Draft of 13 November 2026. Not yet in force and not reviewed by a lawyer. Text marked like this is a placeholder for something not yet decided.
Couch Golf Club
Privacy
What the game keeps about you, why, where, and how to remove it. It is short because the game keeps little.
In one paragraph
You can play without giving us anything. If you keep a score, we store the name you chose, your rounds, and either the public half of a passkey or your email address. We do not sell any of it, show no advertising, and run no tracking or analytics. You can delete your account and everything in it yourself, at any time.
Who is responsible
Couch Golf Club is run by Fractal Technologies - FZCO, which is responsible for the data described on this page. [FOR A LAWYER: the company is in a free zone of the United Arab Emirates. Whether it must name a representative in the EU (and the UK) for EU and UK players, and whether a postal address must be given here.]
Contact: hello@couch.golf
If you play as a guest
You do not sign up, and you are not asked for a name. A guest plays practice rounds. A practice round is played entirely in your browser; when it is over, the game sends it to the server once so it can tell you where your score sits among the day's practice rounds. To do that:
- Your browser makes up a random key and keeps it in its own storage. The server stores a one-way hash of that key, never the key itself.
- The server checks the round by replaying its strokes, and then keeps only the result: the day, your score on each hole, the total, and when it was finished. The strokes are not kept. Only your first practice round of a day is kept at all.
Nothing in that says who you are. Practice results are deleted once they are 30 days old. If you clear your browser's storage the key is gone, and the result is then tied to nobody.
If you make an account
The round that counts is played signed in. An account holds:
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| The name you chose | It is shown on the leaderboard, to everyone, next to your scores. | Until you delete the account |
| Your counted rounds and every stroke in them, and your practice results (scores, and what the round was played with; no strokes). With each stroke: what your browser says it was played with (keyboard, mouse, touch, or a controller and how you swing with it), the swing level it was judged at if it has one, and how long you took over the two taps of the swing meter | They are your scores. The server replays each stroke to check it, and other players can watch a finished round played back. What a round was played with is shown beside your name, so players can see like against like. The tap timings are kept to help tell people from programs; nothing is done with them today. | Until you delete the account (practice results: 30 days) |
| A passkey's public half, its id, a use counter, and when it was added (if you use a passkey) | To check it is you when you sign in. The private half stays on your device or in your password manager; we never see it, and we never see a fingerprint or face. | Until you delete the account |
| Your email address (only if you give one) | To send you a sign-in link when you ask for one. Nothing else is ever sent to it. | Until you delete the account |
| A record of each signed-in browser: a one-way hash of its sign-in cookie, with start and end dates | To keep you signed in for 90 days on that browser. | Removed when you sign out there or delete the account. [TO DECIDE: records of sign-ins that ran out after 90 days are not yet cleared automatically.] |
| For each sign-in link asked for: the address it went to, a one-way hash of the link, the name asked for, and a one-way hash of the internet address that asked | So the link works once and for 20 minutes, and so nobody can use the game to send mail in bulk: to one address, three links an hour and ten a day; from one connection, eight an hour and twenty a day; and no more than 300 a day from the whole game. | About a day after the link stops working |
| A one-way hash of the internet address an account was made from, with the time. It is not linked to the account. | So that one connection cannot make accounts without limit (five a day). | About two days: older ones are deleted when the next account is made |
| When the account was made | Housekeeping, and to spot accounts made to cheat. | Until you delete the account |
When you make an account, the practice results you had as a guest in that browser become the account's.
What everyone can see
Your name, your score on each hole of a day, your total, when you finished, and what the round was played with (keyboard, mouse, touch, controller, a controller's stick swing, or a mix), and the swing level where there is one. A finished round can also be watched: the game plays your strokes again in the watcher's browser. Your email address is never shown to anyone.
In your browser
The game keeps a few things in your browser's own storage. They stay on your device.
- One cookie, only if you are signed in: it says which account this browser is signed in to. Scripts cannot read it and it is sent only to this site. It is needed for accounts to work, so there is no cookie banner. There are no other cookies.
- The guest key described above.
- The scorecard and stroke log of a round in progress, so a reload does not lose it.
- Your settings: sound, left or right handed, the swing level you chose for the daily, and how many times the first-shot tips have been shown.
What the server sees in passing
Every request reaches us from an internet (IP) address. The server uses it to limit how fast one connection can send strokes; that count is held in memory for a minute and written nowhere. Apart from the hashed form kept with a sign-in link and with the count of new accounts, as listed above, the game's own database holds no internet addresses, and the game writes no log of visits. If a request makes the server fail, a description of the error is printed to the server's log. When a sign-in link is sent, that log notes the kind of link and the message's id at Cloudflare, not the address it went to.
[TO CONFIRM: what Cloudflare itself records about requests as the host (it sees every request's internet address and browser details), and for how long. This paragraph describes our code, not Cloudflare's own logging.]
Where it is kept, and who else handles it
The game runs on Cloudflare. The database is in Cloudflare's western Europe region. The code that answers your requests runs in whichever Cloudflare data centre is nearest to you, and the part that checks strokes runs in western Europe. Cloudflare handles the data on our behalf; nobody else receives it.
Sign-in emails are sent from couch.golf through Cloudflare's email service, which handles the
address and the message to deliver it. Cloudflare keeps a record of each message sent (to whom, when, and
whether it was delivered), so that we can look it up if a link does not arrive; it does not keep the
message itself. [TO CONFIRM: how long Cloudflare keeps that record. Its dashboard shows the last 30
days.] If mail to an
address bounces, or its owner reports it as spam, Cloudflare stops sending to it.
If you write to the contact address, Cloudflare passes your message on to the company's own mailbox, where it is kept like any other email.
[FOR A LAWYER: Cloudflare is a United States company. Whether that needs a sentence about transfers outside the EU, and the legal basis for each kind of data above, has not been checked.]
What we do not do
- We do not sell or share your data.
- There is no advertising and no advertising or tracking code on the site.
- There are no analytics and no scripts from other companies.
- We do not email you except the sign-in link you ask for.
- Nothing you can buy affects play, and today nothing can be bought at all, so no payment data exists.
Deleting it all
Signed in, open Account from the daily's screen, choose Delete my account, and type your name to confirm. That removes, at once and for good: your name, your email address, your passkeys, your sign-ins on every device, and every round you have played with all its strokes. The leaderboards you were on close up without you. Nothing is kept.
If you cannot sign in, write to the contact address and we will do it for you once we are satisfied the account is yours.
A guest has no account to delete. Clearing your browser's storage for this site removes the key, after which the practice results on the server are tied to nobody; they are deleted after 30 days in any case.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or have it deleted, by writing to the contact address. A player's name can also be removed or changed by us if it breaks the terms. If you are in the EU or the UK you can also complain to your data protection authority. [FOR A LAWYER: which authority to name, given that the company is outside the EU.]
Children
[TO DECIDE: a minimum age. The game asks for no age and nothing in it is aimed at children, but an account holds a name and perhaps an email address.]
Changes
If the game starts keeping anything not listed here, this page changes first, and the date at the top with it.