Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Pinion ("we", "our", or "us") is operated by Gamer Alliance Members Esports, LLC and is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use the Pinion mobile app, the Pinion website and web app at pinionup.com, shared and public Pinion profile pages, and the emails, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and push notifications we send (together, the "Services").

Many Pinion members are student athletes under 18. Section 6 explains how the Services work for teens and what a parent or guardian approves. If you are a parent or guardian, we encourage you to read that section first.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following information:

• Account Information: Your name, email address, mobile phone number, date of birth, gender, and password. If you are under 18, we also collect the email address of your parent or guardian.
• Athlete Profile Information: Information you choose to add to your profile, such as your photo, bio, city, state and country, height and weight, sports, positions, teams, statistics and athletic attributes, career history, school, graduation year, GPA, major, academic achievements, test scores, NCAA ID, interests, links to your videos, and any resume or academic transcript you upload.
• Guardian Consent Records: For members under 18, whether a parent or guardian approved, declined, or later withdrew their approval, when they did so, and the email address the request was sent to.
• Terms Acceptance Records: Which version of our Terms and Conditions and this Privacy Policy you accepted when you signed up, when, and the IP address, platform, and app version you used.
• Conversations With Nio: The messages you send to Nio, our in-app guide, and the replies Nio gives. See Section 5.
• Preferences and Activity: Your recruiting, visibility, and notification settings, schools you save, tournaments you register for, and share links you create.
• Mobile Phone Number and SMS Consent Data: If you choose to opt in to receive text messages from Pinion by checking the consent checkbox during registration on the Pinion website or mobile app, or later in your Notification settings, we collect your mobile phone number, the date and time of your opt-in, the source of the opt-in (web or mobile app registration form, or settings), the IP address from which the opt-in was submitted, the app version, and a record of the consent language presented to you. We also collect any subsequent opt-out, whether in your settings or by replying STOP, and any START or HELP requests you send via SMS.
• Device and Usage Data: Information collected automatically when you use the Services, such as your IP address, device type, operating system, advertising identifier (see Section 8), app version, browser type, the screens and pages you view, the features you use, crash and error reports, and a push notification token if you allow notifications.
• Payment Information: If you make a purchase, your payment is processed by our payment processor, Stripe. We receive limited details such as the purchase, its amount, and the last digits and brand of your card; we do not store your full card number.
• Website Forms: Information you submit through forms on our website, such as contact requests and NIL tools.

3. Use of Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Create and manage your account and verify your phone number
• Build your athlete profile and show you how complete it is
• Share your profile with schools, colleges, coaches, and programs when you choose to be open to recruiting, as described in Section 4
• Match your profile against what schools and programs are looking for, including by automated scoring. Pinion staff review these results; they are not recruiting decisions
• Answer your questions and help you find your way around the app through Nio
• Request, record, and honor parent or guardian consent for members under 18
• Keep members safe, including reviewing messages that suggest someone may be at risk, and enforce our Terms and Conditions
• Process your transactions and send you related information
• Send you account, security, and service messages by email, push notification, SMS, or WhatsApp
• Send you SMS messages related to your account, transactions, and our programs, including new features, scholarship matches, events, and updates, as well as account verification codes and security alerts where applicable, consistent with your opt-in choices and our Terms and Conditions
• Maintain auditable records of your SMS opt-in consent and any opt-out (STOP) or HELP requests as required by applicable telecommunications regulations and carrier guidelines (including CTIA and TCPA)
• Understand how the Services are used, measure which campaigns lead people to install the app, fix problems, and improve the Services
• Protect the security of the Services and comply with the law

We do not sell your personal information.

4. Disclosure of Your Information

We share information only in the following situations:

• With Schools, Colleges, Coaches, and Programs: When you turn on "open to recruiting", Pinion may share your profile with schools, colleges, coaches, and athletic programs, for example as part of a list of athletes who match what a program is looking for. These lists can include your name, graduation year, sports, positions, school, city and state, height, how complete your profile is, how well you match the program's criteria, and a link to your profile. Your email address, phone number, and your parent or guardian's email address are included only when Pinion staff record a specific reason for sharing them. If you are under 18, your profile is not shared with schools until a parent or guardian has approved it. Once information has been shared with a school or program, their own privacy practices apply to it and we cannot recall it; turning off "open to recruiting" stops future sharing.
• Through Links You Share: You can create a private link to your published profile and send it to anyone you choose. Anyone with the link can see your name, bio, academic details, sports and positions, and interests. The link never shows your photo, location, or contact details. You can turn a link off at any time.
• On a Public Profile Page: If you choose to make your profile discoverable, the same information is published on a public web page that search engines may index. You can turn this off at any time, after which we remove the page; copies held by search engines may take time to disappear.
• With Your Parent or Guardian: If you are under 18, we email your parent or guardian to ask for their approval, including your name.
• Third-Party Service Providers: We may share your information with third parties that perform services for us or on our behalf, including payment processing, data analysis, email delivery, hosting services, customer service, and marketing assistance. This includes our SMS aggregator and messaging provider (Twilio), which we use solely to deliver SMS messages to you on our behalf. These service providers are contractually required to handle your information consistent with this Privacy Policy and applicable law. Our service providers include:
  • Supabase and Amazon Web Services (hosting, database, file storage, and public profile pages)
  • Anthropic (the AI model behind Nio; see Section 5)
  • Twilio (SMS and WhatsApp messages and phone verification)
  • SendGrid (email, including parent and guardian consent requests)
  • Expo (push notifications)
  • Stripe (payments)
  • Google Firebase (app analytics) and AppsFlyer (measuring which links and advertising campaigns lead people to install and use the app; see Section 8)
  • Sentry (crash and error reporting)
  • Cloudflare Turnstile (protecting our website from bots)
  • Slack (internal tools our staff use to prepare lists for schools)
  • Airtable (website form submissions)
• By Law or to Protect Rights: If we believe the release of information about you is necessary to respond to legal process, to investigate or remedy potential violations of our policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of others, including where a member may be at risk of harm, we may share your information as permitted or required by any applicable law, rule, or regulation.
• Business Transfers: If Pinion is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Privacy Policy.

