Last Updated: August 2023
- About This Privacy Policy
- Personal Data We Obtain
- How We Use Personal Data
- How We Disclose Personal Data
- Your Choices and Rights
- Data Security
- Third-Party Sites and Features
- Children and Parents
- Data Transfers
- Retention of Personal Data
- Changes to This Privacy Policy
- How to Contact Us
1. About This Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how the NBA Family (“we,” “our” or “us”) processes personal data about individuals in connection with providing our products and services, including through our websites, apps and digital platforms that link to or display this Privacy Policy (the “Online Services”) and our games, events, and other programs (together, the “Services”). The Policy describes the type of personal data we obtain, how we may use the data, to whom we may disclose it, the choices available regarding our use of the data, and other information about our privacy practices.
The NBA Family” includes the National Basketball Association (“NBA”), the Women’s National Basketball Association (“WNBA”), the NBA G League (“G League”), the NBA 2K League, the Basketball Africa League, and each of their respective teams and affiliates. The NBA teams include Atlanta Hawks, Boston Celtics, Brooklyn Nets, Charlotte Hornets, Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs, Toronto Raptors, Utah Jazz, and Washington Wizards. The privacy practices of our teams also may be subject to their own privacy notices describing how they process personal data collected in the context of their apps, websites, and arenas.
By using any of the Services, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to this Policy. Return to Top
2. Personal Data We Obtain
The types of personal data we collect include:
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- Contact information, such as name, email address, postal address, government identification, phone number and other similar contact data.
- User credentials, such as username, user ID, password, password hints and similar information used to create an account and authenticate users of the Online Services.
- Demographic data, including age and gender.
- Payment data, such as credit card information and billing address.
- Device data and online activity information, as described in the Automated Data Collection section below.
- Location information, such as general location information and precise geolocation data.
- Commercial information, such as products or services purchased, obtained or considered, games or events attended, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies.
- Interests and preferences, including inferences, such as information about your favorite teams and players, your home city, or your communications preferences. In addition to what you provide directly, we infer your interests and preferences from other data we collect, such as the content and advertisements you interact with while using the Online Services or when attending an NBA Family event.
- Online account information, including social media information, which we receive from third-party online services (for example, social media platforms) when you connect your use of our Online Services through their services.
- Communications and interactions, such as information you choose to provide to us in emails and other communications or interactions with us (for example, communications with NBA Family ticket representatives, customer service inquiries, product reviews, our automated chat features, and other feedback regarding our products and services), surveys you complete, registration or sign-up forms you submit, and other features of the Online Services.
- Professional and education information, such as level of education obtained, job title, industry sector, and company name.
We collect this personal data when you use our products and services or interact with us, such as through the Online Services or while attending our games, events, and other programs. You may provide personal data to us directly, such as when you submit your information through the Online Services or communicate with us, and through automated means as described below. We also obtain your personal data from other sources, including our affiliates, our partners, our customers, our vendors, third-party online services, social media platforms, data brokers, and public sources. In addition, we may obtain other personal data about you in ways that we describe at the time of collection.
When you interact with our Online Services or open our emails, we may obtain certain information by automated means, such as through cookies, web server logs, web beacons (including pixels and tags), technology to review how fans interact with our Online Services, scripts, and other technologies. These technologies help us (1) remember your information so you do not have to re-enter it; (2) track and understand how you use and interact with the Online Services; (3) provide you with advertising for products, services, tickets, programs, or events that might be of interest to you; (4) tailor the Online Services to your preferences; (5) measure the usability of the Online Services and the effectiveness of our communications; (6) authenticate your identity, protect against fraud, and provide our products and services; and (7) otherwise manage and enhance our products and services and help them work properly.
We may use these automated technologies through our Online Services to collect information about your device, browsing actions, usage patterns, and location, such as: your device IP address, location information, unique device identifiers, device type and model, device characteristics and settings, browser settings and characteristics, operating system type and version, language and country preferences, software installed on the device, usage statistics, error reports, referring emails and web addresses, and other device details. We also may obtain information about your interactions with our Online Services, such as the pages or portions of the Online Services you visit, links you click, programs or features of our Online Services you access or use, emails you open, content you engage with, referring or exit URLs, dates and times of usage, frequency and duration of your interactions, session information, clickstream and page-scroll data, and other information about your interactions with our Online Services.
