Privacy policy
Trackside Careers is an independent job board for Formula 1. This policy explains what personal data we process, why, who helps us, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do.
In short: we don't use cookies for visitors, we count visits without identifying you, we remove recruiters' contact details from the job adverts we collect, and we only email you if you ask us to.
Last updated
Who we are
The controller is Cloakist B.V., based in the Netherlands, which runs Trackside Careers. Our postal address is available on request by email.
Email for anything about privacy: contact at tracksidecareers dot com. A person reads every message.
We are appointing a representative in the UK under Article 27 of the UK GDPR. Until then, UK residents can contact us at contact at tracksidecareers dot com.
What we process and why
| When | What | Why, and our legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| You visit the site | Your IP address, browser details and the pages you open, as they reach our host (Cloudflare). | To deliver the site and keep it secure. Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). |
| Page analytics | Fathom Analytics counts page views. It sets no cookies; it processes your IP address and browser details to tell visits apart, and gives us only aggregate numbers. | To understand which pages are used. Legitimate interest. |
| Job views and apply clicks | When you open a job page or press Apply, we count it against that job in Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine: the job, its team and its source, and nothing about you (no cookie, no IP address, no identifier). Requests that look like bots aren’t counted. | To show employers and ourselves which roles get attention. Legitimate interest. |
| Newsletter | Your email address, when you sign up. It goes to Feather, the service that runs our newsletter and blog. | To send you the newsletter. Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)); you can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing or emailing us. |
| Job alerts (coming soon) | Not available yet. When they launch: your email address, the filters and frequency you choose, and a record of your consent (which wording, when, on which page, and when you confirmed it). You confirm by email before anything else is sent. A Cloudflare Turnstile check and a per-connection limit on the sign-up form stop abuse; we don’t store your IP address. | To send you the alerts you asked for. Your consent. |
| A request through our employers page | Your name, email address and organization, what you ask and the details you give. A salted one-way hash of your IP address, to limit abuse: kept for the hour the limit needs, deleted within a day at the latest, and never copied into our backups. | To handle your request and keep a record of what we did. Legitimate interest; for a request about your own data, our legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)). |
| Emails you send us | Your address and what you write. | To answer you. Legitimate interest. |
| Job adverts we collect | Adverts sometimes name a recruiter or hiring manager, or give an email address or phone number. See the next section. | To list roles from official sources. Legitimate interest: helping people find F1 jobs, and employers to reach them. |
Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have weighed it against your interests and rights, and you can object at any time (see your rights).
Where our job data comes from
We collect job adverts only from official sources: the careers sites of Formula 1 teams, their power-unit makers and Formula 1 itself, and the applicant tracking systems they use. We never take jobs from other job boards, aggregators or agencies. The sources today are: Alpine, Aston Martin, Audi, Cadillac, Ferrari, Haas, Mercedes, Racing Bulls, Red Bull Racing, Williams, Audi Formula Racing (Neuburg), GM Performance Power Units, Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, Red Bull Ford Powertrains, Formula 1 (Formula One Management).
Our crawler, TracksideBot, identifies itself as TracksideBot/1.0 (+https://tracksidecareers.com/bot), obeys robots.txt and never logs in or gets around a block. The TracksideBot page lists the organizations whose sites it reads, the rules it follows and how often it reads them.
Before we store or show an advert, we automatically remove email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn profile links and names that follow phrases like “contact” or “Recruiter:”, and replace them with “see original posting”. This filtering works on patterns, so it can miss something: if you find your details on our site, email removals at tracksidecareers dot com or use the request form on our employers page, and we remove them within one working day. We also keep the raw pages we fetched, before filtering, for 30 days so we can check our work; then they are deleted.
Because the adverts are published by the employers themselves and we keep no contact details from them, we don't contact each person named in an advert (Art. 14(5)(b) GDPR); this notice is how we inform you instead.
Who helps us
These providers process personal data for us. We are recording a data processing agreement with each.
| Provider | What for |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosting and delivery of the site, our database and file storage (kept in Cloudflare’s EU jurisdiction), the view and click counts, the Turnstile check on our forms, the gateway our AI requests pass through, and, once they launch, sending job alerts (Cloudflare Email Service). |
| Fathom Analytics | Cookie-free page analytics. |
| Feather | Our newsletter and blog. |
| Anthropic | AI classification: the text of job adverts, with personal data removed first, goes to Anthropic’s API through Cloudflare’s AI Gateway, to sort roles by discipline and seniority and to write short summaries labelled as AI-written, under terms that don’t allow our inputs to be used for training. Adverts from employers who opt out of AI are never sent. |
| Resend (planned) | Not in use yet: a fallback for sending job alerts once they launch. |
Some of these providers are based in, or use systems in, the United States. Where personal data leaves the EEA or the UK, we rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework (and its UK extension) where the provider is certified, and otherwise on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the UK addendum.
We don't sell personal data or share it for advertising.
How long we keep it
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Raw copies of the job pages and feeds we fetch | 30 days, then deleted automatically. |
| The full description of a job that has closed | 30 days after it closes; then we keep only the facts (title, team, dates). |
| Our crawler’s access log (which pages it requested, when, and the answer) | 90 days. |
| Database backups | 90 days. |
| Job view and apply-click counts | 3 months as single events, then as daily totals per job (no personal data in either). |
| Employers-page requests | The IP hash: one hour (deleted within a day at the latest; never in backups). Your name, email, organization and message: 24 months after we close the request; then we keep only what was asked and what we did. |
| Newsletter sign-up | Until you unsubscribe. |
| Job alerts (coming soon) | Sign-ups that aren’t confirmed: 7 days. When you unsubscribe (one click in any alert email) we delete your address and alerts at once, and keep for 2 years only a one-way hash of your address, so we don’t email you again, and when you gave and withdrew your consent, to answer a complaint. If emails to you bounce permanently we stop at once and delete your subscription after 30 days. If you ask us never to email an address, we keep its one-way hash until you ask us to remove it. Our record of which alert emails went out holds no address or content and is kept 90 days. |
Cookies and email
- Our site sets no cookies for visitors. The only cookies we set are for the site owner's own admin login, which is protected by Cloudflare Access. The blog is run by Feather, whose own policy covers it.
- Fathom runs a small script in your browser to count the visit, without cookies. We rely on the Dutch exemption for analytics that has little or no effect on your privacy (Telecommunicatiewet art. 11.7a(3)(b)).
- Cloudflare Turnstile protects the employers form and the job alerts sign-up: it runs a check in your browser on those pages only, to tell people from bots. It is there for security only.
- Our own emails (job alerts, once they launch) will contain no tracking pixels and no tracked links: every link goes straight to our own pages, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link. Feather sends the newsletter; its own privacy policy covers how it does so.
No automated decisions
We make no decisions about you by automated means. AI only sorts job adverts; it never assesses people. Job alerts will match roles against the filters you choose, by simple rules.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you (access);
- correct it (rectification) or delete it (erasure);
- restrict how we use it, or object to our use of it, including any direct marketing, which we then stop;
- give it to you in a machine-readable form (portability);
- stop using it where we rely on your consent: withdrawing consent doesn't affect what we did before.
Use the request form on our employers page (choose “A request about my own personal data”) or email contact at tracksidecareers dot com. We answer within one month, and remove personal data from a job page within one working day.
You can also complain to a supervisory authority: in the Netherlands the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), or the authority where you live or work.
Changes
When this policy changes
We update this page when what we do changes, and change the date at the top. If a change affects how we use the email address you gave us, we tell you before it takes effect.