SurfGlyph is a surf platform: it reads ocean conditions at your spots, logs your sessions, and connects you with surf businesses. Some of that requires precise location data and payment details, so this policy is specific about both.
01Who we are
SurfGlyph is the controller of the personal data described here, under Brazil's LGPD, the EU and UK GDPR and any other data protection law that applies to you.
Our data protection officer (the LGPD encarregado) can be reached at privacy@surfglyph.com. Write there for any privacy question or request.
02What we collect
| Data | What it is and when we get it |
|---|---|
| Account | Email address, and — if you sign in with Google or Apple — the name, email and avatar those providers return. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and are never visible to us. |
| Profile | Display name, bio, avatar, home break, surf preferences, photos and videos you upload, and the follows and buddies you create. |
| Location | Coordinates you submit when you check in at a spot, the GPS track recorded while a session is running, and — only while a Flare is live — your position shared with the crew you invited. The app requests location permission before any of this and you can revoke it in your device settings. |
| Sessions | Start and end times, GPS tracks, derived metrics (wave count, distance, speed), photos and tagged buddies. |
| Social | Posts, comments, check-ins, reviews, direct messages, voice notes you ask us to transcribe, and chat with the AI assistant. Messages are stored so the conversation persists across devices. |
| Bookings and orders | What you booked or bought, from whom, when, the amount, refunds, and the check-in PIN (shown only to you). Card details go directly to Stripe — we never receive or store your full card number. |
| Business accounts | For businesses: company details, services, pricing, availability, the version of the Business Terms you accepted and when, replies to reviews, and the payout details you give us (a PIX key, or bank or Wise account details such as holder name, bank, account number and tax ID). Payout details are stored in our own database, readable only by you and the SurfGlyph team, and are never shown on a storefront or any public page. |
| Pre-launch waitlist | The waitlist is closed — signup is open to everyone. If you joined it before launch we still hold the email, first name, home break and referral code you gave us, so we can apply the founder access you were promised when you create an account. |
| Device and diagnostics | Push notification tokens, app version, device type, IP address, and crash and error reports. |
We do not collect health data, contacts, or advertising identifiers, and we do not buy personal data from data brokers.
03Why we use it
- To run the service — authenticate you, show forecasts for your spots, record sessions, deliver messages, process bookings. Without this data the product does not function.
- To take payment — process bookings, shop orders, photo purchases and subscriptions, and to pay businesses what they are owed.
- To share conditions — check-ins feed the crowd and conditions shown on spot pages, which are visible to other users by design.
- To notify you — booking confirmations, messages, session reminders and condition alerts, by push notification and email. You control these in settings; transactional emails about a booking you made cannot be turned off while the booking is live.
- To keep it working and safe — crash reports, abuse and fraud prevention, moderation of business listings and user content, and rate limiting.
Depending on where you live, our legal bases are performance of our contract with you (running the service and your bookings), your consent (precise location, marketing email, push notifications), our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention, product improvement), and legal obligation (tax and accounting records).
04AI features
The surf analysis you read is generated in two stages. The numbers — wave height, period, wind, tide, and the confidence score — are computed deterministically from oceanographic sources (Open-Meteo, NOAA CO-OPS tides, METAR observations). A large language model is then used only to describe those numbers in plain language, and to power the in-app chat assistant.
Our model provider is currently OpenAI. We send it data in these cases only:
- Chat and AI explanations: the relevant conditions data and your message.
- Voice input: the audio clip you record, to transcribe it into text.
- Moderation of business content: a business's name, type, tagline and description when the business is created, and the text of each reply a business posts to a review, before it is published.
- Moderation of cover photos: a photo you attach to a check-in or a spot post, before it can be shown as a spot's cover image.
We do not send your GPS tracks, payment details or private messages with other users to OpenAI, and our provider is contractually barred from training on data sent through the API.
05Who we share it with
We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with providers that run parts of the service:
| Provider | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, authentication and file storage |
| Vercel | Hosting for the website |
| Google Cloud Run | Hosting for the API |
| Stripe | Card payments, refunds and subscriptions. All payments land in our Stripe account; Stripe is an independent controller of your payment data |
| OpenAI | Chat and natural-language explanations, voice transcription, and automated moderation (see section 4) |
| Resend | Transactional email |
| Sentry | Crash and error reporting from the website, the API and the app |
| Google Analytics (via Google Tag Manager) | Website usage statistics, only if you accept analytics cookies (see section 9) |
| Expo | Routing push notifications to Apple and Google |
| Apple / Google | Push notification delivery, and sign-in if you use it |
| Slack | Internal review by our team of spots and local knowledge that surfers suggest: the suggestion and the suggester's first name |
We also share what you deliberately publish. A booking sends your name and booking details to that business. A review, post or check-in is visible to other users. A business's reply to a review is public, shown under the review. A Flare shares your live position with the crew you invited, and stops when the Flare ends.
