Effective date: September 27, 2026
Yardage is a golf GPS utility that answers one question: how far is it to the center of the green? This policy explains what the app does with data.
Location
- Yardage uses your location during a golf round that you explicitly start and for a nearby-course lookup that you initiate.
- Distance to the center of the green is calculated on your iPhone.
- During an active round, background location keeps Lock Screen and Dynamic Island yardage current while the phone is locked or another app is open.
- Location use ends when the round ends. Yardage does not intentionally track your location outside an active round.
- Yardage does not upload your latitude, longitude, route, speed, heading, GPS accuracy, or movement history.
- A full route is not stored. The app may retain the latest accepted location locally so an interrupted active round can recover after a relaunch.
Automatic Hole Changes
Automatic Hole Changes runs on your device during a round. It uses local course geometry and your device’s location to decide when to move from one hole to the next. Previous and Next remain available at all times.
Before a round, when Automatic Hole Changes is enabled, Yardage may request the selected course’s timing profile from our server. That request identifies the course and its course-data revision; it does not include your location.
Between rounds, Yardage may send privacy-minimized outcome events so we can understand how Automatic Hole Changes behaves. These events may include an anonymous installation identifier, a random event identifier, course ID, course-data revision, detector/algorithm versions, the hole the transition leaves, the event type, and the tuning level in effect.
These events do not contain latitude, longitude, coordinates, GPS accuracy, speed, heading, route, movement timestamps, score, shot data, or your round path.
Course requests and green reports
If a course is missing, Request a Course sends only the course information you type, such as course name, city, and state, together with an anonymous installation identifier used for deduplication.
If you report a green on a listed course, Yardage sends the course ID, course-data revision, hole number, an event identifier, and the anonymous installation identifier. Green reports are queued on the device during a round and sent after the round. They do not include your GPS coordinates or route.
Anonymous identifiers and retention
Yardage does not require an account, name, email address, or phone number. Some first-party features use a persistent app-generated installation identifier so duplicate requests can be limited and product behavior can be evaluated across an installation.
Course-request and green-report records are retained for up to 365 days. Auto Hole outcome records are retained for up to 180 days. These records are not used for advertising or cross-app tracking.
Purchases
Purchases and subscriptions are processed by Apple through the App Store. Yardage does not receive or store your payment-card information. Restore Purchases uses Apple’s StoreKit mechanisms.
What Yardage does not do
- No account or sign-in is required.
- No advertising SDKs.
- No third-party analytics SDKs.
- No cross-app tracking.
- No selling of personal data.
- No upload of your golf route or raw GPS coordinates.
Website
The website at theyardageapp.com runs no analytics tools or advertising pixels. If you submit one of its forms (for example a waitlist or email list), we keep your email address, the list you chose, the page the form was on and the time, so we can send what the form promised; you can unsubscribe at any time or ask us to delete it by email. Our web host keeps standard server and security logs (such as IP address, browser and pages requested). If we ever add analytics or advertising tools, we will update this page first and ask for consent where the law requires it.
Questions
For privacy questions, email privacy@theyardageapp.com.