Privacy

Privacy

Elected Golf keeps the personal information an application and a Candidacy need, in the club's own database in the AWS Frankfurt region, and nothing more. This page lists every field, why it is needed and how long it is kept, and explains the automatic election decision and how to ask a person to review it.

Who is responsible

Elected Golf is published by Vitaly Bibikov, an individual, who is the controller of the information described here and decides how it is used. The controller is reached at support@electedgolf.com, which is also the address for every request about your data.

What an application collects, and why

  • Email address: to send your confirmation, your Candidacy link, the weekly mail and your outcome. One application per address per intake is enforced with a keyed hash of the address.
  • First name: to address you in mail, and for your initials on a Ledger line if you choose one.
  • Country, from a list: to set the season the plan assumes and which admissions guide applies.
  • Handicap association, and your official index value or, with no official handicap, three recent 18-hole scores: to set the plan's starting load. No membership or GHIN number is collected.
  • Rounds per month (a band) and your goal (one of three): to set the plan's load and which week-3 material is emphasised.
  • Your 18+ confirmation, the Honour Pledge and the dues acknowledgement, with the price version shown: eligibility, the basis of the honour rules, and proof the price was shown before you applied.
  • How you heard about the club, and an optional price at which the dues would be too high: to learn which channels and prices work. The first allows “prefer not to say”; the second may be left blank.

Nothing outside this list is accepted: the server refuses any other field.

What a Candidacy records, and why

  • Practice sessions: date, minutes, focus and an optional note of up to 280 characters: requirement R2.
  • Baseline and re-test cards: the date and four drill totals: requirements R1 and R7.
  • Rounds: date, start time, course name, holes, score, the statistics you log and your Game Plan, which may include a short note per hole: requirements R4 to R6.
  • Rules paper attempts: the questions served, your answers and the score: requirement R3.
  • The Letter: three sections, with their word counts: requirement R8. It is checked for length and shape only, and no person reads it to decide anything.
  • Your seat number, start date, outcome and the rule ids that produced it, and whether the weekly mail is on: running the Candidacy and keeping a record of how the outcome was reached.
  • After an election: your Ledger choices, and, if you press Accept election, the price shown, its version, “charged: false” and whether you want the billing-opens email: the public line you choose, and the record that nothing was charged.

The marker links, the Letter, the Ledger and Accept election open as a Candidacy reaches them. Please keep health or injury details out of notes and the Letter; nothing here needs them.

Never collected: your date of birth, health information, a phone number, payment details, GHIN or membership numbers, a marker's contact details, photographs or your location.

Your marker

A round counts toward election only when the person who marked your card confirms it on their own device, through a single-use link you hand them. That page asks for their first name and records it with their confirm or decline and the time. No surname, email address or phone number is asked for, and no mail is ever sent to a marker. The first name is kept with your Candidacy and deleted with it. If you marked a card and want your name removed, write to support.

The automatic decision

Election is decided automatically by a published rule, which you can read in full on the practice plan page before you apply. The rule counts what you log: two Baseline cards, practice sessions in every week, the Rules paper, a statistics round, a Game Plan round, 36 holes in rounds your markers confirmed, and the Letter's length and shape. Validity rules decide which entries count, and the honour rules H1 to H5 say what a marker's decline does. When every requirement is met inside your window you are elected at once. If one is still unmet when week 4 ends, a 7-day extension starts; if it is still unmet after that, or a third paper is failed, the Candidacy is deferred. A second marker decline ends it as not elected (rule H2). No person grades you, your rounds or your Letter.

What it means for you: an election lets you accept a seat, and nothing is charged. A deferral or a “not elected” outcome ends the Candidacy, keeps your record, and leaves you free to apply to a later intake.

Your right to a human review. You may ask for a person to look at any outcome, and especially one produced by an honour rule. Write to support@electedgolf.com from the address you applied with, name the rule, and say what you think went wrong. A person checks the records and how the rule was applied to them, and takes what you say into account. If a rule was applied wrongly, or a record it relied on was wrong, the outcome is corrected and you are told in writing. You may also contest the outcome with a data protection authority.

The Ledger

Nothing about you is published unless you are elected and choose it. A Ledger line (seat number, initials, region, intake) and your Letter on the Ledger are separate choices, each reversible at any time from your Candidacy page.

The Intake II list

The form that asks to be told when Intake II opens is not open yet and cannot send anything. When it opens it asks for an email address and a separate, unticked agreement to receive one message. The address is kept for 30 days while it waits for confirmation (the confirmation link works for 48 hours), for 365 days once confirmed, and for 30 days after you unsubscribe, marked so it is never mailed again. Deleting it from the link in any mail removes it at once.