Payouts to businesses are made by hand (PIX, bank transfer or Wise) using the payout details the business gave us, so those details go to the bank or payment service that carries the transfer. Nothing else about customers is sent with them.
Ocean and map data sources (Open-Meteo, NOAA, aviationweather.gov, OpenStreetMap, Wikimedia and Wikidata, and Google Places when enabled) receive spot or map coordinates, station ids and spot names from our servers, never anything that identifies you. Two exceptions involve text you type: the place names you search for are sent from our servers to Open-Meteo's geocoder, and when you search for your home town while editing your profile in the app, your phone sends what you type to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service directly, which therefore sees your IP address. Maps load their tiles straight from the map provider to your device (CARTO on the website, Apple Maps or Google Maps in the app), which likewise sees your IP address and the area you are looking at.
Live cams on spot pages come from YouTube. We find them with the YouTube API Services, sending YouTube only spot names and video ids from our servers, never anything about you. When you open a spot page with a cam, YouTube's player loads from YouTube (the youtube-nocookie.com domain), so Google sees your IP address and what you watch, under the Google Privacy Policy. We don't ask for access to your Google or YouTube account; if you ever granted it, you can revoke it at Google's security settings.
We may disclose data if required by law, and if the business is ever sold or merged, data moves with it under this policy.
06Where your data is held
Our providers operate in the United States and the European Union, so your data may be transferred outside your country. Where required, those transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or an equivalent approved mechanism.
07How long we keep it
- Account, profile and session data — until you delete your account.
- Booking, order and payment records, platform fee records and payouts to businesses — up to 7 years after the transaction, because tax and accounting rules require it.
- Business payout details — while the business is on SurfGlyph; they are deleted with the business.
- Crash and diagnostic logs — up to 90 days.
- Pre-launch waitlist entries — until you unsubscribe, which you can do from the link in any waitlist email we sent you.
- Backups — deleted content can persist in encrypted backups for up to 30 days after deletion.
08Your rights
You can access, correct, export or delete your data. Most of it is editable directly in the app: profile and preferences in settings, sessions and posts individually, and account deletion from settings on the web or in the app. You can also write to privacy@surfglyph.com from your account email and we delete it within 30 days.
To get a copy of everything we hold about you, use “Download my data” in settings on the web: you get one JSON file (machine-readable, so you can take it elsewhere) with your profile, sessions, check-ins, messages you sent, bookings, purchases and notifications. Other people appear in it by first name only.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to or restrict processing, to withdraw consent at any time, and to complain to your data protection authority. To exercise any of these, write to privacy@surfglyph.com — we respond within 30 days.
Deleting your account, from settings, takes effect straight away:
- Deleted: your login, your profile, and everything attached to it — follows, check-ins, spot posts, Flares, notifications, sessions with their GPS tracks, metrics, photos and tagged buddies, the direct messages you sent, the photos and videos in your storage folders, and our resized copies of any cover photo you contributed (the spot gets a new cover).
- Cancelled: an active subscription is cancelled with Stripe at the same moment, so you are never charged again. The current period is not refunded.
- Kept, for tax and accounting: your bookings, shop orders and photo purchases, and the payment records behind them. They are no longer linked to a profile, and are deleted when the retention period above ends.
- Kept without your name: reviews you left on a business, which stay on its storefront with no name or profile attached.
If you own a business on SurfGlyph, account deletion is blocked until its open bookings and payouts are closed: write to hello@surfglyph.com first.
10Children
SurfGlyph is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 16; if you believe a child has created an account, contact privacy@surfglyph.com and we will delete it. A parent or guardian must make any booking on behalf of a minor.
11Security
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access to production data is restricted to the people who need it, and database access is enforced by row-level security. No system is perfectly secure — if a breach affects your data, we will notify you and the relevant authority as the law requires.
12Changes
If we change this policy materially, we will update the effective date above and notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use SurfGlyph after that means you accept the updated policy. See also our Terms of Service.