Your browser may tell you how to be notified about certain types of automated technologies and how to restrict or disable them. Please note that without these technologies, you may not be able to enjoy all of the features of our Online Services. For mobile devices, you may be able to manage how your device and browser disclose certain device data by adjusting the privacy and security settings on your device. Please see our Cookie Policy for more information on our use of cookies.
We also may collect your device’s geolocation information. Your device’s operating system or web browser may provide you with a notification when our apps or websites attempt to collect your location. Please note that if you decline to allow our Online Services to collect your precise geolocation, you may not be able to use all the features through our Online Services.
3. How We Use Personal Data
We use personal data for the following legitimate business purposes:
- Operating our business. We use personal data to operate our business, including providing, tailoring, and improving our products and services. Specifically:
- To deliver location-based products and services and comply with territorial restrictions.
- To enhance and personalize fan experiences and enjoyment when using our products and services, including the NBA Family’s owned and operated platforms.
- To better understand fan preferences when using our products and services, including the NBA Family’s owned and operated platforms.
- To allow you to participate in interactive features when you choose to do so.
- To compile, deidentify, or aggregate personal data for our business purposes.
- For analytical and research purposes, such as to better understand our fans and how they use the Online Services. This allows us to improve and expand our products and services.
- To build predictive models, which allow us to tailor our products and services based on the data we have about how our fans’ use our products and services, as well as to tailor our marketing and advertising campaigns.
- Communicating with you. We use personal data to communicate with you, including responding to your requests or inquiries and delivering personalized news, updates, and other types of communications, provide customer support and other services through our automated chat features and maintain transcripts of chat communications.
- Marketing and advertising. We use personal data for our marketing and advertising purposes, as well as for our partners and other parties who advertise on our Online Services. Specifically:
- To send you promotional messages and deliver advertisements about products, tickets, services, programs, or events. The NBA Family and/or our partners may offer these products, services, and other promotions. We may determine which promotional messages and advertisements you see based on personal data that we collect or receive about you, such as your demographic data, location data, usage data, interests, and preferences.
- To conduct internal and market research, identify usage trends, and determine marketing and advertising campaign effectiveness.
- Security, compliance and enforcement. We use personal data for security, legal, regulatory, compliance, and enforcement purposes. Specifically:
- To protect the safety and security of our fans, products, and services.
- To detect and prevent abuse, fraud, or other unlawful or unauthorized activities.
- To resolve disputes.
- To comply with legal and regulatory obligations.
- To enforce our agreements, including our policies and terms of use, that govern your use of our products and services.
We use the personal data for these purposes because we have a legitimate business interest in providing our products and services to our customers and other interested individuals. In accordance with applicable law, we take measures to help balance the interests we pursue with your interests, rights, and freedoms.
Where we have a contract with you, we process your personal data as necessary to perform our contractual relationship with you, provide our products and services, and manage our customer relationships, including for the following purposes:
- Operating our business. Specifically:
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- To create and maintain accounts, as well as process your registration for events and with our Online Services.
- To fulfill transactions that you request.
- To diagnose and fix problems with our Online Services and provide other customer support services.
- Communicating with you. Specifically:
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- To respond to your request if you contact us with a question or concern.
- To provide information about your account, your use of our products and services, or other transactions that you request.
We may also use personal data in other ways we describe when we collect personal data, or when we have otherwise obtained consent. We may also aggregate, merge, co-mingle, or otherwise combine personal data for the uses described above.
This Privacy Policy is not intended to cover deidentified data. To the extent we process deidentified data, we will maintain and use the information in deidentified form and will not attempt to reidentify the information unless permitted by applicable law.
4. How We Disclose Personal Data
We disclose the personal data described above for the following purposes:
Among the NBA Family. We disclose personal data among the companies within the NBA Family to provide and improve our products and services, to build predictive models to better understand our fans, to send promotional messages and advertisements about products and services that may be of interest to you, and for other purposes consistent with this Privacy Policy.
