Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 30, 2026

PickGauge is a small, independently-run tool for tracking against-the-spread picks in college football pick'em pools. This page explains what information the app collects, how it's used, and what control you have over it.

Account information

Signing in is handled entirely by Clerk, a third-party authentication provider. PickGauge never sees or stores your password — Clerk manages that directly. The only account information PickGauge itself uses is your Clerk user ID (an internal account identifier, not your password) and, where you've provided one, your email address for sign-in purposes. See Clerk's own privacy policy for how they handle sign-in data.

What PickGauge stores about your use of the tool

Once you're signed in, the following is saved to a private database bucket tied to your account, and is not visible to any other user:

Your picks, pool entries, and which pools you've joined
Pool sheets you've imported (game lines, pick limits, entry names)
Prediction-input data you've imported or entered (e.g. from a Powers PDF), and which prediction systems and weights you've enabled

Separately, a small amount of data is shared across every signed-in user of this deployment — current game lines, prediction-system averages, and the structure of any pool someone has published (games, pick limits). Your individual picks and entries are never included in that shared data — only the pool's structure is shared, so others can join and pick within it.

Your Odds API key stays on your device — never persisted on our end. If you add a personal key from The Odds API in Settings, it's stored only in your browser's local storage. When you hit Refresh Lines, it's transmitted securely (HTTPS) to PickGauge's own serverless proxy in a request header, so the proxy can call The Odds API on your behalf — it is never written to our database, never synced to your account, and never included in a backup file you export.

Other services this tool talks to

PickGauge is built on a few third-party services, each governed by its own privacy policy:

Clerk — authentication and sign-in
Vercel — hosting for the app and its backend functions
Upstash — the database that stores your synced picks/pools/inputs
The Odds API and third-party computer prediction-system providers — sources for game lines and prediction-system data (no personal information is sent to any of them)

Exporting and deleting your data

Export: Settings → Export backup (.json) downloads everything synced to your account as a plain JSON file, anytime.

Deletion: Settings → Delete my PickGauge data permanently deletes everything in your synced PickGauge account state — every pool, pick, entry, and archived week — on every signed-in device. This is separate from your sign-in itself (email/password/session), which you manage from your account menu. Aggregate product analytics are not part of that synced account-state record: PickGauge does not keep a user-level analytics event history that can be exported or replayed, and aggregate counters age out after about 400 days. Feedback you intentionally submit through the beta form is stored separately and also ages out after about 400 days. If you'd like submitted feedback removed sooner, or would rather not use the in-app deletion button for your synced state, contact us.

Website traffic analytics

PickGauge uses Vercel Web Analytics to understand anonymous, aggregate website traffic — for example page views, unique daily visitors, referrers, country/region, browser, operating system, and device type. Vercel Web Analytics does not use analytics cookies and is designed so the page-view data is not tied to an identified person or stored IP address. PickGauge also strips URL query strings and fragments before a Web Analytics page-view event is sent, because those values are not needed for traffic analysis and can contain transient sign-in state.

PickGauge does not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, advertising trackers, or Vercel custom events to send picks, model numbers, pool names, imported-file contents, or email addresses. Vercel Web Analytics is used for site-level traffic only; it is separate from the signed-in product analytics described below.

Signed-in product analytics and beta feedback

PickGauge also uses a small first-party analytics system to understand whether core signed-in features are being used and where beta users run into friction.

The first-party product analytics system stores daily aggregate counts for a short allowlist of product actions (for example opening the app, changing tabs, refreshing lines, importing a pool, making a pick, or viewing/exporting a Snapshot) plus coarse context such as mobile/desktop, Overall/pool view, season, and week. For the beta activation funnel, one-way hashed account identifiers are added to per-event HyperLogLog counters so PickGauge can estimate how many unique signed-in users reached each core milestone without storing a raw user-level event history. It does not store a raw clickstream, your picks, model numbers, imported file contents, pool names, or your email address. First-party product analytics data expires after about 400 days.

If you intentionally submit the in-app beta feedback form, PickGauge stores the feedback text, category, time, current app section, mobile/desktop and Overall/pool context, season/week, the surface you opened the form from, a coarse recent product action (for example “Load predictions”), and a pseudonymous account identifier so reports can be grouped. The form does not automatically attach screenshots, picks, model numbers, pool names, email addresses, or imported-file contents. Beta feedback also expires after about 400 days. If you need a reply, use the support email shown in the app rather than the feedback form.

Cookies

Neither Vercel Web Analytics nor PickGauge's first-party product analytics sets an analytics cookie. Clerk sets its own session cookies to keep you signed in; see their policy for details.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the "last updated" date above will change too.

Questions

Reach out any time via the contact page.