Delete your data

How to ask

Send an email to legal@golfbook.ca and include:

• Which account. The email address or mobile number you sign in with. If you sign in with Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook, tell us which one and the email address it uses.
• What you want. Either "delete my account and my data" or, if you'd rather keep the account and only remove something specific, tell us what.

Sending it from the email address on the account is the easiest way for us to be sure it's you. If you can't — you've lost access to that inbox, or you sign in by phone — say so, and we'll find another way to confirm it before we delete anything. That step protects you: we're not going to erase someone's account because a stranger asked us to.

There's no charge, and there's no delete control in the app yet. A person on our team carries this out by hand, deliberately: your information lives in more than one place, and doing it by hand is how we make sure all of it goes rather than part of it. When there's a button that does the whole job, this page will point you at it.

If you might want to come back later, email us rather than signing up again. Once an account is deleted, that email address and phone number stay reserved against the old record, so a fresh sign-up with the same details won't work on its own — we have to clear the old one first. Tell us and we'll sort it out; it just isn't something you can do by yourself today.

What happens next

1. Within 3 business days we'll reply to confirm we've got your request, and to check anything we need to check. In practice that's usually the same or the next business day — but 3 business days is the commitment, and it's the one to hold us to.
2. Straight away once it's confirmed, we disable the account. You're signed out, you stop appearing in searches and friend-finding, and nobody can send you anything.
3. Within 30 days we delete or anonymise your personal information, and email you to confirm it's done.

Deleted data can survive for up to a further 7 days in our encrypted database backups, which is how long we keep them before they roll off. Those backups aren't used for anything except restoring the service after a failure.

What gets deleted

• Your profile — name, photo, handicap, home course, and your settings.
• Your sign-in details — email address, phone number, the link to your Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook account, and the scrambled codes used for contact-based friend-finding.
• Your date of birth and age status.
• Posts, comments and reactions you made, and the photos you uploaded.
• Your friends list, blocks and mutes.
• Your saved cards — removed at Stripe, our payment processor, so nothing of them stays with us or with them.
• Your push-notification tokens, so your devices stop receiving anything.

Nothing needs deleting for location. GolfBook's one location feature doesn't store where you were during a round — positions are relayed live to your playing group and never written down. There is no location history on your account to remove, because one is never created. If a future GolfBook feature does keep a rough position, the privacy policy sets out what we've committed to before that ships, and this page will say how to have it deleted.

What we keep, and why

Three things don't simply vanish, and it's better you know before you ask than after:

• Messages you sent to other people. A conversation belongs to everyone in it. We remove your name and profile from your messages so they're no longer attributed to you, but we don't reach into someone else's inbox and delete their side of a conversation.
• Rounds and tournaments you played in with others. Same reasoning — a foursome's round is part of three other people's record too. Your identity is severed from it; the round itself stays.
• Payment and tax records, if you ever paid through GolfBook. Canadian tax law requires these to be kept for six years from the end of the relevant tax year. We can't delete them earlier, and this applies no matter what else we remove.

We may also keep a minimal record that a deletion request was made and completed — the account identifier and the date — because that's the evidence we did what you asked.

If you signed in with Facebook

Deleting your GolfBook account doesn't touch your Facebook account, and it isn't something Facebook can do for you. You can also remove GolfBook's access from Facebook's side, under Settings & privacy → Settings → Apps and websites. Doing that stops any further connection between the two, but it doesn't delete what's already on GolfBook — for that, email us as described above.

The same is true for Google, Apple and Microsoft: removing GolfBook's access in their settings disconnects the sign-in, but the request to us is what deletes the account.

If the account belongs to someone under 18

A parent or guardian can ask us to delete a 13-to-17-year-old's account at any time, and doesn't need the young person's agreement to do it. Email legal@golfbook.ca, tell us the account's email address or phone number, and mention that you're the guardian. Withdrawing consent on its own suspends the account; say so explicitly if you want it deleted as well.

If you believe an account belongs to a child under 13, tell us and we'll investigate and remove it.

Other things you can ask for

Deletion isn't the only option. At the same address you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct something that's wrong, send you a copy of your data, or turn off one specific thing — location sharing, contact syncing, notifications, a saved card — without closing the account. We'll respond to any of these within 30 days.

If you're not happy with how we handle it, tell us first, and then you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Contact

legal@golfbook.ca — for deletion requests and anything else about your data. Our privacy officer is Shaun Benzies.

Related: our privacy policy explains what we collect and why, and our terms of service covers the rest of the relationship.