To Provide the Services. We sometimes engage or partner with other companies to operate and help provide our products and services or to perform certain functions on our behalf. We disclose personal data to vendors and other business partners to perform services for us on our behalf, such as support services related to technology, communications, payment processing, advertising and marketing, analytics, automated chat providers, fraud and security, and customer relations. We also work with third parties to operate our products and services and may provide these companies with access to personal data to perform their functions.
With Partners and Third Parties. We may disclose personal data to certain business partners for advertising and marketing purposes, including so that they can provide individuals with special offers, promotions, and other materials that may be of interest to them. We disclose personal data to partners and third parties as part of marketing and advertising on and off the Online Services. We may also use third parties to serve advertisements on the Online Services and on third-party platforms. These third parties may set their own cookies or similar technologies to collect information about users’ online activities over time and across apps and websites. Please see the Your Choices and Rights section for additional information on the rights to opt out of these disclosures of personal data.
As part of a change in business structure. In the event of a sale, merger, acquisition, reorganization, or similar event, or in contemplation of such an event (for example, due diligence), personal data may be transferred or otherwise disclosed.
When necessary under certain circumstances. We may disclose personal data when we believe that disclosure is necessary to:
- Comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process.
- Protect the safety and security of our fans or our products and services.
- Prevent fraud, abuse, or other unlawful or unauthorized activities.
- Protect our rights or property, or those of third parties, including enforcing the terms of our agreements.
We may also disclose personal data for any other purpose as communicated at the time of collection, or when we have otherwise obtained consent.
5. Your Choices and Rights
You may have certain rights and choices regarding how we collect, use, disclose and otherwise process your personal data.
Communications Choices. You can choose whether you wish to receive promotional messages from the NBA Family and which types of messages you wish to receive. If you receive promotional messages from us and would like to opt out, you may do so by following instructions within those messages. You may also adjust your communications preferences by logging into your NBA account or your WNBA League Pass account and viewing your preferences. You may have to adjust your preferences separately for each member of the NBA Family who may send you promotional messages (for example, if you receive messages from both the NBA and one of its member teams). Please note that these preferences do not apply to informational or transactional communications regarding our products and services.
Interest-Based Advertising Choices. You may see our ads on other websites or apps because we use third-party ad services on our Online Services. Through these ad services, we can tailor our messaging to individuals considering demographic data, inferred interests, and browsing context. These ad services track information about your online activities over time and across third-party websites and apps by collecting information through automated means, including through the use of cookies, web server logs, web beacons, and other similar technologies, such as described in the Automated Data Collection section. These services may collect data about your visits to our Online Services and other websites and apps that participate in these services, such as the pages or ads you view and the actions you take on the websites or apps. This data may include contact information, commercial information, device data, online activity information, location data, demographic data, and interests and preferences.
To learn how to opt out of interest-based advertising, please see our Cookie Policy.
Sales and Targeted Advertising. As described in the Interest-Based Advertising Choices section, we may disclose your personal data by allowing certain third parties (such as online advertising services, social networks, and data analytics providers) to collect personal data through automated technologies on our Online Services for targeted advertising purposes. We also may disclose your personal data to others within the NBA Family and our partners for their own marketing purposes. These kinds of sharing activities may be considered “sales” under certain laws. They also may be considered sharing or processing of personal data for targeted advertising under applicable law.
Depending on where you reside, you may have the right to opt out of the sale of your personal data or sharing or processing of your personal data for targeted advertising. You can exercise your opt-out rights by clicking the “Your Privacy Choices” link in the footer of an NBA.com webpage or by visiting privacy.nba.com.
Other Choices. You can edit or remove certain information in your user account for our Online Services by signing in to your NBA ID account and visiting your NBA ID Account Page for NBA accounts or, for WNBA accounts, by signing in to your WNBA account and visiting your WNBA My Account Page. Please note, however, that if you choose not to provide personal data that is necessary to provide certain features of the Online Services, your use of the Online Services may not include those features.
You can choose not to disclose certain location data by adjusting the settings on your device. Please note, however, that if you choose not to disclose this data, you may not be able to access or use our location-based Online Services.
You can choose to limit the data that third-party services (for example, social media platforms) disclose to us using the options the applicable third-party service provides to you (for example, the options a third-party social media platform provides when you connect your social media account with the Online Services). You can also disconnect your use of the Online Services from the third-party service using the options the applicable third-party service provides its users. Please note, however, that if you disconnect your use of the Online Services from the third-party service, that will not delete the personal data we may have previously collected while you were connected.