For SMS-specific limits on sharing mobile information and SMS opt-in data, including use of messaging subcontractors such as Twilio, see Section 7 (SMS / Text Messaging).

5. Nio, Our AI Guide

Nio is an automated guide in the Pinion app. It answers questions about Pinion and your profile and helps you find the right screen. It only discusses Pinion. Nio is not a person, a counselor, or a recruiting advisor, and its answers can be wrong. Nio is available to members 18 and over, and to members under 18 once a parent or guardian has approved (Section 6).

• What Nio uses: To answer, Nio uses the messages in your current conversation and a limited summary of your profile: how complete it is, which sections you have filled in, your sports and positions, graduation year, GPA, test scores, state and country, whether you are open to recruiting, whether you are under 18, and the status of your guardian approval. This summary does not include your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, school, city, bio, photo, or parent or guardian's email address.
• Who processes it: Many answers come from Pinion's own prepared responses. When they do not, your message and the summary above are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate a reply. Anthropic processes this information on our behalf and is not permitted to use it to train its models.
• Saving conversations: We save your conversations with Nio in your account so that Nio can follow a conversation and so we can review how Nio is working and keep it safe. A new conversation starts after 30 minutes without a message, when you start a new chat, or when you reopen the app. Your conversations are deleted when you delete your account, and you can ask us to delete them sooner.
• Safety: Please do not share personal contact details or other sensitive information with Nio. If a message suggests that you or someone else may be at risk, Nio will point you to people who can help, such as a crisis line, and we keep a short record of that message so our team can review it. We keep that record even if the conversation or account is later deleted, and may use it as described in Section 4 (By Law or to Protect Rights).

6. Teens and Parent or Guardian Consent

Age requirement: You must be at least 13 years old to use Pinion. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we will delete it. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, please contact us.

Members aged 13 to 17:

• When you sign up, we ask for the email address of a parent or guardian and email them a request to approve your profile.
• Until a parent or guardian approves, you can use the app and build your profile, but your profile stays private: you cannot publish it, create a share link, make it discoverable, or be included in lists we share with schools, you cannot use Nio, and we send you no text messages, even if you asked for them.
• A parent or guardian who approves is agreeing that, when you choose, your profile can be published and shared as described in Section 4, that you can use Nio as described in Section 5, and that you get the text messages you asked for as described in Section 7. You still control your own recruiting and visibility settings.

For parents and guardians:

• You can decline the request. If you approve, we email you a link that lets you withdraw your approval at any time; it does not expire. You can also withdraw by contacting us at contact@pinionup.com. When approval is withdrawn, your child's profile becomes private again, their share links stop working, any public profile page is removed, they can no longer use Nio, they stop getting text messages from Pinion, and they are left out of future lists we share with schools. Information already shared with a school cannot be recalled.
• You can ask to review the information we hold about your child, to correct it, or to have it deleted, by contacting us. We will take reasonable steps to confirm that you are the child's parent or guardian first.

7. SMS / Text Messaging

When you provide your mobile phone number and opt in to receive text messages from Pinion, you consent to receive SMS messages from us related to your account, transactions, and our programs, including new features, scholarship matches, events, and updates.

If you are under 18, we record your choice the same way, but we send you no text messages until a parent or guardian has approved your profile (Section 6), and they stop if that approval is withdrawn.

Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. You can reply HELP for help or STOP at any time to unsubscribe. Once you reply STOP, you will no longer receive SMS messages from us unless you opt in again.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Information sharing to subcontractors in support of our services (e.g., SMS delivery via Twilio) is permitted. All other use case categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.

When you opt in at registration, the consent language shown next to the checkbox matches our standard SMS consent disclosure. Enrollment details, supported carriers, and eligibility requirements are described in our Terms and Conditions.

