Professional golfer data

1. Why this page exists

GolfBook shows tournament leaderboards, schedules and world rankings. To do that, we keep our own copy of that data — which means we hold records about professional golfers who never signed up for GolfBook, never agreed to our privacy policy, and in most cases have never heard of us.

That policy is an agreement with our users. These players aren't our users, so it doesn't speak for them. We still think anyone in that position is owed a straight account of what's held about them and how to change it, which is what this page is.

GolfBook is made and run by WhiteHat Software Inc., a company based in British Columbia, Canada, and we're the ones responsible for these records. Our privacy officer is Shaun Benzies, at legal@golfbook.ca.

2. What we hold

For a professional golfer, the record can include:

• Your name, as the source publishes it.
• Tournament results. Which events you entered, your finishing position, whether you were cut or withdrew, your score for each round, and hole-by-hole scores where a source publishes them.
• Rankings and season statistics. World ranking position and points, tour points and money-list standing, and the ordinary season aggregates — scoring average, driving distance, greens in regulation, putts per round, events played, cuts made, top tens, wins, and published earnings.
• The biographical facts a tour publishes, where a source provides them and only then: country, birthplace, college, the year you turned professional, current residence, and listed height and weight. These are often simply missing, because the sources fill them in unreliably.
• Where each fact came from — which source it arrived from, the date the source said it was current, and when we received it. That provenance is kept on every row, and it is what makes a correction possible rather than a guess.

There is one more thing, and it applies only where a professional has been confirmed as the holder of a GolfBook account (section 7). In that case we keep a short written note of what was checked in order to confirm it. Where the check involved a social-media account, that note names the handle — a handle that the player's own tour directory publishes, recorded because a person used it to establish that the account really is theirs.

Outside that, we don't collect social-media accounts for professional golfers at all. There's no automated matching of players to social profiles, and no handle is stored for a player who hasn't been through that confirmation.

3. What we don't hold

• No date of birth. There is no field for one. Where a source publishes a birth date, our importers deliberately don't read it across.
• No contact details. No email address, no phone number, no postal address, no agent or management contact.
• No identity documents, ever — no passports, licences, document numbers, or photographs of any of them. If someone offers them to us, we decline them; there is nowhere in the system to put them.
• No photographs, logos, video, biographies or written coverage. We take facts. We don't copy anyone's pictures or prose.
• Nothing fused into our users' profiles. This reference data and our own users' accounts are kept apart, and the import path is structurally incapable of writing anything to a GolfBook account. The only connection that exists between the two is a link made by hand when a professional confirms an account is theirs — section 7.
• Nothing sensitive. No health information, no financial information beyond published prize money, nothing about family or private life.

4. Where it comes from

Two kinds of source, both published:

• Public tournament scoreboards — the same open, keyless feeds a sports website uses to draw a leaderboard. ESPN's public golf feed is the one we read regularly, covering the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LPGA, Korn Ferry Tour, PGA Tour Champions and LIV.
• Official world ranking lists — the public ranking tables published by the world ranking bodies. These importers are built but are not yet running on a schedule, so routine automated collection from them hasn't started.

One further source, a commercial data feed, is built and switched off. It can't run at all until we license it, and if that happens this page will name it before it does.

Some things we deliberately don't do. Each was a decision, not an oversight:

• We don't scrape the tours' own live scoring products — the shot-by-shot feeds a tour operates and licenses commercially.
• We don't take college or amateur scoring data from partner-only platforms. Where the only route to a competition's scoring is a private or partner arrangement, we don't have that data.
• We don't crawl tour player directories. A person reads one occasionally, by hand, when confirming a claim (section 7). Nothing automated touches them.
• We identify ourselves honestly on every automated request, with a name and a contact address, rather than pretending to be a browser. We follow each site's robots file. If a source blocks us, we stop — we don't route around it.
• Nothing goes the other way. No information about any GolfBook user is transmitted to any of these sources. The flow is inbound only.

5. Amateur rankings, and a note about minors

The official ranking lists we read include the world amateur ranking, which ranks amateur golfers — some of whom are under 18. This is set out on its own rather than folded into the section above, because it's the most sensitive thing on this page and it shouldn't be easy to miss.

What those lists publish, and all we take from them, is a name, a nationality, a ranking position and a points total. No date of birth, no contact details, nothing else. That data is used for one thing — showing a ranking — and it is never combined with GolfBook user accounts.

A ranked amateur, or the parent or guardian of a ranked amateur under 18, can use the removal route in the next section, and we'll treat that request as a priority.

6. Having a record removed, or corrected

Removal

Email legal@golfbook.ca. Tell us your name as it appears on the tours you play, and say that you want your record removed. You don't have to give a reason, and you don't have to be a GolfBook user.

• We'll acknowledge within 3 business days — usually the same or the next business day.
• We'll confirm we've matched you to the right record, which may take one further exchange. Getting the wrong player's record removed is its own kind of harm, so we check.
• We'll remove the record, and keep it out.

Two things to be straight about. Today a person does this, not a switch. There's no self-service opt-out control yet — an in-product mechanism is planned, and when it lands this page will point you at it and the email route will keep working alongside it. Because it's done by hand, keeping a record out is something we do and check, rather than something the system enforces on its own; if you ever see a record reappear, tell us and we'll deal with it.

And removing your record from GolfBook doesn't remove anything from the sources it came from. A result published on a tour's own site stays published there. Only they can change that.

Correction

Same address. Tell us what's wrong and, if you can, what it should say. We'll acknowledge within 3 business days, on the same footing as a removal.

Because every fact we hold is stamped with where it came from and when, we can usually tell quickly whether we imported someone else's error or introduced our own. If we introduced it, we fix it. If it came from the source, we'll correct our copy and tell you which source it came from, so you can take it up with them if you want to. If a source keeps re-publishing something you say is wrong, tell us — we'll keep correcting it, and if we can't stop our copy being overwritten we'll say so plainly rather than leave you believing it's settled.

7. Claiming your own record

A professional player can have a GolfBook account linked to their own professional record, which marks that account as genuinely theirs.

Linking is done by our staff — never automatically, and never by a player acting alone. It takes two independent checks: that you control a social account the tour's own player directory links to, and a reply from an email address on your tour's or your management agency's domain. We record who did the check, when, and a short note of what was verified. We don't ask for or keep identity documents. There's no self-service claim button, deliberately: a wrongly verified account is a worse problem than a slow one.

Once a record is linked:

• It's under your control. You can ask us to correct it, and you can ask us to unlink it at any time. Unlinking isn't an argument you have to win — it's the normal remedy, and it's recorded like everything else.
• Nothing about your GolfBook account becomes more visible. Your own privacy settings still decide who sees what, exactly as they did before the link existed.
• We only link accounts belonging to people aged 18 or over. A professional who is under 18 can claim their record when they turn 18.

8. Complaints

If you're not happy with how we've handled a removal, a correction or a claim, tell us first at legal@golfbook.ca. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which oversees Canadian private-sector privacy law, and whose jurisdiction covers us whether or not you're in Canada.

9. Changes to this page

If what we hold about professional golfers changes — a new source, a new kind of data, or a new use for what we already have — we'll update this page. If you're a GolfBook user, your own information is covered by the privacy policy instead; this page is about the reference data, not about you.

10. Contact

legal@golfbook.ca — removals, corrections, claims, and anything else about these records. A real person reads it.