Text messages

How someone opts in

• They sign in to their own PaddleLens account and open Settings → Notifications. There is no other route in: no coach, administrator or import can add a number to an account. If they type a number while creating an account, their browser may prefill it on that Notifications page, but signup does not send or store it and the browser discards the handoff from its history as soon as the page opens.
• They type their mobile number, read the consent text, and tick a box that is not ticked for them. The button stays disabled until they do.
• We text a one-time code to that number. Nothing else is ever sent to a number until the code comes back — so a number nobody holds is never messaged.
• They enter the code. One welcome message follows, naming their club and the two promises we keep, so they know what a real message from us looks like.

What the form says

Reproduced below word for word, including the small print. This is what is on the screen at the moment a number is typed.

A copy, not the form — it collects nothing. The working one is inside a member's account.

Every message we send

There are six, and this is all of them. They are fixed templates; the only part a person writes is the body of an announcement, which their own coach types.

Frequency, and what it costs you

Message frequency varies — it depends entirely on how often your own club cancels a session, posts something urgent, posts a lineup or asks unanswered members about a practice. For most clubs that is a handful of messages a year; a club that trains through a bad winter may send more. There is a daily ceiling per club, so a fault at our end cannot turn into a flood at yours. Message and data rates may apply: those are your carrier's, between you and them. We never charge a member anything to receive a message — clubs pay for their own texts.

Stopping, restarting, and getting help

You can also simply delete the number in Settings → Notifications, which stops everything without recording an opt-out. Either way, nothing else about your account changes: email keeps working exactly as before.

What we never do

• We never put a link in a text. Not a login link, not a report, not a password reset. Text messages have no sender authentication — anyone can send one claiming to be us — so the one defence we can actually give you is that a real message from us never asks you to tap anything. A text that claims to be PaddleLens and contains a link is not from us.
• We never ask for a free-form reply. An RSVP question asks only for Y, N, or M (Maybe) with its six-character practice code; STOP and HELP keep their ordinary meanings.
• No marketing, no promotions, no fundraising, no third-party content, and never another club's messages.
• Nothing about your paddling travels by text — no report, score, measurement, photo or video. A message carries a club name, a date, and what a coach typed.
• We never use a text message to reset a password or approve anything, because phone numbers can be stolen from their owner by the phone company itself.
• Your mobile information is never sold, and never shared with anyone for their own marketing. The only company that receives it is the one that carries the message — see below.

Who else sees the number

Twilio Inc. (United States), which sends the messages for us, receives replies, and passes us the sender number, reply text, provider message ID and delivery time. The six-character code is what we use to select a practice; we never choose one from the number alone. Twilio and the phone companies act on our instructions and may not use this information for anything else. That is the whole list, and it is on the subprocessors page with everything else that touches our data. Privacy §2, §6 and §7 cover what we store and for how long, and Terms §8a is the agreement itself.