To protect the data the races who use us as their online registration platform, we have made some updates to your race, event and club websites to better protect the online privacy of children, particularly those under the age of 13. Our updates are designed with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (“COPPA”) in mind and are designed to reasonably determine when we collect information about a child for a registration that we are collecting it from their parents.
The first change you will notice is an update in the registration path. The first step of registering for a race will now ask if you are over 18 and either registering yourself or someone else over the age of 18. If you are registering someone under the age of 18 the click box will have you confirm that you are the parent or guardian of the person you are registering and that you are giving us permission to collect the information you provide about your child for the registration.
Secondly the profile we create for the child from the registration process will be a sub-account of the parent’s profile. We will store the full name and address for the child as well as other information used for race results. However, we will only store the parents email address and phone number as the contact information for the child. Our necessary communications to the child (such as a registration confirmation) will always be to the parents email address.
Whenever the child’s information is shown on a public facing part of the site, such as in a participant search or in results the name will be shown in a truncated version (first initial and last name) and will not be shown with other identifying information like their street address.
This is also true for our API – we deliver only the first initial of the first name to scoring and results software in addition to other applications accessing participant information.
In addition, for our Photo Platform, it is now required to have a date of birth in the profile that indicates you are at least 18 years old in order to upload photos.
Further, we log the following each time someone is authorized to upload a photo:
- User ID
- Reported Age
- Access Timestamp
Finally we have updated the Children’s Privacy section of our Privacy Policy to include our new processes.
We would also like to take this opportunity to remind Race Owners, Race Directors, Timers, Partners and others who can access and download participant data from our site of your obligation to protect that data. It is your responsibility to restrict access to your RunSignup account to only those that need to have access to your data. Further once data is downloaded from our site it is your responsibility to protect the security of that data and for your security and privacy policies to comply with applicable regulations like COPPA.