Terms of Use
The rules for using Pocket Looper, written to be read rather than skipped. The section on photographs is the one that matters most.
What this is
Pocket Looper is a golf caddie, a scorecard and a guide to golf courses worldwide: a map, a set of ratings, and a place to keep a record of the rounds you have played. It is offered as-is. Most of it is free; some features are part of paid plans (see Paid plans, billing and canceling).
By creating an account you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, do not create an account.
Your account
You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us at support@pocketlooper.golf if you think someone else has it.
You must be 13 or older to have an account, or older where your country sets a higher age for online services (some countries in Europe use 14, 15 or 16). If you are under 18, ask a parent or guardian before creating one. Pocket Looper is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly keep an account for one; if you believe a child has created one, write to support@pocketlooper.golf and it will be closed.
You may set a username and a display name. Choose ones you have the right to use (not somebody else's name, brand or trademark) and keep them civil. A username is how a friend finds you; it is shown to anyone who searches for it exactly.
Do not use names, event titles or messages to harass, threaten or offend others, or to post anything abusive or objectionable. We may remove content and close accounts that do. To report content or a person, write to support@pocketlooper.golf (the Contact page has a Reporting a problem section) and we will look at it.
You can close your account at any time from Account > Delete account, or by writing to support@pocketlooper.golf. Closing it deletes your rounds, your saved lists, your friends, your photographs, your Lie Reader scans, your swing videos and everything in Coach.
Your rounds and your data
The rounds you log (scores, putts, hole-by-hole detail, the tees you played, your notes and your ratings of the day) are yours. Pocket Looper stores them so that you can see them again, and uses them only to run the features of the site: your Scores page, your course pages, your achievements, and the cards you choose to share. Aggregate figures that identify nobody (how many rounds were logged at a course, say) may be shown on the site.
A round you play with friends is one card with several names on it. Each player sees the round in their own Scores with their own score, and the whole card, including the others' scores. Nobody else can see it: there are no public rounds, profiles, followers, likes or comments. Somebody added by name who has no account appears on the card by name only and cannot open it.
The share card and the scorecard image are drawn on your own device when you ask for them and are not stored by Pocket Looper. What you do with the picture afterwards is up to you.
The Lie Reader and the AI answers
When you use the Lie Reader, Pocket Looper keeps the photo you take, what the caddie read from it, any correction you make, the club and yardage it showed you, and your answer when it asks how the shot came out. These are kept privately with your account: no other user of the site can see them, and they are never shown on a public page.
Pocket Looper uses all of this to test, tune and improve the Lie Reader and the caddie's AI answers: for example, checking new versions of the reader against photos whose outcome is known, adjusting the distance tables, and building and training Pocket Looper's own models. People working on Pocket Looper may look at the photos for that purpose.
You keep ownership of your photos. You give Pocket Looper a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store them and use them, together with the reads and your answers, for the purposes in this section. Pocket Looper will not sell them, publish them, or license them to anyone else.
Deleting your account deletes your Lie Reader photos and records. To delete them and keep your account, delete any scan in Profile > Lie scans, or write to support@pocketlooper.golf. Either way it removes them from Pocket Looper. Improvements already learned from them in aggregate (a changed distance table, say, or a trained model) stay, and cannot be traced back to you.
The Lie Reader's answers are an aid, not a guarantee. Club, distance and lie advice can be wrong; the shot is your call.
Coach: practice plans, swings, rules and round plans
Coach is the part of Pocket Looper that helps you practice and prepare: Golf School (a practice plan and skills tests), Golf IQ (tips, drills and a rules quiz), Swing Studio (your swing videos, measured and coached), the Rules assistant (answers to rules questions) and the round plan in the Tee-time brief (a plan for a round before you play it). What you put into Coach, and what it works out, is kept privately with your account. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what.
Coach's answers come partly from an AI model. They are an aid, not a guarantee, and can be wrong. A swing report is coaching, not medical advice: warm up, swing within what feels comfortable, and stop if anything hurts. A rules answer is a guide based on Pocket Looper's own summary of the Rules of Golf, not an official ruling: the Committee's ruling is final, and Local Rules may differ. A round plan is a starting point; play what you see, and play safely.
Swing Studio asks for your agreement, and that you are 13 or older, before it keeps your first swing video. You can delete any swing at any time from the swing itself.
Pocket Looper may limit how many AI answers each account can ask for in a day or a month, so the service stays fair and affordable for everyone.
Paid plans, billing and canceling
Pocket Looper has a free plan and a paid plan (Pro). During early access, features may be free that will later be part of a paid plan; you will be told before anything you use starts to cost money, and nothing is ever charged without your agreeing to it first.
When paid plans are on sale, the price, the billing period and any free trial are shown before you buy. A plan renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel it. You can cancel at any time; it stays active until the end of the period you have paid for, and is not charged again.
Pro is sold inside the iPhone app with Apple's in-app purchase, from the day paid plans begin: Pro Monthly (1 month) or Pro Yearly (1 year, which may start with a free trial). The app shows each plan's price from the App Store before you buy.
