Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 July 2026

This policy explains what Lineup does with your information. In short: we collect what we need to run games, communities, chat and payments, and nothing else. We do not run analytics, we do not run advertising, we do not track you across other apps or websites, and we never sell your data. There is no ad network, no tracking pixel and no third party analytics code anywhere in the app.

Lineup is operated by Techauthors FZ LLC, a company registered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at In5 Tech, Dubai Internet City. You can reach us at admin@lineup.ae about anything in this policy. Section 16 has our full contact details.

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to the Lineup mobile apps for iOS and Android, and to our website at lineup.ae. It applies to everyone who uses Lineup. If you use Lineup from outside the United Arab Emirates, this policy still applies to you and your data is handled exactly as described here.

Lineup is offered in the United Arab Emirates and is governed by UAE law. That means UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data, known as the PDPL. Our company is based in a Dubai Internet City free zone, which does not have its own separate data protection regime, so the federal law applies to us in full.

2. What we collect

Your name. Your display name, and your first and last name where you give them. Your display name is visible to other players in games, communities and chat.

Your email address. We receive this from Google or Apple when you sign in with them. Lineup has no email and password login. We use your email address to identify your account and to send you the welcome message described in section 5.

Your phone number, if you sign in using a one time code sent by SMS.

Your profile photo, if you upload one. Profile photos, community photos and venue photos are stored in publicly readable storage, which means anyone with the direct file link can open them. Chat attachments are stored privately.

Your gender. We ask for this at sign up and you can change it in your profile. We use it for one purpose only, which is to decide whether you can join a game that the host has marked as women only or men only. If you list your gender as other, you can join a game like that only where the host ticked the option to also open it to other genders. Your gender is never shown to other users.

Your approximate location, if you allow it. When you tap to use your location, your device gives us your coordinates and we immediately turn them into a city or area name so we can show you nearby games. We do not store your exact coordinates against your account. We do store places you deliberately save, and the venue, area and city of games you create or join.

Payment information. When you pay in the app, our payment processor Stripe handles your card. Your full card number never reaches Lineup and we never see or store it. What we store is a reference linking you to your customer record at Stripe, and a record of each payment including the amount, the payment method type, the Stripe charge reference and the name on the booking.

Your wallet. If you add credits to your Lineup wallet, we store your credit balance and a record of every credit you add and spend, including what you spent it on and when. Credits can only be spent inside Lineup and cannot be withdrawn as cash. Your balance and its history are visible to you and to our operations staff, and to nobody else.

Payout information, if you are a host, or you sell a court booking you no longer need. We store your bank account holder name, your IBAN, your bank name, and your username on the Ziina payments app if you give us one, so that a member of our team can transfer your money to you by hand. Our operations staff can see these details. They are never shown to other users.

Your device notification token, if you allow push notifications. This is an identifier issued by Apple or Google that lets us deliver a notification to your device. It is not readable as a phone number or an email address.

Your messages. Game chat, community chat, direct messages and messages to our support team are stored on our servers along with the sender's name. Chat is not end to end encrypted. Our operations staff can read support conversations, and can read game and community chat when investigating a report.

Reports you make about other players. If you report a player or a piece of content, we store what you reported, the reason you chose, anything you typed, and the fact that you were the person who reported it. Our operations staff can see this. The person you reported is not told who reported them.

Your playing record. Your level and reliability score for each sport, which are explained in section 4, plus your wins, losses and draws, your match history, and the games you have joined or hosted.

Your connections and alerts. Who you follow and who follows you, which is visible to other users on your profile. Also the places you save, the game alerts you set up, such as tell me when a football game appears in Dubai Marina, and the notifications we have sent you.

Your IP address. When you do something sensitive in the app, mainly paying or changing your account, we record the internet address your device is connecting from, so we can stop people abusing those actions. We want to be explicit about this because it is easy to miss in other policies.

We do not collect your date of birth, your ID documents, your health data, your contacts, your photo library, your calendar or your advertising identifier. We do not use your camera.

