Privacy Policy

Last updated 25 August 2026

This policy explains what CheckTheCal collects, why, who else touches it, and what you can do about it. It is specific rather than generic, because a privacy policy that could describe any company tells you nothing about this one.

The short version: we hold your email address, the calendar URLs you give us, and the contents of the calendars we fetch for you. We use Stripe for payments. There is no analytics, no tracking, no advertising and no third-party script anywhere on this site. We do not sell your data and we never will.

1. Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is CheckTheCal in California, United States.

• Postal address: P.O. BOX 57770, Tarzana, CA 91357 US
• Contact for any privacy question or request: support@checkthecal.com

We are small enough that this address reaches a person directly, and we have not appointed a data protection officer because we are not required to.

2. What we collect

Your account

• Your email address. It is also your login, since we sign you in with an emailed link rather than a password.
• A display name, if you give us one. Optional.
• Sign-in records — when you last signed in, and the time and requesting IP address of each sign-in link we issued.
• Your timezone, so a daily digest arrives in the morning where you are rather than in the middle of the night.

Your session

When you are signed in we store a session record containing the IP address and browser user-agent the session was started from, and its expiry. We keep these to let you and us tell a legitimate session from a stolen one.

We never store your session token. We store a SHA-256 hash of it. The same is true of sign-in links and recipient confirmation links. A stolen copy of our database therefore yields no usable sessions and no usable links.

The calendars you watch

• The feed URL, in full. Please read this part carefully. Many calendar apps offer a "private" or "secret" feed address, and that address is itself a credential — anyone holding it can read the calendar. We store it in our database in readable form, because we have to send it back to the publisher on every check. We restrict access to that database tightly and never display a full URL where it does not belong, but if a URL you gave us would be damaging to leak, use a public feed address instead, or accept that risk knowingly.
• A name and settings for each watch — how often to check, any filters, digest preferences, which recipients get it.
• The contents of the calendar. To detect a change we have to know what the calendar said before, so we store a snapshot of it. We also keep a history of the changes we detected, for as long as your plan's retention window.

The calendars themselves may contain other people's data

A school calendar names teachers; a club fixture list names opponents and venues. When you ask us to watch a feed, we store and process whatever that feed contains, including personal data about people who have never heard of us.

For that event data you decide what is collected and why — you choose the calendar, the recipients and the retention. We process it on your instruction in order to provide the service to you, and for nothing else. We do not mine it, analyze it across accounts, or use it to train anything. If you are watching feeds on behalf of an organization, that organization is responsible for having a lawful basis to do so.

Recipients

For every address you add as a recipient we store the address, an optional label, whether and when it confirmed, and whether and when it unsubscribed.

Sending records

For every message we send we store the destination address, which watch it was for, a hash of its contents, whether it succeeded, and the provider's message id. The content hash is what stops us sending you the same alert twice.

We also keep a suppression list of addresses that hard-bounced or reported us as spam. It is global, it is keyed on the address, and we keep it indefinitely — see retention for why.

Payments

If you subscribe, Stripe collects and holds your payment details. We never receive your card number. What we store is Stripe's customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, its status, and when the current period ends. Your name, billing address and tax details live with Stripe, and you edit them there.

Operational logs

Our servers keep short-lived logs of requests and errors, which can include IP addresses. Neither is used to profile you.

What we do not collect

No advertising identifiers. No cross-site tracking. No analytics of any kind — no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no PostHog, no session recording, no heatmaps. No third-party scripts, fonts or pixels load on this site at all. We do not buy data about you from anyone.

3. Why we use it, and our legal basis

For anyone in the UK, the EU or the EEA, the GDPR requires us to name a legal basis for each purpose. Ours are:

• Running the service you asked for — fetching your feeds, computing diffs, sending your alerts, keeping your history, enforcing plan limits. Basis: performance of a contract with you.
• Signing you in and keeping your account secure — magic links, sessions, the IP and user-agent on each session, rate limits on sign-in attempts. Basis: contract, and our legitimate interest in keeping accounts from being taken over.
• Billing — subscriptions, invoices, receipts. Basis: contract, and legal obligation for the tax records we must retain.
• Mailing a recipient who is not the account owner. Basis: that person's consent, given by confirming the address. This is why nothing is ever sent to an unconfirmed address, and why an unsubscribe cannot be reversed by the account owner.
• Protecting deliverability and preventing abuse — the suppression list, send caps, the guard audit trail, the safeguards that stop our fetcher being pointed at private networks. Basis: legitimate interests, being our need to remain a sender that mail providers accept and a service that cannot be turned into a tool against third parties.
• Answering your support emails. Basis: contract and legitimate interests.

We do not use your data for automated decision-making that has a legal effect on you, and we do not profile you.

4. Who else we share it with

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not disclose it to anyone except the payment processor.

• Stripe, Inc. — payments, cards, invoices, receipts and tax details. United States. Stripe acts as a processor for the subscription and as a controller for its own fraud-prevention purposes; its own privacy policy governs that.

We will also disclose data where we are legally required to — a valid court order or lawful request — and, if the service ever changes hands, to the acquirer, in which case we will tell you by email beforehand.

5. Where your data is processed

Everything is processed in the United States. Our payment processors is a US company, and our servers are in California.

