Privacy policy
How Clinch handles your training record, and the health data you choose to connect to it.
Clinch is a training log for martial artists. You record sessions, keep a permanent history, and share what you choose with the people you train with. This policy explains what we store, why, who can see it and how to get rid of it.
Controller: Jamie Shaw, trading as Clinch, N227 Folk at Florence Dock, 41–47 Chatfield Road, London SW11 3SH, United Kingdom
What we collect
Your account
When you sign in with Apple or Google we receive an account identifier and, unless you hide it, an email address. Apple's Hide My Email gives us a relay address instead, and Clinch works normally with one. We store that identifier, your username, display name, and anything you choose to add: a bio, a profile photo, a primary discipline, a home gym, and a general area such as a London borough. We never ask for or store a street address, a postcode, or your live location.
Your training
The sessions you log and everything attached to them — discipline, start time, duration, session types, optional round count, title, caption, gym, photos and the training partners you tag — along with planned sessions in your calendar, your running totals, the achievements those totals unlock, and your self-declared grade history.
Social activity
Who you follow, your reactions and comments, and the accounts you have blocked or reported.
Health data, only if you connect a wearable
If you connect WHOOP, Polar or Apple Health, Clinch imports workouts and the measurements attached to them: average and maximum heart rate, energy burned, WHOOP's strain score, time spent in each heart-rate zone, and how much of the workout the sensor actually captured.
This is special category data under the UK GDPR and we treat it differently from everything else on this page. We ask before any of it is read, we never read anything outside the workouts you have connected, and it is private to you by default — it appears to nobody else unless you explicitly attach it to a session you are sharing. It is never used in analytics, never used to rank anything, and never sold or shared for advertising.
Connecting a wearable is entirely optional. Clinch is designed to be fully useful with no hardware at all.
Technical data
A push notification token, if you allow notifications. Product analytics recording which features are used — these carry internal identifiers and coarse categories only, never your captions, comment text, photos, gym addresses or health measurements. Crash and error reports, so faults can be fixed.
Why we are allowed to hold it
- To provide the app — your account, your training record, the feed, following, reactions and comments
- Performance of our contract with you.
- Health data from a connected wearable
- Your explicit consent, given on the connection screen before anything is read, and withdrawable at any time by disconnecting.
- Safety, moderation, and investigating reports
- Our legitimate interest in keeping the community safe, and our legal obligations.
- Analytics and crash reporting
- Our legitimate interest in understanding whether the product works and fixing it when it does not.
Who can see your training
Every session carries a visibility setting — Everyone, Followers, or Only me — and you set the default for new sessions yourself. Accounts are public by default; you can make yours private.
Gym and location follow the session's visibility. Where you train is sensitive, so it is never shown more widely than the session it belongs to.
Heart rate from a wearable — average, peak and time in each zone — shows on a session to the people who can see that session, never more widely. You can hide it on any session, or turn it off for everything you import from then on in Wearables. Energy and strain scores are never shown to anyone.
Who we share it with
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. We use these processors to run the service:
- Convex — database, file storage and server functions. Everything described above is stored here.
- Apple and Google — sign-in only.
- Expo Push Service — delivering notifications you have opted into.
- PostHog — product analytics, on the restricted terms described above.
- Sentry — crash and error reporting.
- WHOOP, Polar and Apple Health — only if you connect them, and only to import your own workouts.
Convex stores Clinch’s data in the United States. PostHog and Sentry hold their data in the European Union. Expo and WHOOP are based in the United States, and Polar in Finland. Where personal data is held outside the UK, the transfer is covered by that processor’s data processing terms, which include the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.
How long we keep it
Your training record is kept for as long as your account exists — it is the thing you came here to build, and sessions are never silently removed.
When you delete your account, your profile and everything in it disappears from the app immediately, and the underlying records are then erased in the background: sessions, planned sessions, photos, statistics, achievements, reactions, comments, grade history, and all wearable health measurements. Where you signed in with Apple, we also revoke Clinch's access with Apple at that point.
Two deliberate exceptions. Reports you have filed about other people are kept as moderation evidence — otherwise deleting an account would be a way to erase a safety record. And if you delete a single session that a wearable imported, we keep the provider's identifier for that workout, stripped of every measurement, so the provider re-sending it cannot resurrect a session you deleted.
Your rights
Under the UK GDPR you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or hand it to another service. Where we rely on your consent — which is to say, health data — you can withdraw it at any time by disconnecting the provider in Clinch, and we will ask you whether to delete the measurements already imported.
You can delete your entire account from within the app, without asking us.
To exercise any of these rights, contact privacy@trainclinch.com.
If you think we have handled your data badly you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first.
Children
Clinch is for people aged 16 and over. If we learn that someone under 16 has created an account, we will delete it and everything in it.
Changes
If we change how we use your data we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where a change is significant, we will tell you in the app.