🔒 Privacy Policy

Protecting your personal data matters a great deal to us. Below we explain how data is processed in the FairwayData app.

1. Local Data Storage

• Golf data: All downloaded golf course and club data (JSON files) is stored exclusively locally on your device or on your personal NAS (if configured).
• Settings & trackers: Local note IDs and app settings remain locally on your iOS device.

2. Location Services

• The app uses your GPS location (CoreLocation and MapKit) to show golf courses in your immediate surroundings.
• Location data is never transmitted to us or stored on external servers. Positioning takes place entirely locally on your device.

3. OpenStreetMap (OSM) Integration

• If you use the OSM place editor and submit a correction, the text content you entered (e.g. changed course name, opening hours, coordinates) is transmitted to the official OpenStreetMap Notes API (api.openstreetmap.org) so the community can process it. No personal data (such as your Apple ID or name) is transmitted by us to OSM in the process.

4. AI-powered Scorecard Scan (optional)

• Voluntary, only if you choose to: when logging a round, you can optionally use an automatic scan instead of entering the values by hand. To do this, you photograph your filled-in scorecard.
• What happens to the photo: the photo is uploaded to our own server, which forwards it for text recognition to the AI connection of our partner Anthropic (Claude API). The photo may contain personal data, e.g. handwritten names of playing partners.
• No permanent storage: the photo is used on our server solely to process this single request and is not stored permanently afterwards.
• Review before saving: the detected hole and score data is shown to you for review and correction before it is saved - nothing is taken over automatically without your check.
• Alternative without server transfer: you can always type in the scorecard manually instead, or have it read by any AI app of your own choice, without the photo ever passing through our server.
• Anthropic's own privacy policy also applies: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy.

5. Community Ratings (optional)

• Voluntary, off by default: You can share your star ratings (without comments) anonymously with other FairwayData users, and in return see how others have rated courses worldwide. This feature is entirely optional and disabled by default – you decide for each individual rating, and at any time in Settings, whether it is shared.
• What is shared: only the structured star ratings (overall score as well as individual categories such as greens, layout, or service) and the country of origin you selected once. Your personal comment is never published.
• What is not shared: no Apple ID, no name, no exact location, and no other personal data. A randomly generated, device-internal identifier is used solely for technical purposes and cannot be traced back to you.
• Where it's stored: shared ratings are stored in a public Apple CloudKit database and are visible to all users of the app, e.g. as a course's average rating or in the worldwide leaderboard.
• Withdrawal: you can set any shared rating back to private at any time, individually or all at once – it is then immediately removed from the public database.
• Concerns about a published rating: golf clubs or users with concerns about a published rating can reach us through the contact options listed on the App Store.

6. Sharing course data (optional)

• On by default, can be switched off at any time: if a golf course doesn't have tee data yet, the app makes the course data you entered when logging a round available to other players. The feature is switched on by default in the settings (“Share tee data”) and can be switched off there at any time; you can also opt out for each individual round. Data is only transmitted when your entries are complete and plausible.
• What is transmitted: club name and internal club identifier, tee name, course rating, slope, total length and par – and, if the scorecard has been fully entered, par and stroke index per hole. Photos, scores, notes, names, location and the date of the round are not transmitted.
• Pseudonym: to detect repeated submissions and prevent abuse, a randomly generated identifier of this app installation is used, which is stored on the server only as a hash value. It does not allow any conclusion about you; IP addresses are not stored for this purpose.
• Review before publication: submissions first go into a queue and are reviewed by us before they become visible to other users – corrected if necessary. They are factual figures of a golf course, as printed on every scorecard.
• No more scorecard photos: users used to be able to provide photos of blank scorecards in the public database. This feature has been discontinued; existing photos are no longer shown to other users and are deleted once the data has been taken over. You can delete a photo you uploaded earlier when editing the respective rating.
• Withdrawal: you can switch off sharing for each round at any time. Because submissions are anonymous, we can only match one by its content (club, tee); for any concerns you can reach us via the contact options provided in the App Store.
• Cart and price information (optional): if you enter costs in a round (green fee, cart, trolley, rental bag), they are assigned anonymously to the club, provided “Share prices” in the settings (Community, on by default) and the switch in the round are active: amounts, currency, for the green fee 9 or 18 holes and weekday/weekend, whether they were regular prices, and the month of the round. You can also explicitly report whether carts are available or what you paid via “Report cart or prices” in the club info. Only this information, the club identifier and the same random installation identifier as above are transmitted - no name, no location. Several reports automatically create a guide value (median or range of the last 18 months) that all users see. Your own costs are additionally saved in your round and synchronised with it via iCloud if you use iCloud.

7. Website and contact form

• Visiting the website (fairwaydata.info): When you visit the website, our hosting provider processes technically necessary server log data (including IP address, time and requested page) to deliver the pages and ensure security. Search terms you enter are only processed to display the results. We do not use analytics or advertising trackers.
• Language setting: If you choose a language in the menu, we store it in a small cookie (fd_lang, valid for one year) so the site appears in that language on your next visit. Without a choice, your browser’s language is used.
• Calculator: The playing handicap / Stableford calculator runs entirely in your browser. The handicap index you entered last is only remembered locally in your browser (local storage) and is not sent to us.
• Contact form: If you write to us via the contact form, your name (optional), email address, your message and – if you open the form from a club page – the club concerned are sent to us by email. We use this information solely to answer your request (legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, or pre-contractual/contractual communication), do not pass it on to third parties and do not store it in a database; the email is deleted once your request has been dealt with and no retention obligations apply.
• Spam protection: To prevent misuse of the form, your IP address is kept on the server only briefly (at most one hour) and only as a hash value to limit the number of messages.

8. External Links

• Insofar as the app contains links to external websites (e.g. club websites or Safari), we have no influence over their content or privacy practices.

9. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to update this privacy policy so that it always complies with current legal requirements.