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Privacy, corrections and removal

athletevalue names real people: college athletes, most of them students and some of them 17 or 18 years old at enrolment. This page says what the project publishes about them, what it does not, and how to get something corrected or removed.

What the software outputs about a named player

  • Ratings, wins and dollar figures computed from public box scores, public play-by-play and public federal filings. These are model estimates. None of them is a report of what a player is paid, and the software says so in every summary.
  • The team table's "position among paid teammates" compares two model quantities against team medians. It is not a judgement about a person.

The software does not collect, store or transmit anything about the people who run it, beyond the downloads it caches on their own machine.

The deal registry

The registry is a CC BY 4.0 file of disclosed compensation deals, one row per deal, with a public source for each. It is closed to contributions until the process below is in place and staffed. The packaged file is empty.

When it opens, these rules apply:

  1. A row needs a public URL that states the figure for that athlete. Figures attributed only to unnamed sources are not accepted.
  2. Valuations published by rating products are model outputs, not deals, and are not accepted.
  3. Records released by a school in response to a public-records request are accepted only if the release itself is public. Do not submit a document that appears to have been released in error.
  4. Athletes must be 18 or older at the deal date.
  5. Contributors certify that the figure is transcribed accurately from the cited page, that the page was public when submitted, and that they are not the athlete's agent or counterparty disclosing confidential terms.
  6. Every row has a status: active, disputed or withdrawn. Disputed and withdrawn rows stay in the file as tombstones, with a status_note, and are never used in a fit. Deleting a row would not remove it from forks under CC BY 4.0; a tombstone travels with the data.

Corrections and removal

If you are an athlete, a school, an agent or a journalist and a row is wrong, disputed or something you want removed, open an issue at https://github.com/jman4162/athletevalue/issues. If the request should not be public, open an issue asking for a private contact and the maintainer will reply with one. The maintainer will:

  • acknowledge within 7 days;
  • mark the row disputed on receipt of any credible objection, which removes it from every fit immediately;
  • mark it withdrawn at the subject's request, with no requirement to prove the figure wrong;
  • correct a transcription error against the cited source.

Why FERPA is not the relevant law, and what is

FERPA governs education records held by institutions that receive federal education funds. A figure a journalist published, or a school released under a public-records law, is not an education record in this project's hands, and FERPA creates no claim against a downstream republisher. The relevant exposure is state privacy, publicity and defamation law, which is why the rules above are about accuracy, public sourcing, age and the subject's ability to object.