Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and who this covers

SportzCrazy is published by Catalyst Web Trendz Pvt. Ltd., D 29, 2nd Floor, Greater Kailash Enclave 2, Greater Kailash, New Delhi – 110048. For the purposes of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (the "DPDP Act") we are the Data Fiduciary for personal data processed through this website, our newsletter and our community boards. You are the Data Principal.

This policy applies to everyone who reads the site, subscribes to The Daily Siren, creates a SportzCrazy account, posts in the fan forum, votes in a poll, or contacts the newsroom. It does not apply to independent websites we link to, which run their own policies.

2. What we collect

We group everything we hold into four buckets:

• Reader data — pages viewed, time on page, scroll depth, referring link, approximate city-level location derived from IP, device type, browser and operating system.
• Subscription data — the email address you give us for The Daily Siren, your chosen sports interests, and whether each edition was delivered and opened.
• Account and community data — display name, email, password (stored only as a salted hash), avatar choice, favourite teams, posts, replies, poll votes, reactions, reports you file and moderation actions taken on your account.
• Commercial and enquiry data — the name, organisation, email, phone number, country, service, budget range and message you submit through the contact form, plus any correspondence that follows.

We do not ask for, and ask you not to send us, financial account numbers, government identity numbers, health information or any other sensitive category of data through the site.

3. Lawful basis for processing

Under section 4 of the DPDP Act we process personal data either on the basis of your consent or for certain legitimate uses. Specifically:

• Consent — newsletter subscription, non-essential and advertising cookies, community account creation, and contact-form submissions. Consent is collected through a clear affirmative action (ticking a box, pressing Accept, submitting a form) and is recorded with a timestamp.
• Legitimate use — data you voluntarily provide for a purpose you have not objected to, such as replying to an email you sent us, plus security logging and fraud prevention.
• Legal obligation — retention required by the Information Technology Act, 2000 and rules made under it, and by tax and GST record-keeping requirements.

Where processing rests on consent, you may withdraw it at any time and with the same ease as it was given. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of anything done before it.

4. Reader analytics

We measure readership so that we can decide what to cover more of and what to stop covering. Analytics are collected in aggregate: we look at how many people read a Ranji Trophy report versus an ISL tactical piece, not at what any named individual reads. IP addresses used for city-level geolocation are truncated before storage and are not retained in raw form beyond thirty days.

You can opt out of analytics cookies from the consent banner. Doing so does not degrade the site — live scores, the forum and the newsletter all work identically without them.

5. Cookies and similar technologies

We set four classes of cookie and local-storage entry:

• Strictly necessary — session integrity, login state, CSRF protection and your consent choice itself (stored locally as szc-cookie-consent). These cannot be switched off.
• Preference — your favourite teams, your poll votes (stored locally as szc-poll-*) and your last-used match-centre tab.
• Analytics — readership measurement described in section 4.
• Advertising — frequency capping, campaign attribution and interest categories, described in section 6.

Declining consent blocks the analytics and advertising classes before they are set. You can also clear everything from your browser settings at any time; preference cookies live for twelve months, analytics for thirteen, and advertising for no more than ninety days.

6. Advertising and ad-tech partners

SportzCrazy is free to read because it carries advertising. Where a campaign is sold directly by our own team, no third party receives your data at all — we simply count impressions on our own servers. Where inventory is filled programmatically, a demand partner may set a cookie or read a device identifier in order to cap how often you see the same creative and to attribute a click.

We contractually prohibit our advertising partners from using SportzCrazy data to build sensitive-category audience segments, from re-identifying readers, and from onward-selling data to fourth parties. We do not run advertising on any page that we have classified as directed at children, and we do not permit betting, gambling, real-money fantasy or loan-app creatives anywhere on the site.

Sponsored and branded editorial is labelled as such at the top of the page. It is subject to this policy in exactly the same way as the rest of the site.

7. Newsletter data

The Daily Siren goes out at 7:30 AM IST on working days. To send it we store your email address, your subscription date, the interest tags you selected, and delivery telemetry (delivered, bounced, opened, unsubscribed). We use open and click data only to remove addresses that have stopped engaging and to fix deliverability problems with a particular mail provider.

