PRIVACY POLICY

01 Who We Are

Exodius FTC is FIRST® Tech Challenge Team 31579, a student robotics team based in Fremont, California, founded in 2025. This website exists to document our robot, our competition seasons, our community outreach, and our sponsorship program.

We are a student-run team. We are not a company, we have no commercial product, and we have no interest in your personal data beyond being able to write you back.

02 What We Collect

There is exactly one place on this site where you can hand us personal information: the form on our Contact page. When you submit it, we receive:

• NAME — whatever you enter in the name field.
• EMAIL — so we have a return address to reply to.
• MESSAGE — the body of what you wrote us.

That's the entire list. We do not ask for your phone number, your address, your date of birth, or your payment details. If you volunteer extra information inside the message box, we'll have it, so please only send what you're comfortable sharing.

03 What We Do Not Collect

We want to be specific here, because most privacy policies are vague on purpose. As of the date above, this website:

• NO cookies of any kind, including tracking cookies.
• NO Google Analytics or any other analytics package.
• NO advertising pixels, retargeting tags, or social trackers.
• NO account system, logins, or stored user profiles.
• NO data stored in your browser's local storage or session storage.
• NO sale, rental, or trade of personal data. Ever. To anyone.

The visual effects on this site — the cursor glow, the scroll warp, the countdown timer — all run locally in your browser and send nothing anywhere.

04 Third Parties In The Loop

Even a simple static site touches a few outside services. Here is the honest, complete list, and what each one sees:

We don't control these companies and we can't speak for them. Each operates under its own privacy policy, and we'd encourage you to read them if that matters to you. We chose them because they're standard, well-established infrastructure for a small team site.

05 Why We Use It & How Long We Keep It

Contact form submissions are used for one purpose: answering you. That might be a sponsorship conversation, an outreach or mentorship request, a question about the robot, or a press inquiry. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not pass your message to sponsors or third parties.

Messages live in the team's email inbox. We keep them as long as they're useful for the conversation and for our sponsorship records — generally through the end of the competition season, after which we clear out what we no longer need. If you'd like your message deleted sooner, just ask.

06 Students, Minors, and Photos

This is the part that matters most to us, because our team is made up of minors.

Photographs and names of team members appear on this site — on the About page, the outreach pages, and in season media. These are published with the knowledge and consent of the students and their parents or guardians, consistent with FIRST's youth protection expectations. We do not publish students' home addresses, personal phone numbers, personal email addresses, school schedules, or any other information that could be used to locate or contact a student directly.

If you are a parent, guardian, or team member and want a photo or name removed, email us and we will take it down. We will not ask you to justify the request and we will not argue about it. Removal is the default answer.

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has sent us personal information through the contact form, please email us and we will delete it. This mirrors FIRST's own policy, which does not permit youth under 13 to create accounts or submit personal data directly.

Separately, be aware that at FIRST competition events, photography and video are common and are not under our control — spectators, other teams, event volunteers, and FIRST itself may capture and publish images. That is governed by FIRST's privacy policy, not by ours.

07 Sponsors

If you sponsor us, we will display your company name and logo on our Sponsors page, on team materials, and potentially on the robot itself, at the level agreed in your sponsorship tier. That's the point of sponsoring us.

Business contact details you share during that process — a rep's name, a work email — stay internal to the team and our mentors. They are used to coordinate the sponsorship and to send you season updates. They are never published on the site and never shared with other sponsors.

08 Security

This site is served over HTTPS. Form submissions are encrypted in transit. Team email is protected with strong passwords and multi-factor authentication where the platform supports it.

We're a student team, not a security company, and we won't pretend otherwise: no system is perfectly secure. Please don't send us anything genuinely sensitive — financial details, government ID numbers, passwords — through the contact form. We will never ask you for any of those.

09 Your Rights

Whatever jurisdiction you're in, and regardless of whether a specific law applies to a high school robotics team, we'll honor these requests:

• ACCESS — ask what information of yours we hold.
• CORRECTION — ask us to fix something that's wrong.
• DELETION — ask us to erase your message or your details.
• TAKEDOWN — ask us to remove a photo, a name, or a logo.

Email us and we'll act on it. Expect a response within a few weeks — we're students, and during build season our reply times get worse before they get better.

10 Changes To This Policy

If we add something to this site that changes what data it handles — an analytics tool, an embedded video, a newsletter signup — we'll update this page and change the date at the top. We won't quietly start collecting more and leave this page stale.

11 Contact

Questions, concerns, takedown requests, or anything else about this policy: