age group rankings will be accurate
- team managers can save a great deal of time by just picking the runners off a list, without having to submit their details again for every event
- clubs can check openly that their (and their rivals’) teams are legitimate
Data Security
We aim to follow best practices in system design and security. All data is held on servers within the European Union. ReportLab operates security-reviewed services for clients such as the Post Office Travel Money service and for government departments, and is appropriately skilled to do this.
However, we cannot make any promises about the security of data once it has left our system.
Access to your data
If you wish to see all the data we hold on you, contact us and (after verifying your identity) we will deliver this to you.
We hope to introduce a feature soon where athletes can be associated with a login, and see all the data we hold and amend it.
If you wish to have some data removed from our system, be aware that if you have entered an event or appeared in results, we may not be able to do this, because these are matters of public record. We cannot remove data from system backups.