Privacy Policy

We take the protection of your personal data very seriously. We treat your personal data confidentially and in accordance with the statutory data protection regulations and this privacy policy.

1. General Information

The following notes give a simple overview of what happens to personal data when you visit this website. Personal data is any data with which a person can be personally identified. The website can be used without registration or login. Visiting it produces technical access data (section 6); if you use the AI chatbots, your input is processed (section 9). In addition, the website displays publicly available competition data of pinball players that we obtain from the IFPA and from Match Play (section 7).

2. Responsible Party

The responsible party for data processing on this website is:

3. Your Rights

You have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Right to information
• Right to correction or deletion
• Right to restriction of processing
• Right to object to processing
• Right to data portability

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority.

4. Cookies and local settings

This website sets a single, technically necessary cookie (NEXT_LOCALE) that stores your language choice for one year (§ 25 (2) no. 2 TDDDG, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We do not set tracking or advertising cookies. Other page settings such as the colour scheme or collapsed sections are stored only locally in your browser (localStorage) and never transmitted to our servers.

5. Hosting (Vercel)

This website is hosted by Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Ave #4133, Covina, CA 91723, USA. When pages are requested, Vercel processes the access data described in section 6 and stores the data we keep (cached rankings, rating histories and shared chat conversations) in Vercel Blob. We use Vercel under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). Transfers to the USA are safeguarded by the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46 GDPR) and Vercel's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in the secure and efficient operation of the website). More information: https://vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy

6. Server Log Files

The provider of the pages automatically collects and stores information in so-called server log files, which your browser automatically transmits to us. These are: Browser type and version, Operating system used, Referrer URL, Hostname of the accessing computer, Time of the server request, IP address. This data is not merged with other data sources. The basis for data processing is Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR, which permits the processing of data for the fulfillment of a contract or pre-contractual measures.

7. Player and tournament data (IFPA, Match Play)

On the IFPA pages (in particular Player History, the championship series and tournaments) we display publicly available competition data of pinball players. This data does not come from the data subjects themselves but from the International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA) via its public API (name, place of residence, IFPA id, world rank, WPPR points, rating, tournament results and placings, rank history) and from Match Play Events via its public data exports (Match Play rating and its history, linked by IFPA id). The data is loaded from the sources on demand and cached for up to 24 hours; championship rankings and the Match Play rating history are stored in Vercel Blob (section 5), the latter accumulated over time because Match Play only publishes the past year of changes. The purpose is reporting on competitive pinball and the analysis of public tournament results. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in presenting public competition results; the data is already public at the sources). This information is provided under Art. 14 GDPR. If you are a data subject and wish to object to the display of your data, write to frg@silverballmania.com: we will remove your data from our storage and exclude it from future imports as far as technically possible. For the data held by the IFPA or Match Play themselves, please contact the respective source.

8. YouTube

Our website uses plugins from YouTube, which is operated by Google. If you visit one of our pages featuring a YouTube video, a connection to the YouTube servers is established. Here the YouTube server is informed about which of our pages you have visited. If you're logged in to your YouTube account, YouTube allows you to associate your browsing behavior directly with your personal profile. You can prevent this by logging out of your YouTube account. YouTube is used to help make our website appealing. This constitutes a justified interest pursuant to Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR.

9. AI Chatbots (Anthropic)

Our IFPA Referee Assistant and IFPA Tournament Director Assistant are AI chatbots. When you use them, the questions you type and the rest of the conversation are transmitted to Anthropic, PBC (USA), which operates the underlying AI model (Claude) and processes your input to generate the answer. Please do not enter personal data into the chat. According to Anthropic, API inputs and outputs are not used to train its models. Transfers to the USA are safeguarded by the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46 GDPR) and, where applicable, Anthropic's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. If you use the share function, the conversation is stored under a publicly accessible link on our hosting provider's storage (Vercel). The legal basis for this processing is Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR (providing the chat function you requested). More information: https://www.anthropic.com/privacy

10. External Links

Our website contains links to external websites of third parties. We have no influence on the content of these websites. Therefore, we cannot assume any liability for this external content. The respective provider or operator of the pages is always responsible for the content of the linked pages.

11. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to change this privacy policy at any time with effect for the future. A current version is always available directly on this page. Please visit the page regularly and inform yourself about the current privacy policy.