Privacy.

Penguin Robotics is a nonprofit robotics team based in Vancouver, BC. As a nonprofit organization operating in British Columbia, we are subject to BC's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), which governs how organizations collect, use, and disclose personal information. This page describes every place personal information lives across our websites and apps, how long we keep it, and how to reach us about it. Our designated privacy contact ishello@penguinrobotics.ca.

The surfaces

We run four things: this public site (penguinrobotics.ca), the volunteer portal (volunteer.penguinrobotics.ca), the member app for current competitors and alumni (app.penguinrobotics.ca), and a staff dashboard used by our coaches and event organizers. What we collect depends on which one you use.

What we collect

Public site. No accounts, no sign-in. We set two optional preference cookies (season and grade) that remember your leaderboard filters for one year and are never used to identify you. Like nearly all websites, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) processes standard request metadata such as IP address and user agent to deliver pages and protect against abuse. We do not build profiles from it.

Member & alumni profiles. Team member and alumni profiles (name, graduation year, school/university, bio, role, social links, photo) are private by default. A profile appears in the public directory only when the member opts in, using a toggle in the member app (settings or onboarding); members can unpublish at any time with the same toggle, and the change takes effect immediately.

Accounts. The member app and volunteer portal use accounts (email or Google/GitHub sign-in). We store the account's name, email, and sign-in credentials with our authentication provider. For security we keep a record of each sign-in session, including IP address and browser user agent; expired session records are deleted after 30 days. Accounts can enable web-push notifications, which stores a device push token until you turn notifications off or remove the device.

Volunteering. When you sign up for volunteer shifts we store your name, contact email, and shift attendance. Volunteers may optionally provide an emergency contact, and students a parent/guardian contact — these exist solely so event-day staff can reach someone in an emergency, are visible only to event staff, and are cleared if a volunteer profile sits unused for two years. Group bookings (for example, a teacher reserving seats for a class) may include a seat-holder's name; those names are removed 90 days after the event.

Email. If you subscribe to our newsletter or volunteer announcements, we store your email address to send them. Subscription is confirmed by a double opt-in link before any marketing email is sent. Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe. We track whether emails were delivered, opened, or clicked (to prune unengaged addresses); those engagement records are deleted after 90 days. Bounced and unsubscribed addresses move to a permanent suppression list so we don't email them again.

Minors

Many VEX competitors are under 19. We deliberately minimize what we collect: we never ask for birthdates, home addresses, or phone numbers of students — the volunteer portal records a coarse age band instead. Student profiles in the public directory are published with coach or guardian involvement, and a guardian may request removal at any time using the contact below. Emergency and guardian contacts collected for event-day safety are used for that purpose only.

How long we keep things

Your choices

You can withdraw consent or ask us to correct or delete your personal information at any time: unsubscribe from any email, flip your profile visibility off in the app, or email us. We respond to access, correction, and deletion requests within 30 days. Deleting an account removes sign-ins, sessions, notifications, volunteer signups, and contact details; a published directory profile is removed too when you ask. Public competition results (scores, rankings, awards) are retained as the public record of the sport even after a profile is removed.

Contact

Privacy questions, access or deletion requests, or a complaint:hello@penguinrobotics.ca. If we can't resolve your concern, you may contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC. Our terms of use are atpenguinrobotics.ca/terms.

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