Privacy

The Czar is a scorekeeping app for a golf group. It has no accounts, no advertising and no analytics, and it collects nothing about you beyond what a scorecard needs.

Last updated 6 October 2026.

There is no account

You never give us an email address, a password or a phone number, because the app never asks for one. On first launch your device is issued an anonymous identifier by our backend provider. It is a random value. It is not linked to you, your device's advertising identifier, or anything else, and it exists only so the app can tell your rounds apart from someone else's.

The one thing you type about yourself is a display name, and it is whatever you want it to be. It is shown to the other players in your rounds.

What is stored

When you create or join a round, the following is saved to our database:

• Your display name, and your anonymous identifier.
• The round: its name, the course name and date, the tee times, the join code, the number of groups, whether the day is played own-ball or as a team format (alternate shot or scramble), and which game each group is playing.
• The pairings — who is in which tee group, and which side of a match they're on.
• Whether each player is in the round's skins, and whether the host has put them in or out of the Big Game by hand.
• The scores: a stroke count per player per hole, plus which device last changed it and when, so a correction can be attributed. In a team format a team’s score is saved against both partners.
• The par and yardage of each hole, copied from the course card when the round is created.
• The results the round settles on — the cut, and the Big Game’s pairs, whether drawn at random or picked by the host, before or after the round.
• If you host a round and post a note to it — local rules, a tee change: the text of the note, the hole it is about if you gave one, your anonymous identifier, and when you posted it. Only a round’s host can post one. Notes cannot be edited; the host can delete them, and they are deleted with the round.
• If you start or join a tournament — several rounds under one code, between two teams, as a Big Game trip, or as stroke play: the tournament’s name, which of those kinds it is, its two team names when it has teams, its join code, and its roster. For each person on the roster that is a display name, their anonymous identifier if they joined with the code (a name the host typed in has none), and in a team tournament which team they are on.
• If you use a code to watch a round rather than play in it: your anonymous identifier, which round it is, and when you started watching. No display name is stored for a watcher, because the app never asks for one.
• If you subscribe to host rounds: your anonymous identifier, whether the subscription is active and until when, and which plan it is. That is all — the payment itself is Apple’s, and no card, receipt or Apple ID reaches us. Joining a round with a code never involves any of this.

That is the whole list. There are no other fields. Nowhere in the app is there a place to enter an email address, a phone number, a postal address, a date of birth, a handicap index or a payment method, and no such data is stored.

What is not collected

• No analytics or crash reporting. The app contains no analytics, attribution, advertising or crash-reporting software of any kind.
• No tracking. Nothing you do is tracked across other apps or websites, and no data is shared with data brokers or advertisers.
• No device permissions, with one exception you trigger yourself. The app never asks for your location, camera, contacts, microphone or notifications, because it uses none of them. If you choose Save Image when sharing a result card, iOS asks for permission to add that one picture to your Photos. That is add-only: the app never reads your photo library.
• No device identifiers. No advertising identifier, no device fingerprint.
• No contacts or address book access. Players are invited by reading them a five-character code.

Who can see your data

The other players in a round can see it. That is the point of the app — a shared leaderboard only works if everyone can see everyone's scores. Your display name, your scores and your results are visible to every player in a round you are part of, and to anyone watching that round with its code. So is anything the round’s host posts as a note to it.

People outside a round cannot. Access is enforced at the database with row-level security: a request only returns rows for rounds you belong to or are watching. There is no public listing of rounds, and knowing a round exists is not enough to read it — you need its join code.

A tournament is shared across all of its rounds. When a round belongs to a tournament, everyone on the tournament’s roster — and anyone playing in or watching any one of its rounds — can see the tournament’s name and kind, its teams and who is on them when it has teams, and the scores and Big Game pairs of every round in it, not only the round they are in. That is what lets two phones at the same table show the same tournament score. It is still closed to everyone else, and still read-only for anyone who is only watching.

Using a code always makes you visible to the round. Joining as a player puts your name on the roster. Choosing to watch instead adds you to a count of watchers that everyone in the round can see. There is no way to read a round without the round knowing.

Watching is read-only, and that is enforced at the database rather than by hiding buttons: a watcher can never write a score, change a pairing or alter a result.

