Privacy
Short version: no accounts, no cookies, no tracking. We don't know who you are and we're not trying to find out.
Things this site doesn't do
No sign-ups. No newsletter. No adverts. No cookies — not one. No following you around other websites, no fingerprinting, nothing sold or handed to anybody. There's no database of visitors. The only thing we store on a server is a rating you choose to share (below).
Things your browser remembers
Heart a course, type your handicap, log a round or rate a course, and your browser hangs on to it so it's still there when you come back:
- the courses you've saved, marked as played, or rated — and your private notes
- the handicap index you typed, and the rounds you've logged
- whether you switched on FPG member rates
- which of your ratings you've shared, and which notices you've already seen or dismissed
All of it stays in your browser, on your device. None of it is sent to us or to anyone else unless you press "Share it" on a rating. Clear your browser's site data and it's gone for good.
If you share a rating
Pressing "Share it" sends that one rating — the stars, your note if you tick the box to include it, and whether you logged a round there (never the score) — to our database so other golfers can see it on the course page. No name, no email, no account. It's filed under a random id your browser made up, so you can update or withdraw it later from the same device. To stop abuse we also keep a scrambled version of your IP address (hashed with a key that changes monthly, so it can't be turned back into an address or joined across months), and the form runs Cloudflare's Turnstile check. Stars appear straight away; a written note is only sent if you tick "also share my note", and is read by a person first and may be declined. We keep a shared rating until you withdraw it. Want one removed from a device you no longer have? The "My golf" page shows your browser's random id — email us that id and the course and we'll delete it. The scrambled IP is only ever used to count submissions and is never joined to anything else.
If you tap "Near me"
Your browser asks your permission, then hands the page your coordinates so courses can be sorted by how far they are from you. That all happens inside the page on your device. Your location isn't sent to us, isn't sent anywhere else, and is forgotten the moment you close the tab. Say no and everything still works — you just sort by something other than distance.
How we count visitors
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is about as boring as analytics gets. That's why we picked it. No cookies, no browser storage, and no attempt to identify you from your IP address or your browser's fingerprint. It doesn't even record query strings.
What we get is a tally: which pages people open, roughly which country they're in, which site they arrived from, and what sort of browser, device and operating system they're on. Instead of following individuals, it counts a "visit" as a page view arriving from somewhere else — enough to tell us Vilamoura is popular, not nearly enough to tell us anything about you.
We use it to find out which courses people actually click on. That's genuinely it.
Where the site lives
Golf Birdie runs on Cloudflare Pages. Like every web host on earth, Cloudflare's servers receive your IP address and browser details in order to send you the page at all, and use them to keep the site running and fend off abuse. Cloudflare's privacy policy covers that part.
The site is also locked down so it can't send anything to a third party beyond the ones named on this page — that's enforced by your browser, not just promised by us.
The maps
Both the satellite imagery and the road maps come from Esri/ArcGIS. Every map tile you see is an image pulled from their servers, which means they see your IP address — same as any image loaded from anywhere on the web. Esri doesn't run a tracking script on our pages.
When you click away
Course pages link out to each club's own website, to Google Maps for directions, and to a Booking.com search for hotels near that course. The header links to our Instagram and TikTok. The moment you follow any of them, you're on their turf and their privacy policy applies instead of ours.
We currently earn nothing from those links. There's no affiliate account behind them. If that ever changes, this page changes with it.
If this page changes
Anything meaningful gets a fresh date at the bottom.
Last updated: 29 September 2026
Questions
Anything at all — including "delete whatever you've got on me", though the honest answer is that we haven't got anything: golfbirdiecontact@gmail.com
Golf Birdie is run by one person, not a company.