WhatsApp messages

If your mobile number is outside the United States, we ask instead whether you would like WhatsApp messages from Pinion about the same things, with the same optional box at registration and a “WhatsApp updates” switch in your Notification settings. We record your choice and the words shown in the same way, and if you are under 18 we send you no WhatsApp messages until a parent or guardian has approved your profile. Message frequency varies. Reply HELP for help, or STOP at any time to unsubscribe, to any WhatsApp message from us; reply START to subscribe again. WhatsApp messages are delivered through Twilio and WhatsApp (Meta), and we do not share your number or your opt-in with them, or anyone else, for their own marketing.

8. Your Choices

• Your profile: You can view and edit your profile at any time in the app.
• Recruiting and visibility: You can turn "open to recruiting" off, turn off share links, and make your profile not discoverable in your settings.
• Notifications: You can change which notifications you receive in your settings, and turn push notifications off in your device settings.
• Text messages: Turn “Text message updates” on or off in your Notification settings, or reply STOP (or START) to any text message from us.
• WhatsApp messages: Turn “WhatsApp updates” on or off in your Notification settings, or reply STOP (or START) to any WhatsApp message from us.
• Emails: Use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email. We may still send you messages about your account.
• Advertising identifiers: On Android, the app collects your device's advertising ID. On iOS, Apple's advertising identifier (IDFA) is available to us only if you allow tracking when your device asks. We use it, through AppsFlyer and Google Firebase, to measure which campaigns lead to installs and sign-ups. You can reset your advertising ID, or limit how it is used for ads, in your device settings.
• Campaign attribution: We use AppsFlyer to learn which links and advertising campaigns lead people to install the app and sign up. AppsFlyer receives information about your device and how you use the app (such as device type, operating system, IP address, advertising identifier where available, the link or campaign you came from, and actions like signing up). For adults, AppsFlyer may tell the advertising partner that ran a campaign that it led to an install or sign-up. For members under 18, we instruct AppsFlyer not to share their information with any advertising partner.

9. Security of Your Information

We use administrative, technical, and physical security measures to help protect your personal information. For example, uploaded transcripts and profile photos are kept in private storage. While we have taken reasonable steps to secure the personal information you provide to us, please be aware that despite our efforts, no security measures are perfect or impenetrable, and no method of data transmission can be guaranteed against any interception or other type of misuse.

10. How Long We Keep Information

We keep your information for as long as your account is open, and afterwards only as long as needed for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. When you delete your account, we delete or anonymize your profile and your conversations with Nio as described in Section 12. We keep some records for longer where we need them to meet legal obligations, resolve disputes, keep members safe, or prevent fraud, including guardian consent records, SMS consent records, payment records, records of what we shared with schools and when, records of your SMS opt-in and of which Terms and Privacy Policy you accepted, and the safety records described in Section 5.

11. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal information:

• The right to access – You have the right to request copies of your personal data
• The right to rectification – You have the right to request that we correct any information you believe is inaccurate
• The right to erasure – You have the right to request that we erase your personal data, under certain conditions
• The right to restrict processing – You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions
• The right to object to processing – You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data, under certain conditions

To exercise these rights, contact us using the details in Section 15. A parent or guardian may make these requests on behalf of a member under 18. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we will not discriminate against you for making one.

12. Account Deletion

You may delete your account at any time through your account settings or by contacting us. When you request account deletion:

• What we delete: We will delete or anonymize your personal information, including your profile data, uploaded files (your photo, resume, and transcripts), conversations with Nio, contact information, and account credentials, in accordance with our data retention practices and applicable law.
• Timeline: Account deletion is typically processed within a reasonable period. Some information may be retained for a limited time where required for legal, security, safety, or fraud-prevention purposes, as described in Section 10.
• Irreversibility: Once your account is deleted, it cannot be recovered. You would need to create a new account if you wish to use our services again.
• Third parties: Where we have shared your information with third-party service providers, we will take reasonable steps to ensure your data is deleted or anonymized by those parties in line with our instructions and their policies. Information already shared with schools, colleges, coaches, or programs is held by them under their own policies.

If you have trouble deleting your account through the app or website, or have questions about what happens to your data, please contact us using the details in the Contact Us section below.

13. Where Information Is Processed

Pinion is based in the United States, and we and our service providers process information in the United States and other countries. If you use the Services from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in countries whose data protection laws may differ from those where you live.

14. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated policy here and change the "Last updated" date above. If we make material changes, including to how we share the information of members under 18, we will notify you in the app or by email, and ask a parent or guardian for approval again where the law requires it.

15. Contact Us

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, including our SMS / text messaging practices, or want to make a request about your information or your child's, please contact us at:

Gamer Alliance Members Esports, LLC
Email: contact@pinionup.com
Address: 187 E Warm Springs Road, Suite B, Las Vegas, NV 89119, USA