Who else is involved

Supabase

The database, the anonymous authentication and the live sync are hosted by Supabase, acting as our processor. Everything described above is stored there.

Apple

Hosting a round is a subscription bought through Apple’s App Store. Apple handles the payment end to end — the card, the receipt, the renewal, the refund — under Apple’s privacy policy. The app never sees your payment details.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat confirms with Apple that a subscription is real and current, and tells us. What it receives is the App Store receipt and your anonymous identifier — the same one described above — and nothing else about you. It is what lets the app know a host is subscribed without our ever handling a payment.

GolfCourseAPI

When a host searches for a course while setting up a round, the text they type is used to look the course up in GolfCourseAPI’s catalogue. Your phone does not contact them directly — the search goes to Supabase, which forwards it and keeps a copy of the result so that the next person looking for the same course does not cause another lookup.

The search text is stored, and it is not linked to you. What is kept is the words typed and the courses they matched — no identifier, no account, no name, nothing that says who searched or which round it was for. A stored search is discarded after 30 days. Course cards themselves — the pars and yardages for a course — are kept indefinitely, because a golf course is not personal information and holding it is what stops the same course being looked up over and over.

A course lookup happens only during round creation. Once the course is chosen, its pars and yardages are copied into the round and nothing is contacted again, which is also why the app keeps working with no signal.

Course data from GolfCourseAPI.

Who is responsible, and where your data is

The Czar is run by its developer, Jonathan Kaplan, who is based in the United States. Under data protection law, including the UK GDPR, he is the controller of the data this page describes. You can reach him at hello@theczargolf.com.

We use your data for two reasons, which the law calls lawful bases. The first is to provide what you asked for: keeping your scores and showing them to your round. The second is our legitimate interest in keeping the service working and secure. We do not rely on your consent, because we do nothing that would need it: no marketing, no profiling and no tracking.

Our database is hosted by Supabase in Canada, and is managed from the United States. Apple, RevenueCat and GolfCourseAPI handle their parts in the United States. The UK recognises Canada as protecting personal data adequately. Data handled in the United States is covered by the safeguards each of those companies describes in its own privacy policy, linked above.

What stays on your phone

Some things are kept locally and never leave the device except as described above:

• Your anonymous session token, so you stay signed in between launches.
• Scores you have typed but not yet saved, so that a hole entered out of signal survives the phone closing the app.
• Which rounds you've hidden from your own history.
• Which of a host's notes you've dismissed from the top of the screen.
• Which one-time screens you've already seen, such as the welcome on first launch.
• Whether the app has already asked you, once, to rate it on the App Store. The rating sheet itself is Apple’s; the app never learns whether you rated it or what you chose.

The app writes a round's join code to your clipboard when you tap to copy it. It never reads your clipboard.

Deleting the app removes all of this local data.

Keeping and deleting data

A round is kept so the group can look it up later. The host of a round can delete it from inside the app, which permanently removes that round and every score, pairing and result in it, for everyone. It cannot be undone.

To have your data deleted, email hello@theczargolf.com and we will remove it. Because there is no account, please send the message from a context that lets us find the round — the round's name and date, and the name you played under.

How long things are kept: a round and its scores stay until its host deletes it or you ask us to. The text typed into course search is kept for 30 days. A record that a host has subscribed is kept while the subscription runs, and afterwards until you ask us to remove it.

One consequence of having no account is worth stating plainly: your access to your rounds depends on the anonymous identifier on your phone. A copy of the key to it is kept in the phone's own secure storage, so deleting the app and installing it again on the same phone brings your rounds back. If it is lost altogether, for example on a new phone set up from scratch, there is no way to restore access to the rounds it was in. The data still exists for the other players in those rounds, but the new phone is issued a new identifier and cannot be reconnected to the old one.

Children

The app is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has entered data, email us and we will remove it.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you, correct, export or delete your data. Email hello@theczargolf.com and we will help, within one month. Given how little is stored, most of it is already visible to you inside the app.

If you are in the United Kingdom, the law gives you those rights by name, along with the right to object to how your data is used and to ask us to restrict it. You can also complain to the regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would be glad of the chance to put things right first.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change is significant, we will say so in the app.

Questions about any of this: hello@theczargolf.com