Privacy Policy

Effective — 14 August 2026

This policy explains what Cricket Times collects, why, how long it is kept, and who can see it. Cricket Times is operated by Dreamers LLC, a Washington State limited liability company, at cricketimes.com. Dreamers LLC is the controller of the personal data described here. It sits alongside our Terms of Service.

1. What we collect

1.1 Account information

Much of the site can be read without an account. If you create one, we collect your email address, a password (which is hashed by Google Firebase Authentication — we never see or store the password itself), the display name you choose to appear beside your comments, and the access level your account holds. We also record when your account was created and when it last signed in.

1.2 Subscription information

If you subscribe, payment is handled by Stripe through its Managed Payments service, under which Stripe acts as merchant of record for the transaction rather than simply processing a payment on our behalf. Stripe provides that service through a Stripe company called Sold through Link, LLC, and the name you will actually see is Link — they are the same organisation. We never receive or store your card number.

Because of that arrangement, Link — not Cricket Times — holds the payment relationship with you. Link collects and holds your payment details and billing address, sends your receipt and invoice, handles refunds and disputes, and gives you an account at link.com where you can see your order history, update your card, and cancel. Those emails come from Link and we cannot change or suppress them. Stripe and Link process this data under Stripe’s own privacy policy.

What we hold is narrower: the status of your subscription — whether it is active, cancelled, or lapsed — the identifiers Stripe gives us so the two systems can refer to the same subscription, and the country in which the card used was issued (see section 1.8).

One consequence you should know about. If you ask Link to delete your data, Stripe will cancel any subscription bought through Managed Payments and delete the associated records from our Stripe account as well as its own. That happens on Link’s side and we cannot prevent or reverse it. It does not delete your Cricket Times account, your comments, or anything else described in this policy — for that, write to us as described in section 6.

1.3 The newsletter

The newsletter is separate from your account, and subscribing to it is entirely voluntary. A signup box appears in more than one place — beneath articles, on the subscribe page, at the end of a Yorker quiz, and on the coming-soon page — but they are all the same list, used for the same single purpose: sending you summaries of what has been published on Cricket Times. Where you signed up makes no difference to what you receive, and we do not maintain a second list for any other use. We do record which box an address came from, so that we know which parts of the site people sign up from.

If you sign up we collect your email address and, if you give it, your first name, which is optional and used only to address the emails. Submitting the form is not enough on its own. We send a confirmation email, and you are added to the list only when you click the link in it; if you never click it, nothing is ever sent to you. That click is also the record that you asked for the emails — it is timestamped, as is the moment the address joins the list.

Newsletter subscriptions are stored and sent by MailerLite, our email service provider, under its own privacy policy. MailerLite is based in the European Union. MailerLite records whether you open a newsletter email and whether you click a link inside it, which is how it reports whether an issue was read. That is measurement of the email, in your mail client, and is separate from the site itself — no third-party code runs on the pages where you read (see section 5). Signing up to the newsletter does not create a Cricket Times account; if you also hold an account, the email address on it is held separately by us as account data, as described in section 1.1.

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the foot of any newsletter email, or by writing to contact@cricketimes.com. We action unsubscribe and deletion requests promptly, and unsubscribing from the newsletter does not affect your account or subscription.

1.4 How the site is read (aggregate measurement)

We measure how the site is used, so that we can tell which writing is worth continuing and which parts of the site nobody opens. This measurement is built by us and runs on our own Firebase infrastructure. It is not Google Analytics, and no analytics vendor, advertising network, or data broker receives any of it.

It is not tied to you. The measurement counts pages and visits, not readers. A page view adds one to that page's total; a visit adds its length to a running figure for the day. What survives is a set of totals — how many times each page was opened, how long readers stayed, how much of that time was active rather than idle. We do not keep, and cannot reconstruct, a list of which pages any particular account opened. We collect:

We do not follow you across other websites, we do not buy or receive data about you from anyone else, and we do not build an advertising profile. None of this is used to personalise the site — there is no recommendation engine, no ranking that moves with your history, no article ordering or pricing that varies by account. The measurement feeds editorial decisions we make afterwards: which subjects to keep writing about, which parts of the site nobody opens. If that changes, section 8 applies — we would say so on this page before it started.

1.5 Sign-in records

Separately from the measurement above, we keep a record of each time an account signs in: the email address, a timestamp set by our server, and the page you were on when you signed in. We use these records for security and for helping readers who have trouble signing in. They record that you arrived, not what you went on to read. They are kept while your account is open and are deleted when it is closed; you can also ask us to delete them sooner.

1.6 Comments, reactions, and submissions

If you post a comment we store its text, your display name, your account identifier, and the time it was posted.

Reactions are counted, but not attributed. You need to be signed in to react — that is what keeps the counts honest — but we do not record which account reacted to what. What we store is the total on each comment and nothing else, so there is no record here, and none we could produce, of what any particular reader reacted to. Your own browser remembers your reactions locally so that a button you have already pressed still looks pressed to you; that record sits on your device, is described in section 5, and is not sent to us.

If you submit an article or other material as a contributor, we store the submission and anything you upload with it. Submitting requires an account, and the submission is held against your account identifier.

1.7 Technical records

Our hosting and server infrastructure is provided by Google Firebase and Google Cloud, which keeps operational logs — including IP addresses, request times, and browser and device information — as an ordinary part of serving and securing a website. Google handles this under its Firebase privacy documentation. We use these logs for security, abuse prevention, and debugging, and we do not use them to identify readers. Section 1.8 describes the one place where we do derive your country from an IP address.

