Privacy Policy

1. Who FreePlay is for

FreePlay is intended for adults who are parents, guardians or carers. Children should not create FreePlay accounts, and FreePlay does not knowingly offer accounts directly to children.

Children's privacy first. No child tracking.

FreePlay does not ask for children's names, exact dates of birth, schools or child accounts. Parents may optionally choose broad age bands to improve recommendations. These are family-planning preferences attached to the parent's account or stored locally for a guest, not child user accounts.

Please never upload identifiable photographs of children to FreePlay. If you believe a child has provided us personal data, contact support@freeplay.ie and we will delete it promptly.

2. Information we collect

Account and authentication

• Your name and email address.
• A securely hashed password (we never store the password itself).
• An optional town or usual area if you choose to add one.
• Account and authentication state, such as whether you are signed in.
• Optional biometric sign-in configuration, which stays on the device where you set it up.

Family-planning preferences

• Optional broad age bands you choose for planning.
• Priorities, Help Me Choose intent, selected constraints and selected preferences.
• A remembered area, where you choose to save one.
• Personalisation choices, which you can change or remove at any time.

If you are signed in, these preferences may be attached to your account. If you use FreePlay as a guest, they may be stored locally on your device instead.

Help Me Choose

A Help Me Choose plan request can contain the type of help you asked for, broad age bands, practical constraints, optional preferences and an approximate or precise starting location. This information is used to generate and rank recommendations for you. FreePlay does not create named child profiles or child accounts.

Location

Location access is optional and may be approximate or precise depending on the permission you grant your device. It is used for nearby places, distance and journey relevance, local weather, Help Me Choose recommendations and map positioning. FreePlay does not intentionally build a history of where you or a child travels.

Saved activity and planning

• Favourites and saved places.
• Private Lists and saved Help Me Choose plans.
• Collaborative Lists, including suggestions and votes.
• Recorded visits where you enable them, Passport progress, streaks and badges.
• Preferences linked to your account.

Community and user submissions

• Reviews and ratings.
• Photos you upload (never upload identifiable photos of children).
• Place suggestions, edit suggestions and corrections.
• Family details you submit about a place.
• Safety or damage reports.
• Moderation history where necessary to keep the service safe and honest.

Purchases and Hero status

If you subscribe to FreePlay Hero, we receive the subscription product, entitlement status, purchase state and renewal state supplied by RevenueCat, Apple or Google. FreePlay does not receive or store full card details.

Notifications and communications

• A device notification token and your notification preferences, if you enable push notifications.
• Essential account emails, such as verification and account-deletion emails.
• Optional marketing or digest choices, which you can change at any time.
• Support requests you send us.

Website enquiries (venue form)

If you submit the venue enquiry form on the website, we collect the venue or business name, contact name, email, optional phone number, county, enquiry type, website or Instagram, venue address, any existing listing reference and your message. This information is used to respond to and manage the enquiry.

Account-deletion requests

If you request account deletion through the website, we process the submitted account email, an opaque request reference, a hash of the verification token, verification and completion status, timestamps and limited security and audit information. Raw verification tokens are not intentionally stored, and verification tokens expire.

Technical, security and product analytics

• Device platform and app version.
• A session or anonymous installation identifier, and an account analytics identifier where you are signed in.
• Feature interactions and conversion events, so we can see whether features work.
• Server and security logs, abuse-prevention information, and error or delivery status where applicable.

FreePlay uses minimised, privacy-conscious first-party product analytics to understand whether features work and where users encounter difficulty. Because an account-linked analytics identifier may exist after login, we do not describe this analytics as fully anonymous. FreePlay does not include account-deletion email addresses or verification tokens in website analytics.

3. Why we use information (lawful bases)

Performance of a contract

• Creating and operating your account, and letting you log in.
• Providing maps and nearby results.
• Generating Help Me Choose recommendations.
• Favourites, Lists, saved plans and the collaboration you ask for.
• Managing your Hero subscription entitlement.
• Processing account deletion.

Consent

• Device location permission.
• Push notifications.
• Optional marketing or digest emails.
• Any other optional device permission that requires consent.

You can withdraw permissions and optional communications at any time.

Legitimate interests

• Keeping FreePlay secure and preventing spam, fraud and abuse.
• Improving product reliability and usability, and measuring feature adoption.
• Moderating harmful or misleading submissions.
• Responding to support and venue enquiries.
• Maintaining accurate place information.

Legal obligations

• Responding to legal rights requests.
• Retaining limited financial, regulatory or security records where required.
• Responding to lawful requests.

4. Sharing and service providers

FreePlay does not sell personal data.

We share limited information only with service providers that help us run FreePlay:

• Maps: Google Maps services, and Apple Maps frameworks on Apple devices where used, display maps and places.
• Weather: Open-Meteo receives approximate coordinates to show local weather.
• Subscriptions: RevenueCat, together with the Apple App Store and Google Play, processes and verifies Hero subscriptions. None of them give us your full card details.
• Email: Resend delivers essential account emails and any emails you opt into.
• Notifications: Expo, Apple and Google notification services deliver push notifications if you enable them.
• Hosting: our website hosting, API hosting and database hosting providers store and serve the service and your account data.

FreePlay also presents information from public catalogue sources such as the EPA, the Marine Institute and OpenChargeMap. These are sources of public place information, not processors of your personal data: FreePlay does not send your personal information to them.

5. International transfers

Some providers may process information outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens, we use appropriate safeguards where required, such as adequacy decisions or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

6. How long we keep information

We keep information for different periods depending on what it is:

• Account data: while your account is active.
• Content you publish (reviews, photos, suggestions): while it is published or linked to your account.
• Preferences: until you change or remove them, or your account is deleted.
• Venue enquiries: for as long as reasonably needed to handle and follow up the enquiry.
• Security and abuse records: for a proportionate period.
• Subscription and financial records: where legally required.
• Account-deletion requests: only as long as needed to verify, process and audit the request. Verification links expire after 24 hours, expired unverified requests are removed through our retention process, and completed request data is minimised or scrubbed.
• Irreversibly anonymised aggregate data, which can no longer identify you, may remain.

7. Account deletion

You can delete your account inside the FreePlay app (Profile, then Delete account) or request deletion on the website at freeplay.ie/account-deletion, which uses an email verification step.

• Associated account data is deleted through our account-deletion process.
• Limited information may be retained for legal, security, fraud-prevention or regulatory purposes.
• Deleting your account does not cancel an Apple or Google subscription. Cancel FreePlay Hero separately in your Apple or Google subscription settings.

8. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access, rectify, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal data, the right to data portability, and the right to withdraw consent at any time.

• To exercise any right, email support@freeplay.ie.
• You may also lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.

9. Security, changes and contact

Data is encrypted in transit using HTTPS/TLS and passwords are stored only as secure one-way hashes. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable and proportionate measures to protect your information.

We may update this policy from time to time. We will revise the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, notify you in the app.

Steve Burke
FreePlay
Ireland
support@freeplay.ie