3. Why we use it and our legal basis

UAE law lets us process your data with your consent, or without consent in specific listed situations. Unlike European law, it has no general legitimate interests basis. So every use below rests on one of three things: performing our contract with you, a legal obligation we have, or your consent. Where it rests on your consent, we ask for it and you can withdraw it at any time.

To run your account, games, communities, chat and bookings. Basis: performance of our contract with you.

To take payments and pay hosts and sellers. Basis: performance of our contract with you, and our legal obligations to keep financial records.

To send you push notifications about your games, chats and payments. Basis: your consent, given through your device's notification permission prompt. You can withdraw it at any time.

To find games near you. Basis: your consent, given through your device's location permission prompt. You can withdraw it at any time.

To protect the service from abuse, fraud and spam, including the internet address records described above. Basis: performance of our contract with you and compliance with our legal obligations.

To handle reports about other players and to moderate content. Basis: performance of our contract with you and compliance with our legal obligations.

We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not build a profile of you for marketing. We do not send marketing emails or promotional push messages. If we ever want to, we will ask you for your consent separately first, and we will not treat this policy as your agreement to receive them.

4. Automated decisions about your level

Lineup calculates a skill level for each sport we support, starting from your own self assessment when you join and then adjusting it automatically based on your match results. We also calculate a reliability score, which reflects how confident we are that your level is accurate. These numbers are produced automatically, without a person reviewing them.

Your level matters because hosts can restrict a game to a level range, so an automatic calculation can affect which games you are able to join. If you think your level is wrong, email admin@lineup.ae and a person will look at it and can correct it by hand.

5. Who we share your data with

We share data with the companies below because we need them to run the service. Each one only gets what it needs, and none of them is allowed to use your data for its own purposes.

For the companies we contract with directly, which are Supabase, Stripe, Resend and our SMS provider, we hold them to protections equivalent to the ones in this policy through written data processing terms. Apple and Google handle data under their own developer and platform terms. OpenStreetMap and Google Fonts are public services we call rather than suppliers we contract with, so we send them the minimum described below and their own privacy policies govern what they do with it. The same requirement applies to any parent, subsidiary or related company of ours that has access to your data.

Supabase. This is our main hosting provider. It runs our database, our sign in system, our file storage and our server code, so it holds essentially everything described in section 2.

Stripe. Our payment processor. Stripe receives your card details directly from your device, plus the payment amount and a reference to your account. Stripe is the party that actually handles card data. We do not.

Google. Google does several separate things for us, and none of them involves advertising. If you sign in with Google, Google confirms your identity and gives us your name, email address and profile picture. On Android, Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers your push notifications and therefore receives your device token and the notification content. Google Maps and Google Places power venue search and maps, which means Google receives the search terms you type and the map area you are looking at. We use only Firebase's messaging component. We do not use Firebase Analytics or Crashlytics.

Apple. If you sign in with Apple, Apple confirms your identity and gives us your name and email address, or a private relay address if you chose to hide it. On iOS, Apple's push service delivers your notifications and receives your device token and the notification content.

Resend. Our email delivery provider. When your account is created, your email address and first name are sent to Resend so that a welcome email can be sent to you. That welcome email is the only email we send automatically.

Twilio. Our SMS provider. If you sign in with a phone number, your number and the one time code are passed to Twilio so it can deliver the message. It receives nothing else about you.

OpenStreetMap. When you search for a venue by name, your search text and the general region you are searching in are sent to the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service to look up addresses.

Google Fonts. Our app and our website load typefaces from Google's font servers, which means Google's servers see the internet address your device is connecting from when a page loads.

A note on Ziina. If you give us a Ziina username so we can pay you, we store it and show it to our own staff. We do not send it to Ziina and Ziina has no access to our systems.

We may also disclose data if we are legally required to, for example in response to a valid order from a UAE court or regulator, or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim. We do not sell your data and we do not share it with data brokers.

6. What other users can see

Some information is deliberately visible to other people using Lineup. Your display name, profile photo, sport levels, reliability scores, and who you follow and who follows you are visible to other players. Your messages are visible to everyone in that game or community chat. If you host or join a game, your name appears on the team sheet, which is the list of players in that game. Your email address, phone number, gender, wallet balance, payment details and payout details are never shown to other users.