Access, Correction, Deletion and Other Rights. Depending on where you reside, you may have the right to request access to, or correction or deletion of, your personal data. To submit an access, correction or deletion request, please visit http://privacy.nba.com or call us at (866) 622-7674. You may appeal our decision with respect to a request you have submitted by making a request at privacy.nba.com. In addition, subject to applicable law, you may receive, in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format, certain of your personal data that you have provided to us. You also may have the right to have this information transmitted to another company, where it is technically feasible.
To help protect your privacy and maintain security, we will take steps to verify your identity before granting you access to your personal data or complying with your deletion or correction request. We may verify your identity by requiring you to authenticate the email address you use to make the request or provide information about your prior transactions or interactions with us.
If you are a resident of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or United Kingdom (“UK”), please see the EEA/UK Privacy Statement for more information about your privacy rights.
If you are a resident of Brazil, please see the Brazil Privacy Statement for more information about your privacy rights.
If you are a California resident, please see the California Consumer Privacy Statement for more information about your privacy rights.
If you are a Colorado resident, please see the Colorado Consumer Privacy Statement for more information about your privacy rights.
Global Privacy Controls. You also can use the Global Privacy Control (“GPC”) through a supported browser to signal certain of your opt-out preferences across the NBA’s websites. You may opt out of the processing of your personal data for purposes of targeted advertising or certain sales of your personal data by broadcasting the Global Privacy Control signal through a supported browser as described in the “Your Privacy Choices” link in the footer of an NBA.com webpage. If you use the GPC, we will process your request for your browser, but it will not apply outside of that browser to your device. You will need to use the GPC for each browser you use to access the Online Services If you clear your cookies in your browser after using the GPC, you will need to use the GPC again for us to process your opt out for that browser.
6. Data Security
We maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards designed to protect personal data against accidental, unlawful or unauthorized access, destruction, loss, alteration, disclosure or use.
7. Third-Party Sites and Features
Our Online Services may contain links to, or integrations with, other websites, platforms, or services (such as social media platforms) that the NBA Family does not operate or control. These services and third-party features operate independently from us. This Privacy Policy does not apply to those third parties. The privacy practices of the relevant third parties, including details on the information they may collect about you, are subject to the privacy statements of these third parties, which we strongly suggest you review. We are not responsible for the information practices of these third parties.
8. Children and Parents
Our Online Services are not directed at children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under the age of 13. For certain activities in which children are allowed to participate (for example, youth clinics, camps, kids clubs, and community outreach events), any request for personal data (such as registration data) is intended for and directed to the parent or legal guardian.
If you have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 has provided personal data to us without parental consent, please visit us at http://privacy.nba.com or contact us using any of the methods described in the How to Contact Us section to request that we delete the personal data.
9. Data Transfers
Personal data the NBA Family collects may be stored and processed in the region in which it is collected, in the United States, and in any other region where we maintain major operations. We maintain offices in Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We take steps to help ensure that the personal data we collect under this Privacy Policy is stored and processed in accordance with this Privacy Policy regardless of where the data is located. Such personal data may be transferred to the offices and servers of the NBA Family and our authorized third-party service providers.
10. Retention of Personal Data
To the extent required by applicable law, we retain personal data for as long as necessary to provide our products and services and fulfill the transactions you have requested, or for other business purposes such as complying with our legal obligations, resolving disputes and enforcing our agreements. Because these factors vary for different types of personal data, actual retention periods may vary. The criteria we use to determine the appropriate retention periods take into account how long the personal data is needed to provide our products and services, the applicable statute of limitations and records retention requirements under applicable law.
11. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our business, products or services, or our practices and procedures. If we do make changes, we will post any changes on this page and indicate the date on which the Privacy Policy was last revised. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically.
12. How to Contact Us
If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or how we collect, use and disclose personal data, you may contact us by any of the following methods:
- By writing to us at 645 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10022, Attn: NBA Fan Relations;
- By sending an email to DataPrivacy@nba.com; or
- By calling us at (212) 407-8000.