A scoreboard, not a surveillance operation.

The short version

We collect what the scoreboard needs to work — your account, your bets, your friends, your golf scores — and nothing more. We don't sell your data, we don't track you across other apps, and no real money ever moves through Friendly Stakes.

The rest of this page is the same statement with the details filled in. It applies to friendlystakes.com and to the Friendly Stakes apps for iPhone and Android, which are the same product in different wrappers.

What we collect

Your account. An email address, a display name, a username, and a password — the password is stored only as a cryptographic hash by our authentication provider, and we never see it. If you sign in with Apple or Google instead, we receive the identifier (and, if you share it, the email address) those services provide. You can add an avatar photo; Pro members can add animated ones.

What you create. Bets — their descriptions, stakes, participants, and outcomes. Messages in a bet's chat. Friend connections and groups. Pool picks and standings. Golf rounds, scorecards, and the games played on them. Profile customizations. This is the entire point of the app, so all of it is stored.

Scorecard photos. If you scan a paper scorecard with your camera, the photo is uploaded to our servers, read by an AI document-reading service to extract the numbers, and retained so a human can verify the course data it produced. Scanning is optional; you can always type a card in by hand.

Technical records. A push-notification token if — and only if — you turn notifications on. The app version you're running. A coarse last-active timestamp. If the iPhone or Android app crashes, a diagnostic report — device model, OS version, and what the code was doing at the moment it failed — goes to our crash-reporting service so we can fix it; crash reports carry no account identity and no IP address is retained with them. And one deliberate legal record: when you accept the Terms of Use, we store the date, the version you accepted, your IP address, and your browser identifier, because a terms acceptance we can't prove happened is worth very little.

Billing. Your subscription status and the customer identifiers our payment processors assign. Card numbers, Apple IDs, and Google payment details never touch our servers — see Payments below.

Location

The golf course search has a "Near me" option. If you use it, your device asks for permission and your coordinates are used to run that one search, then discarded. We do not store your location, we do not track your movements, and a golf round records which course you played — not where your phone was while you played it.

How we use what we collect

To run the product: keeping score, settling bets, delivering chat, tallying pools, and remembering that you are two up on your brother-in-law this year. To send the notifications you asked for and the transactional emails an account occasionally requires. To keep your subscription state in sync with whichever store you paid through. To answer your support tickets. To keep the service safe, enforce the Terms of Use, and meet legal obligations.

That list is exhaustive. There is no engagement-optimization model and no analytics broker at the end of it.

What we will never do

We do not sell or rent your data. We do not track you across other apps or websites. We do not hand your information to data brokers. And no wager recorded in Friendly Stakes ever moves money through us.

If any of that ever changes, this policy changes first, loudly, and you'll be told in the app before it takes effect.

Who processes data on our behalf

We use a small set of service providers, each of which receives only what its job requires: a cloud platform that hosts our database, authentication, and file storage; a web-hosting provider; a payment processor for purchases made on the web; Apple's App Store and Google Play, together with a subscription-management service, for purchases made in the apps; Apple's and Google's notification services for push delivery; an email-delivery service for the occasional transactional email; an AI service that reads scanned scorecard photos; and a crash-reporting service that receives the apps' anonymous diagnostic reports. We don't share your personal information with anyone else, except if the law genuinely requires it.

Payments

Friendly Stakes Pro is the only thing money can buy here. On the web, payment runs through our payment processor's secure hosted checkout; in the apps, through Apple's or Google's own billing. In every case the card details go directly to the payment processor — our servers see that you subscribed, when it renews, and nothing about how you paid. Stakes on bets are settled between friends, outside the app, exactly as the Terms of Use describe.

What other people can see

Friendly Stakes is social on purpose. Your username, display name, avatar, and win-loss record are visible to other users. The people in a bet see that bet — that is what a bet is. Group and pool members see each other's picks and standings by the rules of the game. And a bet's invite link shows the bet card to anyone who holds the link, so the friend you're challenging can see the terms before signing up — share links like you mean it.

Security

Passwords are hashed, sessions are cookie-based and validated on every request, all traffic is encrypted in transit, and every table in our database enforces row-level access rules — the database itself refuses to hand out rows you're not party to. If you enable Face ID or fingerprint sign-in, your credentials are stored in your device's own hardware-protected keychain and never on our servers.

No system is perfect and we won't insult you by claiming otherwise. If a security incident ever affects your data, we'll tell you what happened and what we're doing about it.

Retention and deleting your account

We keep your data for as long as you keep your account. You can delete your account yourself, from inside the app, and it takes effect immediately: your personal information is removed, and your side of shared records — the bets your friends won and lost against you, pool standings, golf rounds — is anonymized to a nameless ghost, because your rivals' histories are theirs to keep even when you leave.

Deleting your account automatically cancels a subscription purchased on our website. A subscription purchased through the App Store or Google Play can only be cancelled in your store subscription settings — Apple and Google do not let us do it for you, so do that first if you're leaving for good.

A few minimal records outlive deletion where keeping them is the responsible thing: the terms-acceptance audit trail and subscription billing records. They're kept because regulators, card networks, and the occasional dispute expect them to exist.

Want the step-by-step version, including what to do if you can't sign in? How to delete your account

Age

Friendly Stakes is for adults. The Terms of Use require you to be at least 18, and the service is not directed at children. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we'll delete it.

Your choices and rights

Notifications are opt-in and can be turned off any time, in the app or in your device settings. Location permission is only ever requested by the course search, and denying it just means typing a course name. You can see and edit your profile data in the app, and delete everything as described above.

Depending on where you live, privacy law may grant you rights to access, correct, export, or erase your personal information. Email us and we'll honor them — we'd have done it anyway.

Changes to this policy

If what we collect or how we use it changes, this page changes with it and the effective date above moves. Material changes get called out in the app rather than smuggled in quietly.

Contact

Questions, requests, or the sudden urge to read database schemas: support@friendlystakes.com, or the Contact Support option in the app's profile menu.