For parents

What this is, plainly

Fanzwipe is a fantasy football game. Scottish Premiership players come at your child one at a time, and they zwipe right to pick a player or left to skip, building a squad of fifteen. A couple of rules keep it sensible: a proper formation, and limits on how many players they can take from any one club. That team then scores points off real fixtures. There's also a smaller guessing game inside it called Streak. That's the whole thing.

It was built in Edinburgh by a dad and his 12-year-old son as an alternative to social media. It's meant to be the thing he sends his mates, not a lecture, and not a data-collection exercise dressed up as a game.

One thing worth knowing: scoring from real matches isn't live yet. The squad saves and displays now, and points start with the new season, which opens at the end of July.

What it stores

A nickname your child chooses

The game asks for this first, before they play. They pick it themselves, it's filtered for anything unsuitable, and it's the only thing other players see. We don't ask for a real name and they're told not to use one.

Their best score

So it can show on the leaderboard.

A device code and a hashed recovery code

So the game remembers them on their phone, and so they can get their nickname back on a new one. Hashed means we keep a scrambled version, not the code itself.

That's the lot. It's held on Cloudflare, the same service the site runs on.

What it does not do

• No real name, no email, no age, no location, no photos.
• No accounts and no sign-up. There's nothing to log into.
• No chat, no messaging, no comments, no way for one player to contact another.
• No user uploads of any kind.
• No ads and no ad networks.
• No tracking, and no cookies used to follow anyone around.
• No third-party sharing of anything.

A note on the photos you won't see

There are no photographs of footballers anywhere, and there never will be. Players are shown as simple illustrated figures and their club's colours. That's deliberate, partly legal and partly because this doesn't need real faces to be fun. Club badges aren't used either.

Removing a nickname, or telling us about one

If you'd like a nickname taken off the leaderboard and its record removed, that's fine and it's quick. Email design@poweronmedia.com with the nickname and it'll be dealt with.

Same address if you spot a nickname that shouldn't be there. Nicknames are filtered automatically, but no filter catches everything, so if something's got through please say and it'll be removed.

The privacy page sets out exactly what's held.