Privacy Policy

Coursing Club is an independent fan site for AKC Fast CAT results. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the American Kennel Club. This page explains what information the site collects, what we do with it, who else receives it, and the choices you have.

The short version: we collect what we need to run your account and your dog's page. We do not sell personal data and we do not use advertising trackers. You can download or delete your data yourself from your account page.

1. What we collect

Your account

• Email and password sign-up: your name, your email address, and a bcrypt hash of your password. We never store the password itself.
• Google sign-in: the name, email address and profile picture that Google sends us.
• When you sign up you confirm that you are 18 or older. We send a confirmation link to your email address; you need to confirm it before you can claim a dog or subscribe.
• The date your account was created and when you last signed in.

Ownership claims

To show that a dog is yours, you send us:

• the dog's AKC registration number;
• the owner name as printed on the AKC paperwork;
• a photo of the AKC registration or title certificate;
• a photo of yourself holding a government photo ID (you may cover the ID number and your address);
• optionally, a photo of you with the dog.

These are stored privately and can only be seen by our review team. They are never shown on the site. Every time a reviewer opens a photo-ID image, that is logged. See section 7 for when they are deleted.

Photos you upload

Dog photos and scorecard photos are re-encoded when you upload them. That removes the information cameras and phones embed in a picture, including location. These photos are shown publicly on the dog's page.

What you add to a dog's page

A verified owner can add a photo of their dog. Verified owners with Premium can also add a call name, a bio, height, weight and birthdate, and log runs: date, speed or time, event, club, city and state, weather and surface, placement and notes. This is shown publicly on the dog's page while the subscription is active.

Favorites and reports

• The dogs you mark as favorites.
• If you report a profile: the reason, what you wrote, and a contact email address if you are not signed in.

Payments

Premium payments are handled by Stripe on Stripe's own checkout page. We never see or store your card number. We keep a Stripe customer and subscription reference, your plan, its status and the date the current period ends.

How the site is used

We keep our own usage records. They contain:

• the path of each page viewed, the page you came from (the referrer), and a random ID that lasts for one browser tab;
• search queries typed into the site search;
• which dog pages are viewed;
• your user ID alongside these, when you are signed in.

To stop abuse — for example repeated sign-in attempts — we also keep short-lived counters tied to an IP address or an email address.

2. Cookies and browser storage

• One sign-in cookie. It keeps you signed in. There are no advertising or third-party analytics cookies.
• Session storage (cleared when you close the tab): the random per-tab ID used for page-view counts, and a note of a dog you tried to favorite before signing in.
• Local storage: your light or dark theme choice.

3. How we use it

• To run your account and keep it secure.
• To check ownership claims and handle reports and disputes.
• To show the pages, photos and runs that owners publish.
• To take payment for Premium and manage subscriptions.
• To send the emails listed in section 6.
• To understand which parts of the site are used, fix problems and prevent abuse.

4. Who receives your information

We do not sell personal data. We use the services below to run the site, and each receives only what it needs for its job:

• Anthropic — when a Premium owner uses “Snap your run card”, the scorecard photo is sent to Anthropic so its AI model can read the printed run details into the form.
• Resend — delivers our emails, so it receives your email address and the content of each message.
• Stripe — processes Premium payments.
• Open-Meteo — to look up race-day weather we send the city, state and date of a run. No account information is sent.
• Google — if you choose “Continue with Google”, Google handles that sign-in. Uploaded files are kept in Google cloud storage provided through our hosting provider.
• Our hosting and database providers — the site and its database run on their systems.

If you sign in with Google or pay through Stripe, their own privacy policies also apply to what you give them.

5. What is public

• Dog names, breeds, sex, speeds and rankings from the AKC's public Fast CAT rankings.
• What a verified owner adds to their dog's page: photo, call name, bio, vitals, logged runs and scorecard photos.
• A badge showing that a dog has a verified owner.

Your email address, your claim documents and your favorites are not shown publicly.

6. Emails we send

• A confirmation link for your email address.
• A password-reset link, when you ask for one.
• Updates on an ownership claim: received, verified or declined.
• The outcome of a report you sent.
• A weekly digest about the dogs you have favorited. This is on by default. You can turn it off with the one-click unsubscribe link in every digest, or from your account page.

7. How long we keep things

• Photo-ID image: deleted as soon as your claim is approved or declined.
• AKC paperwork photo and photo with your dog: deleted if your claim is declined, if you withdraw the claim or remove the dog from your account, and when you delete your account.
• Everything else tied to your account is kept while the account exists, and removed when you delete it (see the next section).

8. Your choices

On your account page you can:

• change your name, email address and password;
• turn the weekly digest on or off;
• remove a dog from your account;
• download your data — one file with your profile, claims, favorites, logged runs, reports and email preference;
• delete your account. This takes effect immediately. It removes your sign-in details, favorites, claims and their documents, the runs you logged and their scorecard photos, and the photo, bio and call name on dogs you own. A Premium subscription is cancelled first. Usage records and any reports you filed are kept, but are no longer linked to you. Records of review decisions made by our team are kept.

If you can't sign in, or you want something corrected or removed that you can't change yourself, email support@coursingclub.com.

9. Where the dog data comes from

Ranking data is sourced from the American Kennel Club's public Fast CAT rankings page at apps.akc.org/apps/fastcat_ranking. Runs logged by owners are unofficial and are marked on the site as pending AKC confirmation. If you own a dog listed here and want its page corrected or removed, email support@coursingclub.com. The AKC may use the same address.

10. Age

Accounts are for adults. You must be 18 or older to create one.

11. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we will update the date at the top of the page. The current version is always at /privacy.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: support@coursingclub.com.