When you buy Pro in the iPhone app, Apple takes the payment under its terms, and you manage and cancel the plan in your Apple ID's Subscriptions settings; refunds for those purchases are handled by Apple. Payment is charged to your Apple ID when you confirm the purchase, or when the free trial ends, and the plan renews unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Apple's Standard License Agreement for apps (https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/) also applies to the iPhone app, alongside these Terms.
Prices may change. A new price applies only from your next renewal, and you will be told before it does.
Inviting others
You can invite somebody to a round by text message. By entering their number you confirm that you know them and that they would expect to hear from you. The message goes once, says who sent it and what it is for, and Pocket Looper does not text that number again unless you ask it to. Do not enter a number that is not yours to use.
Photographs you submit
This is the part that matters most, so it is set out in full.
When you attach a photograph to a round, you are submitting it to Pocket Looper as a possible course photograph. You keep ownership of your photograph. You are not selling it and you are not giving it away.
You confirm two things about every photograph you submit: that you took it yourself, or otherwise have the right to submit it; and that it does not contain anything you do not have the right to share: no other person's copyrighted work, and no one who has asked not to be photographed.
You grant Pocket Looper a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable license to:
- store your photograph and keep copies of it as needed to run the site;
- display it publicly on Pocket Looper, including as the main photograph for the course it shows;
- crop, resize, compress, rotate and otherwise adjust it as reasonably needed to fit the site's layout, and to remove location and camera information from the file;
- keep displaying it after the round it was attached to has been edited or deleted, and after you have stopped using the site;
- credit you by your display name beside it, or leave it uncredited if you have not set one;
- use it in the same way in a mobile app version of Pocket Looper, and in material describing Pocket Looper itself.
This license does not let Pocket Looper sell your photograph on its own, license it to a third party as stock imagery, or use it to advertise a product that is not Pocket Looper.
You can ask for a photograph to be taken down at any time by writing to support@pocketlooper.golf, and it will be removed from the site. Copies may remain in backups for a period afterwards.
Pocket Looper is under no obligation to use, publish or keep any photograph, and may remove any photograph at any time for any reason.
What you may not submit
Nothing unlawful, nothing that harasses or identifies a private person without their agreement, nothing obscene, and nothing that belongs to someone else.
Photographs are reviewed before they appear publicly on a course page. Until one is approved it is visible only to you. Lie Reader photos are never published.
Our content
Pocket Looper's own ratings, written descriptions and course notes, the photographs we took, the drawings made for Pocket Looper, and the design and software of the site and the app belong to Pocket Looper. You are welcome to use the site; you may not copy these out of it.
Much of the course information is not ours. Course names and places, hole maps and community scorecards come partly from OpenStreetMap contributors, directly and through OpenGolfAPI, under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0, https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/). That information stays under that license. It is © OpenStreetMap contributors (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright), and what came through OpenGolfAPI (https://opengolfapi.org) is credited "© OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0) via OpenGolfAPI". You may reuse it under that license, and nothing in these terms takes away what the license allows. The courses we list from OpenStreetMap are free to download from the About page, under the same license. Some course locations are the center of their town, from GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org), under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Some scorecards, tee details and hole maps come from paid data suppliers, GolfAPI and Golfbert. They belong to those suppliers and are shown under their terms; you may not copy them out of Pocket Looper.
The map tiles are © OpenStreetMap contributors and © CARTO, and the satellite pictures are Google's. Some course photographs were taken by other photographers and are shown under the license credited beside each one. A photograph a golfer sends stays theirs (see Photographs you submit).
Course names, club names and trademarks belong to their owners and appear here for identification only. Pocket Looper is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any club or course listed.
Ratings and information
The ratings and written verdicts on Pocket Looper are opinion and a guide, not a promise: you may see a course differently. Details such as par, yardage, slope, green-fee band, walking policy, year opened, location, architect and public or private status come from public sources, open data (see Our content) and data suppliers, and can be wrong or out of date. Tee times, prices and access are between you and the course.
Weather shown beside a round is a forecast or a record from a third-party service for the course's coordinates and the day in question. It is indicative, not a promise about the day you will have.
Booking links and course websites point to third-party sites. What happens there is governed by their terms, not these.
Acceptable use
Using the site, you agree not to:
- copy, scrape or extract Pocket Looper's own ratings or written content, or the scorecards and hole maps from GolfAPI and Golfbert, whether by hand or by machine, beyond what a normal visit involves (the open data under the Open Database License stays free to reuse under that license; see Our content);
- send invitations or messages to people who have not asked for them, or enter phone numbers you do not have the right to use;
- impersonate anybody, or claim a username, display name or photograph that is not yours to claim;
- interfere with the site, probe it for weaknesses, or load it in a way designed to degrade it for others;
- use the site for anything unlawful.
Pocket Looper may suspend or close an account that breaks these rules, and may remove any content at any time.
As-is, and limits
Pocket Looper is provided as-is and as-available, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Pocket Looper is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you have paid to use the site in the twelve months before the claim.
Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury caused by negligence, or fraud.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, United States, and any dispute will be heard in the courts there, unless the law where you live gives you rights that cannot be taken away, in which case those rights stand.
Changes
These terms may change. When they do in a way that matters, you will be asked to accept the new version the next time you open the site, and the record will show which version you accepted and when. Minor edits (spelling, a clearer sentence) may be made without asking again.
Getting in touch
Write to support@pocketlooper.golf.