YOUTH CONTENT POLICY

RinkStop publishes hockey content about players, coaches, and organizations across every age level — including youth and adolescent hockey. This page explains how we handle content that involves minors, the regulatory frameworks we work within, and the controls available to parents and guardians.

Our compliance frameworks

RinkStop treats content involving minors under two complementary standards:

• COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, U.S.) — governs the collection of personal information from children under 13.
• TFAT (Treating Families as Third Parties, U.K. ICO age-appropriate design code) — broader framework for handling data and content involving minors, not limited to under-13s.

We apply both standards globally, regardless of where the child or the user is located. The TFAT framework in particular informs how we design features, defaults, and disclosure surfaces that may involve a minor or a minor’s parent.

What youth content we publish

RinkStop publishes two types of content that may involve minors:

• Public directory listings — youth teams, youth leagues, and youth tournaments that publish rosters and schedules through their own federations and websites.
• Editorial coverage — news, analysis, and how-to guides about youth hockey development, often covering well-known tournaments, development models, and parent-facing topics.

We do not publish personal contact information, home addresses, school affiliations, or sensitive biographical details about individual minors. Where individual player names appear in directory listings, they are limited to first name, last initial, jersey number, position, and team — the same scope used by most youth league public rosters.

Advertising on youth content

RinkStop’s youth-facing pages (/directory/youth-hockey, /guides/youth) are excluded from ad placement. This is a deliberate policy choice, not a technical limitation. We do not run contextual or personalized advertising against pages whose primary audience is parents or minors, and we do not use remarketing audiences derived from visits to those pages.

Parent and guardian claims

Parents and guardians can claim a minor’s player profile on RinkStop using the standard claim flow:

1. Sign in or create a free account.
2. Open the player profile and choose “Claim this listing.”
3. Indicate that this is a parent-managed claim for a minor.
4. Verify relationship to the minor via the verification flow.

Parent-managed claims bypass the standard claim cap (one claim per free tier) so that a parent can claim their child’s profile without consuming their own claim allocation. Once a parent claim is approved, the parent controls what appears on the player profile — including the option to limit the profile to first name and last initial only, or to request full takedown.

Removal and takedown

A parent or guardian can request removal or redaction of any content involving their child — including directory listings, photos, editorial mentions, and any other surface — by contacting youth-content@rinkstop.com. We honor these requests within five business days. Takedown is permanent; redaction is permanent unless the parent later requests that the content be restored.

What we don’t do

• We do not collect email addresses, phone numbers, or other direct contact info from users we know to be under 13.
• We do not run ad campaigns, retargeting, or lookalike audiences based on visits to youth-content pages.
• We do not profile minors for behavioral advertising purposes under any circumstance.
• We do not publish home addresses, school names, or specific birth dates for individual minors.
• We do not solicit or display user-uploaded photos of identifiable minors without a parent claim in place.

Data retention

Directory records for youth teams, leagues, and tournaments are retained as long as the underlying organization exists in the public record and the listing meets our quality thresholds. Editorial articles remain published unless corrected or removed through our standard corrections process. When a parent request leads to takedown of a player profile, the record is removed from active surface and from search results within five business days; the row is retained in our audit log only for as long as needed to demonstrate compliance.

How this policy fits with the rest of our policies

This page is one of a set. For related reading:

• Privacy Policy — full data-handling disclosure.
• Cookie Policy — what cookies and trackers RinkStop uses.
• Data Methodology — how directory information is sourced, verified, and updated.
• Editorial Policy — how we produce, fact-check, and correct editorial content.
• Corrections — public log and submission form.

Contact

To exercise any of the controls described on this page, to ask a question about how a specific piece of content is handled, or to report a concern about youth content on RinkStop, contact youth-content@rinkstop.com. We aim to respond within five business days, and sooner for takedown requests.