Where it is kept, and who processes it

Everything is stored in the club's own Amazon DynamoDB table and mailed through Amazon SES, both run by Amazon Web Services in the Frankfurt region (eu-central-1, Germany); the site's API runs on AWS Lambda in the same region. Amazon Web Services processes it on the publisher's behalf. There is no other processor, no payment processor and no advertising network. Nothing is sold, and nothing is used for advertising. Mail is plain text with open and click tracking switched off. Pages are delivered by Amazon Web Services; as with any website, the servers that deliver a page see your IP address and the page requested.

How long it is kept

  • An application whose address is not confirmed within 48 hours is deleted, with everything recorded for it.
  • A confirmed Candidacy's records are kept while it runs and until 12 months and 30 days after its window closes (12 months after the 30 days an elected candidate has to answer), unless you delete them sooner.
  • An Accept-election record is kept until billing opens or the club closes the programme, and for at most 24 months.
  • A Ledger line is kept until you withdraw it or delete your Candidacy.
  • Rate-limit records hold your IP address hashed with a secret that changes every day, and expire after 24 hours.
  • Monthly totals (for example, how many applications arrived or how many people heard of the club from a search engine) carry no address or identifier and are kept for 24 months.

Expired records are removed by the database's automatic expiry, normally within a few days of the date given.

Deletion and export

Your Candidacy page has a control that downloads your whole record as a file and one that deletes it. Deletion removes every row at once, including any Ledger line, and revokes every link; one last email confirms it. The database's recovery backups still hold the deleted rows for up to 35 days, after which they are gone. If you have lost your link, use “Email me my link” on the apply page with the address you applied with, or write to support.

Legal basis

For people in the EU, the UK (UK GDPR) and Switzerland:

  • The application, the Candidacy and the automatic decision are steps taken at your request before entering into membership (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). The decision is automated because that is the service you ask for: a published rule applied the same way to everyone (Article 22(2)(a)), with the human review described above.
  • How you heard about the club and the optional price answer, the marker's first name, the rate-limit records and keeping an outcome's record for 12 months rest on the publisher's legitimate interests in learning which channels work, confirming rounds, preventing abuse and answering a contested outcome (Article 6(1)(f)).
  • A Ledger line, your Letter on the Ledger, the billing-opens email and the Intake II list rest on your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time without affecting what was done before.
  • Cookieless page-view counting rests on the publisher's legitimate interest in knowing which pages are used (Article 6(1)(f)); Do Not Track switches it off.

If you are in the UAE

Your information is processed outside the United Arab Emirates, in Germany, by Amazon Web Services, as described above. You may ask for access, correction or deletion, or object to processing, by writing to support.

Analytics

The site counts page views and a fixed list of 25 named events with Umami, a cookieless analytics tool the publisher runs itself; its script is loaded from analytics.pagefabrica.com, the only script on this site served from another address, and the figures are shared with no one. An event is a name and nothing else: no price, no identifier, no text. The complete list is accept_election_pressed, application_submitted, apply_started, elected_by_card, exam_passed, letter_submitted, nav_apply, notify_confirm_rejected, notify_confirmed, notify_delete_rejected, notify_deleted, notify_request_rejected, notify_request_submitted, notify_unsubscribe_rejected, notify_unsubscribed, offer_exposed_apply, offer_exposed_election, offer_exposed_terms, price_ack_checked, week_completed_1, week_completed_2, week_completed_3, week_completed_4, work_completed, work_started.

For each page view the collector records the page address (the tracker is told to drop the part after # or ?), the page title, the referring page, the browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language, and the country, region and city looked up from the IP address. The IP address and browser string form a visit identifier that changes every month; the IP address itself is not stored. The two pages that carry a link key in their address, /k/ and /apply/confirm/, load no analytics at all. If your browser sends Do Not Track, nothing is counted.

Cookies and storage

No cookies are set. Your browser keeps only what the site needs, under these names: hc-key, hc-letter-draft, hc-plan-draft, hc-reported, hc-device. Each is described on the cookies page.

Mail to support

Mail you send to support@electedgolf.com is kept as ordinary correspondence so we can reply and, for a data request, show that it was answered. Ask and it is deleted.

Age

The club is for adults. You must be 18 or over to apply, and no information is knowingly collected from anyone younger.

Your rights

You may ask for access to your information, a copy in a portable form, its correction or deletion, a restriction of its use, or object to its use, and you may withdraw any consent, by writing to support@electedgolf.com. Requests are answered within one month. You may also complain to a data protection authority where you live or work: in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

Last updated October 15, 2026. Questions: support@electedgolf.com