1.8 Where you are, and why we need to know

Two things about this site depend on which country you are in: the price and currency we show you, and whether a paid subscription is available to you at all — we can only sell subscriptions in the countries listed in our Service Area, because those are the countries where our payment provider handles local sales tax on our behalf.

To do that, we derive a country from the IP address of the request when you visit the subscribe page. It has to work this way round: the price must be on the screen before you type a card number, so we cannot take the country from your card. We work out the country only — not a city, a region, or a location on a map — and we do not store a history of it or attach it to your reading. The country we have detected is shown to you on the subscribe page. If it is wrong, tell us and we will put it right — the page explains how.

Separately, when a subscription is purchased, we record the country in which the payment card was issued, which Stripe passes to us. We compare it with the country we showed the price for. This is how we check that subscriptions are not bought from countries we cannot sell into, and that regional pricing is not obtained by misrepresenting location — both of which our Terms of Service prohibit. Where we find a mismatch we may cancel the subscription and refund the unused portion. We do not use this for anything else, and it tells us the issuing country of a card, not where you were standing.

These records are kept for 24 months and then deleted, together with a note of what we decided in any case we acted on.

2. Why we collect it, and on what basis

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object on the basis of your particular situation. The measurement described in section 1.4 is not tied to your account, so there is no record of your reading to stop or delete. What is tied to you is the sign-in record in section 1.5, and you can ask us to delete the records we hold for you.

3. How long we keep it

• The underlying event log — the individual page views and timings, before they are added up — is kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. Deletion runs as a background job rather than on the stroke of the ninetieth day, so an entry may survive a short time past its expiry before it is removed. These entries carry the temporary visit identifier described in section 1.4, not your account.
• The totals derived from them — how many times each page was opened, and how long readers stayed — are kept indefinitely. They are figures about pages rather than about people, and contain nothing that identifies anyone.
• Sign-in records — kept while your account is open, and deleted when you close it, or sooner if you ask.
• Account and subscription records — kept while your account is open, and deleted when you close it, except where we must keep payment and tax records for longer by law.
• Location and card-country checks (section 1.8) — kept for 24 months and then deleted, along with a note of any decision we took. Payment records held by Link are kept under Stripe’s own policy, not ours.
• A record that an account was closed — the email address, the dates, and what was removed — is kept for six years and then deleted automatically, so that we can show a deletion request was made and carried out. It is not used for anything else: it is not a mailing list, not a suppression list, and is not consulted if you open a new account. Six years is the period in which a claim arising from your subscription could still be brought under Washington law.
• Comments — kept while posted. If you close your account you can ask us to remove your comments as well; say so when you write to us.
• Newsletter subscriptions — held by MailerLite until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion, together with the confirmation record and the open-and-click records described in section 1.3.
• Published contributor articles — kept in the archive indefinitely, as any publication keeps what it has published.

4. Who can see it

Internally: only the site's administrators. The measurement collections are written by our servers rather than by your browser, and the security rules that govern them permit reading only by an administrator account. The aggregate figures contain nothing that identifies a reader.

Externally: we do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. The only third parties that handle your data are the service providers we need in order to operate — Google Firebase and Google Cloud (hosting, authentication, database, and email delivery for account messages), Stripe, including its Managed Payments entity Sold through Link, LLC (subscription payments, as merchant of record — see section 1.2), and MailerLite (the newsletter) — and each only to the extent needed to provide that service. We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.

Cricket Times is operated from the United States and the data described here is processed there. If you are in the UK or EU, that is a transfer outside your jurisdiction; our providers operate under standard contractual clauses and their own transfer frameworks.

5. Cookies and local storage

There are no advertising cookies on this site, no third-party tracking cookies, and no cookie banner — because there is nothing we would need to ask your consent for. No page on this site loads a third-party tracking script of any kind. What we use ourselves is strictly functional: a session cookie and a token that keep you signed in, and a small amount of browser storage that remembers things like whether you have already reacted to a comment and whether this visit has already been counted as a sign-in. Clearing your browser storage signs you out; it does not delete anything we hold.

6. Your rights

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete the sign-in records we hold for your account;
• delete your account and the records attached to it;
• stop sending you email.

Write to contact@cricketimes.com. We will action requests promptly and will not charge you or make you give a reason. Depending on where you live you may also have a right to complain to a data-protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office — and we would rather you came to us first, but that is your right either way.

We will confirm any request with the account holder before acting on it, using the email address on the account. Because closing an account cannot be undone, we will ask you to confirm that specifically before we delete anything. Closing your account ends any access it holds, so cancel an active subscription first if you want to use out the time you have paid for.

There is a second route we do not control. Because Stripe is the merchant of record for subscriptions (section 1.2), you can also ask Link directly to delete your data. If you do, Stripe will cancel the subscription and remove the payment records from its systems and from our Stripe account. That is Link’s process, not ours, and we cannot reverse it — and it will not delete your Cricket Times account, your comments, or your sign-in records, which are separate and which only we can remove. If you want everything gone, write to us as well.

We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights: your subscription, price, and access stay exactly the same.

7. Children

Cricket Times is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

8. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The version on this page is the one in force, and the effective date at the top changes when it does.

Where a change materially affects how we collect, use, or share your personal information, we will publish notice of it prominently on the Site at least 30 days before it takes effect, so that you have time to decide what you want to do before it does. Corrections and clarifications that do not affect how we handle your data take effect when posted.

This policy describes what Cricket Times does today. We currently run no advertising and no third-party analytics service. If that changes — if we introduce advertising on the freely available pages, or bring in an outside analytics provider — we will update this page and say so before it starts, and we will put in place whatever consent mechanism the law where you live requires. We will not quietly begin doing something this page says we do not do.

9. Contact