Privacy Policy
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Overview- Game entry data
- Automatic Emails
- Email Newsletter
- Game Sponsors
- Prize Winners
- Advertising
- Website Analytics
- Cookies
- Your rights
- Changes to the privacy policy
- Contact details
Overview
Velogames Fantasy Cycling provides free-to-play fantasy sports contests based on the professional road cycling season.
Users take to role as directeur sportif of their very own fantasy cycling team, selecting a group of riders who will score points based on their real-life performances in each event.
The user login system, entry form mechanism and use of advertising, analytics and web hosting partners means that various pieces of personal information are requested and made use of during website operations.
This privacy policy is intended to inform you regarding the personal information that Velogames Fantasy Cycling and third parties obtain from you when interacting with the website and associated services.
Please read on for more information about how your personal data is stored and used.
Game Entry Data
When you submit a team into a Velogames Fantasy Cycling contest, you are requested to provide certain pieces of information about yourself.
This data enables your team entry to be saved in the system, displayed in leaderboards and associated with your user account so you can easily find your team to update your rider selections and view your performance.
The collection of Game Entry Data is a fundamental necessity of running the contests on the website, for reasons stated below. Therefore, Game Entry Data is collected under the legal basis of Legitimate Interest of Velogames Fantasy Cycling.
The personal data requested when entering a game are as follows.
- Username
The username is a single-word identifier, chosen by the user, that will be used for purposes of logging in to the site and to identify logged-in users. This enables relevant user-specific pages to be shown to the logged-in user, and prevents other visitors of the site accessing team management and account information pages that are specific to the logged-in user.
Usernames are stored in the database, which is managed by UK hosting provider Tsohost (see web hosting, below) but never published on the public-facing pages of the website.
Usernames are never shared with an external company or individual, apart from the aforementioned web host.
- Email Address
Each user must sign up with a valid email address. The valid email address is used to ensure that each user only enters one team per contest, for games where there is a limit of one team per user.
Email addresses are also used to communicate with each user, with emails broadly separated into two groups, being
- Automated alert emails, necessary to enable the website’s user account services to function. These are sent out automatically as a result of a trigger fired when a user performs a task on the website. These automated emails will include confirmation of account creation and change of account details, including lost password reset emails.
- Marketing newsletter emails, sent in bulk on a semi-regular schedule to opted-in members of the Velogames mailing list. These emails mainly provide users with news of upcoming contests, and are only sent to users who "opt-in" and consent to receiving them. For more information regarding Marketing Newsletter Emails, please see the section entitled Email Newsletter, below.
- Director Name
The name of each user is listed next to the team name on several pages on the website, including Team Roster Page, Main Leaderboard pages and Mini League pages. Users are allowed to enter a "fake" director name if they do not want their actual name to appear on the website.
- Team Nationality
The nationality of each team entered into the game is collected on the Team Entry page. You may chose a different nation to represent with your team than your actual home nation or nationality.
Team nationality is shown on the team roster page, and could also be used for the purpose of generating National Leaderboards.
Email Newsletter
You may choose to optionally sign up for the Velogames email newsletter.
Users are requested to provide their email address when they sign up to the newsletter.
I use your email address to send bulk email newsletters to the Velogames mailing list, to tell you about upcoming games and alerts regarding changes in race start lists. I might occasionally also send a mid-race scoring summary update too.
Email newsletters might also include references to game sponsors’ promotions, including prize information and a message delivered on behalf of the the game sponsor.
When signing up to the email newsletter, your email address is shared with Mad Mimi, a leading email marketing service owned by Go Daddy LLC, which enables me to create, send and track each email campaign.
The details of users who sign up to the email newsletter are ONLY shared with Mad Mimi for the specific purpose of maintaining the recipients list and sending the email to the correct addresses.
The details of users who sign up to the email newsletter are NOT shared with any other organisation, including game sponsors.
All newsletters sent may contain a "tracking pixel", which is a small file embedded in the email which allows an analysis of the success of online marketing campaigns.
Because of these tracking pixels, I may see if and when you open an email and which links within the email you click.
The use of these tracking pixels allows me to review the performance of each email campaign, and periodicslly clean up the mailing list to ensure I do not continue to send emails to addresses that are either defunct or no longer interacting with the emails I send.
You may review the Privacy Policy of Mad Mimi (and other Go Daddy products) by following this external link.
Game Sponsors
Velogames Fantasy Cycling does not share your email address with any other organisations, including game sponsors, without gaining explicit consent from each user.
Any such additional consent to share email details with game sponsors will be obtained on the entry form for individual contests, rather than the generic email newsletter sign up form or Velogames account sign up form.
In these circumstances, an additional privacy statement and opt-in checkbox will be provided on the individual contest entry form, detailing what information will be shared with the third party, and the limitations of its use.
If a user does not give explicit consent for the sharing of their personal data, then none will be shared with any thrid-party,
Prize Winners
If you qualify to win a prize through playing a Velogames Fantasy Cycling game, you may be asked to provide additional information, such as address, date of birth and telephone number, in order for the prize to be fulfilled.
These details, with the permission of the prize winner, will be shard with the game sponsor responsible for fulfilling the prize.
Advertising
Like many online publishers big and small, Velogames presents online advertising provided by the services of Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA, hereinafter referred to as “Google“.
I specifically use the products Google Ad Manager, Google AdExchange and Google AdSense to help generate income for the website by displaying contextual and personalised display advertisements (also known as "banner ads") across the Velogames website.
In order to do so, the website collects statistical information about you that will be processed by Google Ad Manager, Google AdExchange and Google AdSense in order to show the most relevant advertisments and to analyse performance of each advertising campaign.
