Privacy Policy

Skratch Golf Inc. ("Skratch Golf", "we", "us", "our") operates the Skratch Golf platform — a tee time and golf lesson booking service available at skratchgolf.ca and through our mobile application.

This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, disclose, and protect your personal information when you use Skratch Golf as a golfer.

We are incorporated in British Columbia, Canada. We handle personal information in accordance with:

• •Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
• •British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA)
• •Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act
• •Quebec's Law 25 (An Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector)
• •Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) for commercial messages

Quebec's Law 25 is the strictest of these. We apply the Law 25 standard to every user, in every province, rather than giving Quebec golfers better privacy than everyone else.

This platform is offered in Canada and is not currently configured for GDPR (European Economic Area) or CCPA (California) compliance.

Skratch Golf has a designated Privacy Officer who is accountable for our compliance with this policy and with Canadian privacy law.

Write to the Privacy Officer to access your data, correct it, delete it, withdraw consent, or complain about how we have handled your information. We respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, to the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, or — if you live in Quebec — to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

Account information — Your name, email address, and optionally your phone number. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your name and email address from that provider; we never receive your password.

Booking information — The golf facility or coach, date, time, number of players, booking status, and any notes you add. For lessons, the lesson type and price.

Profile information — An optional handicap index, your round history, and any golfers you add as buddies.

Phone verification — If you verify your phone number, we send a one-time code by SMS and store the fact that the number is verified.

Payment information — Handled entirely by Stripe. See section 8. We never see or store your full card number.

Location data — With your permission, your device's location, used in real time to show nearby facilities and calculate distances. We do not store a location history.

Usage and device data — Pages viewed, searches performed, facilities opened, plus basic device and operating-system information for troubleshooting. Where you have consented to analytics, this includes session recordings — see section 9.

Support conversations — Messages you send to our chatbot or by email, and our replies. See section 10.

Contacts — Only if you use the buddies feature in the mobile app, and only in hashed form. See section 11.

We do not collect government identification, health information, or your social insurance number from golfers.

We use your information only for purposes related to providing the Skratch Golf service:

• •Creating and managing your account, and keeping you signed in
• •Processing, confirming, changing, and cancelling bookings
• •Sending booking confirmations, reminders, and service notices
• •Showing you relevant golf facilities and coaches based on location and preferences
• •Tracking your round history and handicap trend
• •Verifying your phone number to reduce fraudulent and duplicate bookings
• •Taking payment for lessons, and applying a facility's cancellation or no-show policy
• •Responding to your questions and support requests
• •Detecting and preventing abuse, fraud, and automated attacks
• •Understanding how the platform is used, so we can improve it
• •Meeting our legal, tax, and accounting obligations

We do not use your information for targeted advertising, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not sell your personal information to anyone, for any price.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only in these limited circumstances:

• •Golf facilities: When you book, we share your name, contact details, and booking details with that facility so they can honour your reservation. The facility handles that information under its own privacy practices, which we do not control.
• •Coaches: When you book a lesson, we share your name, contact details, and lesson details with that coach. A coach who has connected a calendar will see your booking in it.
• •Other golfers: If you add someone as a buddy or book a round together, they see your name and the shared booking.
• •Service providers: The companies listed in section 6, each only to the extent needed to do their job for us.
• •Legal requirements: If required by law, subpoena, or court order, or to protect the safety and rights of Skratch Golf, our users, or the public.
• •Business transfer: If Skratch Golf is sold, merged, or reorganised, your information may transfer to the acquiring entity. We will notify you, and this policy will continue to apply until you are given notice of a new one.

All service providers are bound by contract to protect your data, use it only for the purposes we specify, and not use it for their own purposes.

These are every third party that handles golfer personal information on our behalf. Each maintains its own privacy notice.

If we add a processor that handles golfer data, we will update this table and the effective date at the top of this page.

Skratch Golf is a Canadian company, but most of our service providers store and process data on servers in the United States. This includes your account, your bookings, and your profile.