Every edition carries a one-click unsubscribe link in the header and the footer. Unsubscribing removes you from the sending list immediately and your address is deleted within thirty days, retained only on a short suppression list so that we do not accidentally re-add you. We never rent, sell or trade the subscriber list.

8. Community profiles and user-generated content

If you create an account to post in the fan forum, your display name, avatar, join date, post count and posting history are visible to other readers by design — that is what a public forum is. Your email address, password hash and IP logs are never displayed and are visible only to the moderation team.

Anything you post publicly (comments, replies, poll answers, match reactions, images you attach) is content you have chosen to publish. You keep ownership of it; the licence you grant us to display and syndicate it is described in section 6 of our Terms of Use. Because other readers may quote or archive a public post, deleting your account removes your profile and unlinks your posts but cannot recall copies that already exist elsewhere on the internet.

Reports you file against another member, and moderation notes about your account, are retained for twenty-four months so that repeat behaviour can be recognised.

9. Sharing and disclosure

We share personal data only with: our hosting, email delivery, error-monitoring and payment processing providers, each under a written contract limiting them to processing on our instructions; our advertising partners on the restricted basis set out in section 6; our professional advisers where required; and law enforcement or a court where we are obliged to do so under the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Code of Criminal Procedure, or a valid order.

We do not sell personal data. Where a provider processes data outside India, we transfer it only to jurisdictions not restricted by the Central Government under section 16 of the DPDP Act, and under contractual safeguards.

10. Retention

We keep data only as long as the purpose lasts. In practice: raw IP logs, 30 days; analytics events, 13 months; newsletter subscriber records, until you unsubscribe plus 30 days; community accounts, for as long as the account is open; deleted community accounts, 30 days in a recoverable state and then erased; contact-form enquiries, 24 months; invoices, GST records and payment evidence, 8 years as required by tax law.

Once a retention period ends the data is deleted or irreversibly anonymised. Anonymised aggregate statistics — for example "42% of Test-match readers arrive from mobile" — are not personal data and may be kept indefinitely.

11. Your rights and account deletion

Under the DPDP Act you have the right to obtain a summary of the personal data we hold and how it is processed; to have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected or completed; to have data erased where it is no longer needed; to nominate another individual to exercise these rights if you die or become incapacitated; and to a readily available grievance redressal mechanism.

You can delete a SportzCrazy account yourself from Account Settings; deletion is confirmed by email and completed within thirty days. For everything else, write to the Grievance Officer using the details in section 14. We respond to rights requests within thirty days and never charge for the first request in a twelve-month period. You also retain the right to complain to the Data Protection Board of India if you are not satisfied with our response.

12. Children's data

SportzCrazy is written for a general adult audience. We do not knowingly create accounts for, or collect personal data from, anyone under eighteen without verifiable parental consent as required by section 9 of the DPDP Act. We do not run behavioural advertising to, or track, any user we identify as a child, and we do not use their data for profiling.

If you believe a child has created an account or submitted data to us, write to the Grievance Officer and we will verify and erase the account, usually within seven working days.

13. Security and breach notification

Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes and are never recoverable in plain text. Access to production data is restricted to named staff, logged, and reviewed quarterly. Our reasonable security safeguards are those expected of a body corporate under section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

No system is perfect. If a personal data breach occurs we will notify the Data Protection Board of India and every affected Data Principal without undue delay, describing what happened, what data was involved and what you should do about it.

14. Grievance Officer and changes to this policy

Complaints and rights requests should be addressed to the Grievance Officer, SportzCrazy (a named role within Catalyst Web Trendz Pvt. Ltd., appointed under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the DPDP Act, 2023) at the address, email and phone number in the block below. We acknowledge every grievance within seventy-two hours and resolve it within thirty days.

We update this policy when the law changes or when we change what we do with data. Material changes are announced on the site and in The Daily Siren at least fourteen days before they take effect, and the "last updated" date above always reflects the current version. Any dispute arising from this policy is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts at New Delhi.