Last updated 26 August 2026
Sonar is a swim-records tracker for competitive swim clubs. Most of the people in it are children. This page says exactly what we hold, why, who can see it, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
Sonar is operated from Ontario, Canada. Contact: swimsonar@gmail.com. We are the organisation responsible for the personal information described here.
Clubs give us the documents they already distribute to their families: rosters, Top Times reports, entry confirmations and time standards. From those we hold swimmers' names, birth dates, club and training group, race results, entries and personal bests. This is club information about club activity. We do not buy it, scrape it from a governing body's database, or obtain it from anywhere other than the club itself.
This is the practice-tracking feature, and the important thing to know first is that most of it never reaches us at all. Practices are read from Apple Health or Health Connect on the phone and drawn on the phone. Sonar shows your last 7 practices this way, free, and none of those leave the device. There is nothing for us to hold, disclose, or lose.
Uploading practices to our servers — so they survive a lost phone, keep going past the last 7, and can be seen by a parent — is the paid part, and it is off until somebody buys it.
Only pool swims, and only these:
Sonar never asks for heart rate. It also does not ask for sleep, steps, weight or body measurements, nutrition, menstrual or reproductive health, or anything at all outside a swim.
Two honest footnotes, because the difference between them is the difference between a promise we keep and one we only appear to:
Sonar never writes anything back to Apple Health or Health Connect, and it does not use health data for advertising — there is no advertising in Sonar.
We do not sell personal information. We do not run advertising. We do not build profiles for anyone other than you and your club.
Access is enforced in the database itself, on every query, not only in the interface. In practice:
Practice data is separate from all of that, because most of it is not on our servers to have rules about. Free practice history lives on the swimmer's phone and is visible to whoever is holding it. Once a family subscribes and practices are uploaded:
Swimmers in Sonar are usually minors, and we treat that as the default rather than the exception.
A swimmer who is 13 or over signs up with their own email address and needs nothing from a parent. We ask when they were born, never whether they are over 13 — a yes/no question tells you which answer gets you in.
A child under 13 cannot sign up alone, because their email address is itself personal information and asking for it is already collection. Instead:
r****m@gmail.com— as a reminder, because a ten-year-old may genuinely not know which of a parent's addresses was used.The code expires after a week and can be reissued at any time. We record who issued it, which child it was for, and the version of this policy that was in force when they did — because the question later is never just did a parent agree but what did they agree to.
An approval code approves an account. It does not turn on health tracking. Nothing about a younger swimmer's experience differs from a 15-year-old's: the same free tier, and the same paywall before any practice data reaches us.
We keep this list short on purpose. Each of these does one job:
Account information is kept while your account exists. Club results are kept as part of the club's record. Delete your account and the personal side of this goes immediately, as described below.
Free practice history has no retention policy, because we never had it. It is read from the phone each time the screen is opened and drawn there. Deleting the app ends it; we are not involved.
Uploaded practice data — the paid feature — is kept while the subscription is active. Two things end it sooner, and they behave differently on purpose:
The difference is deliberate. Turning it off is a decision; a card expiring in August is not, and losing a season to a billing failure is a punishment nobody chose.
While a subscription is active, we keep the whole history rather than trimming it to a fixed number of months. Seeing this season against last season is the point of the feature, and a swimmer who has been at it for years should not lose the early part of that.
Approval codes(see Children) expire after a week. The record that one was issued and redeemed is kept for as long as the child's account exists, because it is the evidence that an adult agreed — deleting it would destroy the only thing that answers a later question about consent. It goes when the account goes.
You can delete your account yourself, from inside the app, without emailing anyone. Go to You → Account → Delete account. It takes effect immediately.
What is deleted: your login, your profile, your display name and photo, your verified links to swimmers, anyone you follow, your access requests, and any practice data recorded for swimmers you are responsible for.
What stays:the swimmer's roster entry and their race results. Those belong to the club, came from the club, and would still exist if Sonar had never been written. Administrative logs are kept for security, with your email removed from them.
Deleting your account does not cancel a paid subscription and does not issue a refund. Subscriptions are billed by Apple or Google, and only they can cancel one. Cancel it in your Apple ID subscription settings or in Google Play before deleting, or you will continue to be charged.
Under Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Email swimsonar@gmail.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are unsatisfied you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who can see it, we will say so in the app rather than quietly updating the date at the top.
Questions about this document? Email swimsonar@gmail.com.