Google Ad Manager is a platform for the placement, management and optimization of ads on websites. With DFP, Velogames can reach and present personalized ads to website visitors who have shown interest in certain content areas. This is made possible through an analysis of their use of our website, including other site pages, and on other websites within the Google display network (Google itself, Google Ads, and other websites).
For this purpose, Google uses DoubleClick cookies, which are stored on your computer. Most cookies contain a cookie ID. This is a sequence of characters that match websites and servers to the browser where the cookie is stored. It enables the websites and servers to distinguish the browser from browsers with other cookies and identify every browser with a unique cookie ID. This ID is used exclusively for the unique identification of a web browser on a certain computer and not to identify a person. DoubleClick cookies do not contain or store any personal data of users.
You can deactivate personalized Google ads in your browser by clicking the "Turn off" link in the deactivation settings under https://www.google.com/settings/ads or, if you use the Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer browser, by deactivating the DoubleClick cookie by installing the browser add-on available at https://www.google.com/settings/ads.
Further information about how Google processes your personal data in is contained within its privacy policy. Moreover, Google's privacy policy provides further information with regard to your rights and settings concerning privacy. You can access Google's privacy policy by following the link below:
Google Privacy Policy - https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
Additionally, please click here (https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/partner-sites/) for more information on how Google uses information from sites or apps (including Velogames) that use Google services, including details on ads personalisation and how users can control the information collected by Google on these sites and apps.
Website Analytics
Like many websites, Velogames uses a third party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard details of visitor behaviour patterns.
This helps me analyse performance of the website, provide visitor numbers to potential advertisers and game sponsors, and work out features of the website that can be improved upon to provide a better experience to users.
Google Analytics records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system.
The standard integration of Google Analytics also records your computer’s IP address, which could be used to personally identify you (although Google do not grant publishers access to this information).
Velogames' integration of Google Analytics utilises an additional setting to anonymise your IP address. This works by shortening users' IP addresses prior to the data reaching Google's servers, providing an additional safeguard for users’ anonymity, at the expense of slightly degrading the quality of geographic user data that is available for me to analyse.
Further information about Google’s privacy policy may be obtained from http://www.google.com/privacy.html.
You may Opt Out of Google Analytics tracking at any time by following the instructions contained at: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en
Cookies
Like many other websites, Velogames uses cookies. Cookies are small text files transferred from a website server to your hard disk. Through cookies, we automatically receive certain information about your computer, e.g. IP address, the browser utilized, the operating system, and its connection to the internet.
Session Cookies
Velogames uses cookies to record session information, enabling the website to identify and remember a logged-in user.
This allows the website to show the relevant user-specific pages to logged-in users, such as their individual team roster page. Session cookies are also used to enable authentication on team management pages, such as the Select Team page, Make Transfers page and Join Leagues page, to ensure that only logged-in users are able to make team management changes on their own team.
Session Cookies can be set to be stored between User Sessions. Users who click the "Remember Me" box upon log-in will have their session cookie stored for multiple visits to Velogames from the same computer. This means that users do not have to log in on each visit to the website.
A Session Cookie set up using the "Remember Me" feature is automatically closed when the user logs in to Velogames on another computer - users cannot be logged in to a single account on two different computers at the same time.
Users who share access with other individuals to a single computer are advised to uncheck the "Remember Me" feature, since they could remain logged in the the website while another user uses the same computer.
Advertising Cookies
Certain third-party adverts are hosted on the site, which use cookies to record user behaviour such as page loads and clicks on adverts.
These advertising cookies enable Velogames' advertising partners to deliver user-specific advertising, and also enable advertisers to record advertisement performance and user behaviour for their own analysis.
Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to Velogames Fantasy Cycling.
Google's use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to Velogames and/or other sites on the Internet.
Most cookies contain a cookie ID. This is a sequence of characters that match websites and servers to the browser where the cookie is stored. It enables the websites and servers to distinguish the browser from browsers with other cookies and identify every browser with a unique cookie ID. This ID is used exclusively for the unique identification of a web browser on a certain computer and not to identify a person. DoubleClick cookies do not contain or store any personal data of users.
You can deactivate personalized Google ads in your browser by clicking the "Turn off" link in the deactivation settings under https://www.google.com/settings/ads or, if you use the Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer browser, by deactivating the DoubleClick cookie by installing the browser add-on available at https://www.google.com/settings/ads.
Further information about how Google processes your personal data in is contained within its privacy policy. Moreover, Google's privacy policy provides further information with regard to your rights and settings concerning privacy. You can access Google's privacy policy by following the link below:
Google Privacy Policy - https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en
Additionally, please click here (https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/partner-sites/) for more information on how Google uses information from sites or apps (including Velogames) that use Google services, including details on ads personalisation and how users can control the information collected by Google on these sites and apps.
Your rights
You are entitled to view, amend, or delete the personal information that is held by Velogames Fantasy Cycling.If you would like me to provide you with a full report of exactly what is held, please email me at george@velogames.com and I will compile a report within 30 days.
Similarly, if you would like me to delete all personal data held within the Velogames database, please email me at george@velogames.com and I will delete your user account from our records, redact any personal information from previous team entries and delete your details from our third-party mailing list provider.
Changes to the Privacy Policy
This privacy policy was last reviewed and updated on 30th April 2021.The policy will be regularly reviewed and updated if any details contained within become out-dated.
Contact Details
If you have any questions or comments, or if you feel that this site is not following the above-stated privacy policy, you may contact me at the following address:
george@Velogames.com
George Chapman
Velogames Fantasy Cycling
22 Birkbeck Road
London
W5 4ES
United Kingdom