You should know what that means. While your personal information is in the United States, it is subject to the laws of that country, and may be accessed by United States courts, law enforcement, and national security authorities under those laws, without notice to you and without our being able to prevent it.

We tell you this because Canadian privacy law requires it, and because it is the sort of thing you deserve to be told plainly rather than discovering in a footnote.

We reduce the exposure where we practically can: IP addresses are stripped from analytics, form inputs are masked in session recordings, card numbers never reach us at all, and each provider is contractually bound to protect the data and use it only for us.

By using Skratch Golf, you consent to your personal information being transferred to and processed in the United States as described here.

Skratch Golf never sees, handles, or stores your full card number. Card details go directly from your browser or app to Stripe, our payment processor, over an encrypted connection. We receive only a token, the last four digits, the card brand, and the expiry date.

When lesson payments go live, Stripe will securely store your card so the coach can charge it under their cancellation policy. No money moves at the moment of booking.

Charges are made directly on the coach's or facility's own Stripe account — they are the merchant of record, not us. Money flows from you to them without passing through Skratch Golf. Your card statement will show the partner's name alongside ours.

Stripe is certified to PCI-DSS Level 1, the highest level in the payments industry. Stripe processes your payment data under its own privacy policy.

Where we are today: online booking and card payments are not yet live on Skratch Golf. Listings are currently visual only — you call the facility to book, and you pay them directly. Nothing described in this section happens until we turn online booking on, and we will tell you before we do.

To remove a card we have saved, email info@skratchgolf.ca and we will delete it from Stripe. Self-serve card management is not built yet.

Analytics are off until you turn them on. Nothing in this section happens unless you accept analytics in our cookie banner, and you can withdraw that consent at any time from the Cookie Policy page.

With your consent, we use PostHog to understand how the platform is used — which pages get visited, which searches get run, where people give up on a form. This tells us what to fix.

This includes session recording. PostHog reconstructs a replay of your visit: the pages you moved between, where you clicked, how you scrolled. We use it to find the places where the site is confusing or broken.

What a recording does not contain: everything you type into a form field is masked before it leaves your device — your name, email, phone number, and handicap are recorded as dots, not characters. Card fields are handled inside Stripe and are never part of a recording at all. Your IP address is stripped before the data reaches PostHog.

We do not use Google Analytics, the Facebook pixel, TikTok pixel, advertising conversion tracking, or any retargeting service. Full detail is in our Cookie Policy.

The chat bubble on our site is powered by Google's Gemini model. When you type a message into it, that message is sent to Google to generate a reply.

Please do not type anything into the chatbot you would not want processed by a third party — no card numbers, no passwords, no government identification. It is there to answer questions about golf courses and how Skratch works.

Google processes this data as our service provider under the Gemini API terms. We do not send your account details, booking history, or payment information to the chatbot.

This applies only to the mobile app, and only if you choose to find buddies from your contacts. It is optional and off unless you grant permission.

Your address book is never uploaded to us. When you use this feature, the app reads your contacts on your device, converts each phone number into an irreversible cryptographic hash, and sends only those hashes to us. We compare them against hashes of numbers already registered with Skratch Golf.

The practical effect: we learn which of your contacts already use Skratch Golf, and we learn nothing whatsoever about the rest of them — not their names, not their numbers. We cannot reverse a hash back into a phone number.

You can revoke contacts permission at any time in your device settings.

This section applies only if you are a Skratch Golf coach and choose to connect a calendar (Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook) to your Coach Portal. Golfers are never asked to connect a calendar.

If you connect a calendar, we access it solely to: (1) read your event times so we can show when you are available or busy on your Skratch coaching schedule, and (2) create or remove lesson and block events so your Skratch bookings stay in sync with your calendar.

We never sell this data, never use it for advertising, and never show your event details to golfers — golfers only ever see a time as available or unavailable, never the title or contents of your events.

Skratch Golf's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

You can disconnect your calendar at any time from the Coach Portal, which immediately stops all access.

