Privacy Policy

GolfPath is not open to the public yet, and this policy describes a product that is still being built. Specifically, today:

• Family accounts are not open. Families join during a pilot we set up directly.
• We are not creating profiles for golfers under 13 at launch. The under-13 rules described below are built and tested, but the sign-up path is closed. Families of younger golfers can join a waitlist instead.
• Messaging is not live. No coach can message any player through GolfPath today, at any age.
• Our parental consent is an attested checkbox. A parent confirms they are the parent. That is not the verifiable parental consent COPPA requires for children under 13, which is exactly why we are not signing up under-13 golfers yet — we will have a verifiable method in place before we do.
• We hold no privacy certification, seal or third-party audit, and we are not claiming one.

From anyone with an account

• Email address and a display name.
• A password, which is held by our authentication provider. We never see it.
• An account type — parent, player, coach, tournament director or instructor.

On a golfer's profile

• Name, graduation year, gender, city, region and country; school, home course and handicap if entered.
• Birthdate, stored in a single separate table with no read access granted to any client — not to a coach, not to a parent's browser, not to our own web app. It is read only inside database routines that work out which age band a golfer is in. It is never sent to a screen.
• Tournament results and round scores, each marked either director-verified or self-reported. The two are never averaged together.
• Optional resume material the family chooses to add: GPA and test scores, personal statement, rankings, references (name and role), equipment, and links to profiles on other sites.
• Videos and photos uploaded to the profile.

Other things we hold

• Payments. Stripe handles checkout. We store Stripe's identifiers for a customer and subscription, and for instructors a Stripe account id. We never see or store card numbers, and we hold no tax documents and no Social Security numbers.
• Referrals. If a family types an instructor's referral code when they join, we keep the code.
• Waitlist. An email address, which audience you are in, and — for families — the golfer's birth year. Never a full birthdate, and no names.
• Coach and instructor applications. Organisation, role title, website and a short note, so a human can decide whether to verify the account.
• Sign-in cookies. Cookies that keep you signed in. We run no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics on the site today.

This is the part most parents want, so it is the plainest thing on the page. Age decides visibility, and the rules run in the database on every single request — a coach who guesses a profile's web address still gets nothing if their age band does not permit it.

Regardless of age band:

• Contact details are never public. A reference's phone or email is released only once recruiting contact is actually open for that player.
• Social media handles and connected-app links sit behind the same contact gate, because they are a way to reach a player off GolfPath.
• Coaches see a golfer's season-by-season record as totals and averages only, not a dated event-by-event history — a complete history narrows down a birthdate, and that would defeat the point of keeping it private.
• Coach and tournament director accounts get nothing until a human at GolfPath verifies them. Choosing "coach" on a form grants no access by itself.
• If a parent revokes consent, the profile freezes: it stops being visible to anyone but the family, immediately.

• A child under 13 never has a login. There is no account for them to sign into, and the database will not allow one to be created.
• Their profile is a record owned by a parent's account. The parent enters everything and posts every video.
• Their profile is visible to verified tournament directors only. It does not appear in coach search, and no coach can contact them.
• Golfers aged 13 to 17 may have their own login, linked to a guardian account with parent oversight.
• As noted above, we are not creating under-13 profiles at launch, and we will put a verifiable parental consent method in place before we do.

Videos are stored privately and streamed through Amazon Web Services. Playback access is signed and expires within an hour, so a video link cannot be copied out of the page and shared as a permanent public URL. Who is allowed to load a video in the first place follows the same age rules as the rest of the profile.

A golfer can add links to profiles they already have elsewhere — ranking bodies, junior tours, launch monitors and shot-tracking apps. These are links and nothing more. We do not import, store, compute or restate anyone else's performance data as ours. If you follow one of those links you are on that company's site, under their privacy policy, not ours.

We could not run GolfPath without these companies. They process data on our instructions:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — website hosting, database, sign-in, file and video storage, video processing and streaming, and account emails.
• Stripe — payments and instructor payouts.

Beyond those, we share personal information only when the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to train advertising profiles.

We keep a profile and its content for as long as the account exists. We do not yet operate a published retention schedule — writing one down that nobody runs would be worse than saying so. Defining and automating retention is on our list before general launch, and this section will be replaced with the real schedule when it exists.

If you ask us to delete an account, we delete the profile, its results and its videos. During the pilot this is done by hand, so allow a few days.

• See and correct. Everything on a golfer's resume is editable by the family in their portal.
• Revoke consent. This freezes the profile and flags its content for removal. It stops being visible to anyone but you. During the pilot, email us and it takes effect the same day.
• Delete. Email us and we will delete the account and its data.
• Instructor access. An instructor can only see a student after a parent consents, and that consent is revocable. Revoking it cuts their access immediately rather than just hiding it.

If you are covered by a privacy law that gives you additional rights — such as GDPR or a US state privacy law — write to us and we will honour the request. We handle these manually right now, so we may ask you a question or two to confirm who you are.

Permissions live in the database rather than in the app. Every request runs under the identity of whoever made it, and the rules above are applied to the data itself, so a mistake in a page cannot expose a profile the viewer was never allowed to see. The table holding birthdates has no read permission granted to any client at all, and administrative actions are gated inside the database rather than by a check in application code.

No system is perfectly secure, and we are not claiming otherwise. If you find a security problem, please tell us at support@golfpath.app.

When this policy changes we will update the date in the banner at the top. The counsel-reviewed version will replace this draft in full before GolfPath opens to the public.

Questions about privacy, or a request about your data: support@golfpath.app.

See also our Terms of Service.