One thing to be aware of, as section 2 explains: your profile photo is stored in publicly readable storage, so anyone who has the direct file link can open it, not only other Lineup users.

7. Sending data outside the UAE

Our hosting provider Supabase stores our database and files in South Korea, in the Seoul region of Amazon Web Services. Stripe, Google, Apple, Resend, Twilio and OpenStreetMap also process data outside the United Arab Emirates, mainly in the United States and the European Union. This means your personal data is transferred abroad.

UAE law allows this where the transfer is necessary to perform a contract with you, which is our position: we cannot run the app you have signed up to without hosting it. The UAE Data Office has not yet published a list of countries it considers adequate, so we rely on that contractual necessity, backed by the data processing terms in our contracts with those providers. Where a provider's standard terms do not already commit them to protections equivalent to those in this policy, we put a separate agreement in place before we send them your data.

8. How long we keep your data

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account, section 11 explains exactly what goes and what stays.

We keep payment and payout records for at least the period UAE tax and company law requires, currently understood to be five years, even after you delete your account. We keep them because we are legally required to, not because we want them.

We want to be honest about the rest. Apart from account deletion, Lineup does not yet delete old data automatically. Old chat messages, old game records, and the internet address records described in section 2 are retained indefinitely. Payment records are not deleted automatically once the five year period ends either. Building the scheduled clean up that would enforce proper retention periods is work we have not done yet, and we would rather tell you that than imply a deletion that does not happen.

9. How we protect your data

Your data is stored in a database with row level access rules. The server checks on every query what you are allowed to see and change: you can only change your own data, and you can only read other people's data where this policy says it is meant to be visible, such as the profile details and chat described in section 6. Files in our public photo storage are the exception, as section 2 explains, because they are readable by anyone with the direct link.

Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted while it travels. Text you type into profiles, chats and game descriptions is treated strictly as text when we display it, never as instructions to the app, so it cannot be used to attack other users. The app is also restricted so that it can only talk to servers on our approved list.

Our administrative tools are used only by our own operations staff. We are still building finer controls over which staff accounts can see which data, so for now you should assume that any member of our operations team can see the data described in section 2.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach happens that affects your personal data, we will notify the UAE Data Office, or the authority acting on its behalf, immediately and in any event within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and we will tell you directly if the breach is likely to put you at high risk.

10. Your rights and how to use them

Under UAE data protection law you have the right to ask us for a copy of your data, to ask us to correct it, to ask us to delete it, to ask us to restrict or stop certain processing, to withdraw any consent you have given us at any time, to object to direct marketing, to ask for your data in a portable machine readable format, and to object to decisions made about you purely automatically. Withdrawing consent does not undo anything we did lawfully before you withdrew it.

Some of these you can do yourself in the app:

Correct your data. Edit your profile in the app at any time.

Delete your account. Go to your profile settings and use Delete account. See section 11 for what this does.

Withdraw consent. Notifications and location are the two things we rely on your consent for. Turn either permission off in your device settings and that consent is withdrawn immediately. You can also mute individual communities in the app.

The rest are handled by a person, and we would rather say so plainly than point you at a button that does not exist:

Getting a copy of your data, or a portable export. There is no self serve export in the app yet. Email admin@lineup.ae and we will send you your data within one month.

Restricting or objecting to processing, or asking us to delete specific items rather than your whole account. Email admin@lineup.ae and we will action it within one month.

Asking a person to review your automatically calculated level. Email admin@lineup.ae.

Please write from the email address on your account. If you signed in with a phone number and have no email on file, write from any address and include that phone number, and we will send a code to it so we can confirm the account is yours before we act. We may ask you to confirm your identity in this way for any request, so that nobody else can get at your data.

UAE law gives us one calendar month to respond, and we aim to answer well inside that. For requests that are unusually complex we can extend by up to two further months, and if we need to do that we will tell you why before the first month is up.

11. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app, in your profile settings. This is a permanent deletion, not a deactivation, and it is available to you wherever you live.