If you are in the UK, the EU or the EEA, that means your personal data is transferred outside your country. For those transfers we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, and for the UK on the International Data Transfer Addendum, entered into with each processor, together with the safeguards described in section 9. You can ask us for details of these arrangements at any time.

We are telling you this up front, because for some users it is a reason to choose a different service, and you should be able to make that decision before you sign up.

6. Cookies

One cookie. It is called `ctc_session`, it holds your sign-in session, and it is strictly necessary — without it we cannot keep you signed in. It expires after 30 days or when you sign out, whichever is first.

That is the entire list. There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies and no third-party cookies, which is why you have never seen a consent banner here: there is nothing optional to consent to.

Signing out deletes the cookie and revokes the session on our side.

7. How we protect it

• Session tokens, sign-in links and recipient confirmation links are stored only as SHA-256 hashes, never in usable form.
• Sign-in links are single-use and expire after 15 minutes. Sessions expire after 30 days.
• Card details are entered on Stripe's pages and never reach our servers.
• The site identifies itself honestly to every server it fetches from.
• Backups are encrypted.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your personal data and is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the relevant supervisory authority without undue delay, and within 72 hours of becoming aware of it where the GDPR requires.

8. How long we keep it

• Change history — for your plan's retention window, which ranges from a week on the free plan to a year on Business. The current figure for each plan is on our pricing page. A background job deletes older entries automatically.
• Calendar snapshots — for as long as a watch on that feed is active, because the snapshot *is* the thing the next check compares against. Snapshots are not history and are not accumulated.
• Feed records — a feed is shared between everyone watching it, so the feed row itself, its URL and its snapshot survive after you stop watching it, if somebody else still does. It carries nothing that identifies you. Once nobody watches it, it is never fetched again.
• Sessions — 30 days, then deleted. Sign-in links — 15 minutes.
• Sending records — retained so that we can honor content de-duplication and answer "did that alert go out?". We prune them periodically.
• The suppression list — kept indefinitely, and this is deliberate. It records that an address hard-bounced or complained. Deleting that record would let mail start flowing to it again, which is exactly what the person at that address asked us not to do. It holds an email address and a reason, nothing more. If you want your address removed from it, email us and we will discuss it — but we will not remove it just to resume sending.
• Billing records — Stripe retains invoices for as long as tax law requires, typically seven years. We cannot delete those and neither can you.

9. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct anything inaccurate.
• Delete your account and its data — see the next section.
• Restrict or object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
• Export your data in a portable format.
• Withdraw consent, where consent is the basis — for a recipient, that is the unsubscribe link, and it works instantly.

Email support@checkthecal.com to exercise any of these. We will respond within one month. We do not charge for a request, and we will not treat you differently for making one.

If you are in the UK, the EU or the EEA, you also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority — the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or your national authority in the EU. We would much rather you came to us first, but the right is yours and we will not stand in the way of it.

If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law

You have the right to know what we collect and why, to access it, to correct it, to delete it, and to receive it in a portable form. You also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the past twelve months, and we do not have a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link because there is nothing to opt out of. We collect no sensitive personal information as that term is defined by the CPRA, other than what a calendar you point us at may happen to contain.

10. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, from your billing page. It takes effect immediately and it cannot be undone.

What deletion removes: your account and user record, your watches and their settings, your change history, your recipients, your sending records, your usage counters, and your session — you are signed out on the spot. Any active subscription is cancelled at the same time, with no refund for the remainder of the period you have paid for.

What deletion does not remove, and why:

• Shared feed records. A feed is watched by many accounts and holds no data identifying you. Your link to it goes; the feed row stays if others watch it, and is simply never fetched again if nobody does.
• Suppression entries for addresses that bounced or complained, for the reason given in section 8.
• Stripe's billing and invoice records, which tax law requires Stripe to retain.
• Backups, until they age out of rotation.

If you would rather we did it for you, or you cannot sign in, email support@checkthecal.com and we will do it within one month, usually the same week.

11. If you are a recipient, not a customer

You may be reading this because somebody added your address to a watch and you got an email.

• Nothing was sent to you until you confirmed that address by clicking a link. That confirmation is the consent we rely on.
• The unsubscribe link in every alert is one click and final. It stops that mail immediately, and the account owner cannot switch you back on. Only you can, by confirming again.
• You have no account with us and cannot see anything about the account that added you — not its other calendars, not its billing, not its other recipients.
• You have all the rights in section 9 over the data we hold about you, which is your address, its confirmation status, and the record of what we sent you. Please email us a request.
• If your address was added without your agreement, tell us. We will remove it, and we will look at the account that did it.

12. Children

The service is not directed at children and is not for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from a child. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

A calendar you watch may of course concern children — a school's term dates, a junior team's fixtures. That data reaches us as calendar content under section 2, on your instruction, and is treated the same as any other event data.

13. Changes to this policy

The date at the top of this page always says when this policy last changed. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will email the address on your account at least 14 days before it takes effect, so that you can delete your account first if you would rather not continue.

14. Contact

Any question, any request, any complaint:

support@checkthecal.com

CheckTheCal P.O. BOX 57770, Tarzana, CA 91357 US