Privacy
Last updated 26 July 2026
The short version
Your swing videos are stored on your own device, in your browser. They are not uploaded anywhere as a matter of course. Two features do send data off your device, and both are things you choose to run: 3D reconstruction sends cropped images of you, and AI coaching sends your swing numbers. Neither is stored after it returns an answer.
What stays on your device
Recorded video, the pose track extracted from it, your measurements, reports and practice plans are held in your browser's local storage (IndexedDB). We cannot read them. They stay until you delete them or clear your browser data, and clearing your browser data deletes them permanently — there is no server copy to restore from.
What leaves your device, and when
Swing analysis — the recording you analyse
When you analyse a swing and you are online, the clip is uploaded to our analysis server (Modal, in the United States), which finds your body positions in each frame and sends the measurements back. The clip is processed in memory and is not written to disk or retained after the request completes — the video and every measurement end up stored on your device, not with us. If you are offline or the upload fails, the same analysis runs on your phone instead; it is slower there, and on some phones the phone's own video decoder cannot read imported slow-motion files at all, which is why the server does this job when it can.
3D reconstruction — only when you tap “Run 3D analysis”
Your browser crops each frame to the area around you, downscales it, and sends those images to a GPU service (Modal, in the United States) which returns a 3D skeleton. These are photographs of you. They are processed in memory to produce the skeleton and are not written to disk or retained by us or by Modal after the request completes. The video itself is never uploaded — only the cropped frames.
Clubhead tracking — only when you tap “Track the clubhead”
This one sends the CLIP ITSELF — the recorded video, as recorded, up to 24 MB — to the same GPU service, along with your hand and ankle positions so it knows where to look. It is the only feature that uploads video rather than cropped stills, because following a clubhead needs the frames either side of each one and the phone cannot do that work. The clip is decoded in memory to produce the track and is not written to disk or retained after the request completes. If you never tap it, your video never leaves the device.
AI coaching — when a report is generated
Numbers only: your measurements, which of them fell outside the reference corridors, the club, the detected swing archetype, and anything you entered in your player profile (handicap, typical miss, goal). No images and no video. This is sent to Anthropic's Claude via an API gateway to write the coaching text. If it fails, the app falls back to a rules-based report written from the same numbers.
Anonymous benchmarks — only if you opt in
If you choose to compare yourself against other golfers, the numeric measurements from that swing are added to a pool with your self-reported handicap band and club type. Nothing identifying is attached, and it cannot be traced back to you or your account.
Account and billing
If you sign in, we store your email address (via Supabase) to identify your account. If you subscribe, Stripe processes the payment — your card details go directly to Stripe and never reach us. We keep only the Stripe customer reference so we know what you have access to.
Analytics
Page views and real-device performance, collected by Vercel. Cookieless and not tied to your account or your swings. We use it to see which features get used and whether the app is fast enough on real phones.
What we do not do
- We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.
- We do not use your swings to train models. If that ever changes it will be opt-in, asked for plainly, and off by default.
- We do not use your video or images for anything other than returning the analysis you asked for.
- We do not attempt to identify you from your body, and we do not run face recognition.
Your choices
You can use every on-device feature without an account. On the Account page you can download everything GolfMate holds about you as a single file, delete the data on this device, or delete your account entirely — which also cancels any subscription. Swings can also be deleted one at a time from their own page.
If you are in the UK, EU or California you have rights to access, correct, export and erase your personal data. Those two controls exercise them directly and take effect immediately, which is faster than asking us to do it — and because most of your data never reaches us in the first place, they are also more complete than anything we could action from our side.
Children
GolfMate is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Contact
GolfMate is in beta and a published contact address is being set up. Until then, use the controls on the Account page to export or delete your data — they work without needing to contact anyone.