Before you delete, one warning. If you have credits left in your Lineup wallet, they are deleted with your account. They cannot be refunded, cashed out or transferred afterwards. Spend them first, or email admin@lineup.ae before you delete if you want them dealt with.

When you delete your account we permanently delete your profile, your sport levels and reliability scores, your match history, your notifications, your device notification tokens, your saved locations and saved game alerts, your community messages, your direct messages, your follows and followers, the reports you have filed, your wallet balance and its transaction history, the reference we store linking you to your customer record at Stripe, and your bank and Ziina payout details.

Some things do not disappear, and you should know this before you delete:

Your profile photo file. Deleting your account removes the photo from your profile, but the image file itself stays in our storage for now, and anyone who already has its direct link can still open it. Removing these files at deletion is work we have not completed yet.

Payment and payout records are kept, including the amount and the name on the booking, because we are legally required to keep financial records. We do remove the link between those records and your account. Stripe separately keeps its own record of payments you made, which it is required to retain.

Messages you sent in game chat currently remain visible to the other people in that game, along with the name you were using at the time. Your name also remains on the team sheets of games you played in, and on games you hosted. We know this makes deletion visibly incomplete and we intend to fix it by blanking those stored names at the same time the account goes.

Copies of your data can remain in our encrypted database backups for a limited period after deletion, and then expire automatically. Those backups are not used to restore individual accounts, and nobody reads your data out of them in the normal course of running Lineup.

If you have already uninstalled the app, or you cannot get into your account, email admin@lineup.ae and we will delete it for you within one month. Write from the email address on your account, or, if you signed in with a phone number, from any address including that phone number so we can confirm it is yours.

If you signed in with Apple, you can also remove Lineup from the list of apps using your Apple ID, in your Apple ID settings on your device.

12. Children

You must be at least 16 years old to have a Lineup account. If you are under 18, you may only use Lineup with the knowledge and permission of a parent or guardian, and a parent or guardian must be the person who makes any payment on your account.

We do not currently ask for your date of birth, so we rely on you to be honest about your age. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will delete it and the data attached to it. If you believe someone under 16 has created an account, email admin@lineup.ae and we will remove it.

13. Permissions the app asks for

Notifications. Used to tell you about your games, messages, join requests and payments, and to remind you about a game roughly an hour before it starts. You can decline this and still use everything else in the app.

Location. Used only when you tap to use your location, to work out which city or area you are in so we can show you nearby games. You can decline this and choose your area manually instead.

We also open your device's browser for signing in with Google and for Stripe checkout, because those services do not allow sign in inside an embedded app window. We ask for no other permissions. We do not access your camera, microphone, contacts, calendar, photo library or files, beyond the single image you actively choose when you set a photo.

14. Cookies and local storage

The Lineup app and website do not use advertising cookies, tracking cookies or third party analytics cookies.

The app stores your sign in token and a small amount of app state on your own device, so that you stay logged in and the app loads quickly. This is stored locally and is not shared with anyone. Clearing your app data or signing out removes it.

Both our app and our website load typefaces from Google Fonts, and our website may also embed a Google map. Both of those mean Google's servers see the internet address your device is connecting from when the page loads. There is nothing else on the website that follows you.

15. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top and publish the new version on lineup.ae. If the change is significant, for example if we start collecting a new category of data or add a new company to section 5, we will tell you before the change takes effect, by push notification or by email to the address on your account. If the change requires your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

16. Contact us and how to complain

Lineup is operated by Techauthors FZ LLC, registered at In5 Tech, Dubai Internet City, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

For anything about your data, email admin@lineup.ae. This inbox is monitored and a person reads it. If you are contacting us about a data request, please write from the email address on your account, or follow the phone number route in section 10 if you do not have one.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your request, you can complain to the UAE Data Office, the federal regulator for data protection. At the time of writing, data protection queries in the UAE are handled through the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, at tdra.gov.ae. You can also raise a consumer complaint with the UAE Ministry of Economy, or with Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism. Nothing in this policy or in our terms takes away your right to do that.