Skratch Golf requests access to your device's location to show nearby golf facilities and calculate distances. This is optional — you can use Skratch Golf without granting location access, though distance-based features will not be available.

We use your location in real time to sort and filter search results. We do not store your precise location history on our servers, and we do not track you in the background.

Where we display your location back to you, we show only the first three characters of your postal code (for example, "V6B") — never your coordinates, never your full postal code, never your IP address.

You can revoke location permission at any time through your device settings.

Skratch Golf uses automated processing in two visible ways: to rank and recommend golf facilities and coaches to you, and to apply rate limits and fraud checks that can block a suspicious booking attempt.

Recommendations are based on your stated location, distance, your search filters, and general popularity. They are a convenience for sorting a list — they do not affect the price you are shown or whether you are allowed to book.

We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that would produce a legal or similarly significant effect. A person at Skratch Golf reviews any decision to suspend or restrict an account.

If a decision about you is ever made purely by a machine, we will tell you so at the time we tell you the decision — not on request, and not buried here. When we do, you may ask us which of your personal information was used, the reasons behind the decision and the main factors that drove it, and you may correct anything we relied on that was wrong.

You may also simply tell us we got it wrong. Those observations go to a person with the authority to change the outcome, not back into the same automated check. Write to the Privacy Officer in section 2.

We separate three kinds of message, because the law does and because the difference matters to you:

Service messages — booking confirmations, reminders, cancellations, password resets, security notices, invoices. These are part of the service you asked for. They have no unsubscribe link, because turning them off would break your bookings. To stop them entirely, close your account.

Marketing messages — launch announcements, new facility news, occasional offers. We send these only if you asked for them, such as by entering your email in a "notify me at launch" box or ticking a box at signup. Every one carries a one-click unsubscribe link and our mailing identification, as required by Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation.

Tee time alerts — if you save an alert, we email you when a matching tee time opens. You asked for these, but because they point you at something bookable we treat them as commercial messages too: every alert email carries the same unsubscribe link, and you can switch individual alerts on and off at any time on your Alerts page.

How to stop marketing mail. Click Unsubscribe at the bottom of any marketing or alert email, or use your mail app's own unsubscribe button — Gmail and Outlook show one at the top of the message. You do not need to be signed in, and you will never be asked to give a reason. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately; the law allows us ten business days and we do not use them. It also switches off your tee time alert emails. It never affects your bookings or your account.

If an unsubscribe link ever fails, email info@skratchgolf.ca and we will remove you by hand the same day. We keep a record of your unsubscribe so it cannot be undone by a later import or export of our mailing list.

SMS — texts are opt-in only. Reply STOP to any message to end them immediately, or HELP for assistance. Standard message and data rates from your carrier may apply. A STOP sent to your carrier is permanent from our side — re-ticking a box on our website will not restart texts; you have to text START.

Phone calls. We do not cold-call golfers. We do phone golf facilities, simulator venues and coaches about partnering with us. Those are business-to-business calls, which the CRTC exempts from Canada's National Do Not Call List — but the exemption does not remove our other obligations, and we keep our own internal do-not-call list regardless. Tell us once, on any call or by email to info@skratchgolf.ca, and we will not call that number again. We add it within 14 days, as the rules require, and it stays on the list for at least three years.

Third-party mail tools. Some announcements are sent through an email platform rather than from the website itself. Those messages carry the same personal unsubscribe link, and the list is scrubbed against our unsubscribe record before every send — an address that has opted out is removed before the message is prepared, not after.

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, or as long as the law requires us to. Specifically:

When a retention period ends, the data is deleted or irreversibly anonymised. These are not aspirations — a daily job enforces every period we control, and the two handled by our analytics and error-monitoring providers are set as retention limits in their systems.

You can delete your account yourself, from your profile on the website or in the app. Here is exactly what happens when you do. Your account, profile, handicap, rounds, buddies, saved alerts, notifications and any coaching notes about you are deleted outright. Your bookings and lessons are not deleted — they are stripped of every identifier and kept as a financial record about nobody, because Canadian tax law requires the transaction be recorded for years after you leave, and because a coach is entitled to their own record of a lesson they were paid for. Nobody can work back from what remains to you.

If you would rather we did it for you, or you want a written confirmation of what was removed, contact info@skratchgolf.ca.

You have the right to:

• •Access — get a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and be told how we have used it and who we have shared it with.
• •Correct — fix anything inaccurate or incomplete in your profile, yourself or by asking us.
• •Delete — have your account and personal data erased, subject to the retention rules above.
• •Withdraw consent — turn off location, analytics, contacts, or marketing at any time. Some features stop working, but nothing else is held against you.
• •Portability — receive the information you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or have us send it to another organisation where technically feasible. This right comes from Quebec's Law 25 and we extend it to every user regardless of province. You can download the whole file yourself from your profile — you do not have to ask us and you do not have to wait.
• •Stop the spread — require us to stop publishing information about you, or to de-index a link to it, where publication contravenes the law or a court order, or where keeping it visible causes you serious injury to your reputation or privacy that clearly outweighs the public's interest in it. This right comes from Quebec's Law 25 and we extend it to every user regardless of province. In practice we publish very little about golfers, so this will usually concern a name shown to another golfer on a shared booking.
• •Be heard by a human — where a decision affecting you was made by automated processing, ask us what information was used and why, and give us your own account of it, to a person able to change the outcome. See section 14.
• •Complain — to us, and then to a regulator if we have not put it right. Contact details are in section 2.

To exercise any of these, email info@skratchgolf.ca. We respond within 30 days, free of charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that nobody else can request your data.

Skratch Golf uses a small number of essential cookies to keep you signed in, and (with your explicit permission) analytics cookies to understand how the platform is used. We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or cross-site trackers, and we do not sell cookie data.

For the full breakdown of every cookie we use, the legal basis under PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25, and how to change your preferences at any time, see our Cookie Policy.

We take the security of your data seriously. Skratch Golf uses industry-standard measures to protect your information:

• •All data is transmitted over HTTPS (encrypted in transit)
• •Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text
• •Database access is controlled with row-level security — each user can only access their own data
• •API routes are rate-limited to prevent abuse
• •Card details never reach our servers — they go straight to Stripe
• •Form inputs are masked in session recordings before they leave your device
• •Administrative accounts require a second factor to sign in

No system is completely secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately at info@skratchgolf.ca.

If your personal information is lost, stolen, or accessed by someone who should not have it, and there is a real risk of significant harm to you, then Canadian law requires — and we commit — to do the following:

• •Tell you directly, as soon as feasible, describing what happened, what information was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you can do to protect yourself.
• •Report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec where Quebec residents are affected.
• •Notify any organisation that could reduce the risk of harm to you.
• •Record it in our confidentiality incident register — every incident, whether or not it was reportable, whether or not anyone was harmed. Quebec’s Law 25 requires that register, sets what must be in it, and requires it be kept for five years from the day we found out. PIPEDA asks for two years; we keep five, for everyone.

We will not delay telling you in order to finish investigating, and we will not minimise what happened.

Skratch Golf is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 14. If we learn we have collected information from a child under 14 without parental consent, we will delete it promptly.

Users between 14 and 17 must have a parent or legal guardian review and consent to these terms before creating an account, as described in our Terms of Service.

We use 14 rather than 13 because Quebec's Law 25 sets that threshold, and we apply the strictest Canadian standard across the whole platform.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has given us personal information, contact info@skratchgolf.ca and we will remove it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes — a new category of data, a new processor, a new purpose — we will update the effective date at the top of this page and notify registered users by email or in-app notification before the change takes effect.

Where a change requires your consent under Canadian law, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

Your continued use of Skratch Golf after non-material changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy? We're easy to reach:

• •Privacy Officer, Skratch Golf Inc. — info@skratchgolf.ca
• •Coaches and facility partners — see the Partner & Coach Privacy Policy
• •Cookies and tracking — see the Cookie Policy

Skratch Golf Inc. · All rights reserved · September 2026