Privacy policy

Top Dog SF Academy (“we”, “us”) is the online training academy of Top Dog SF, operated by Top Dog Supply LLC, 2121 Taraval St, San Francisco, CA 94116, United States. Top Dog Supply LLC is responsible for the personal information described here. You can reach us any time at hello@topdogsfacademy.com.

Account details. Your name, email address, and a password (stored only as a secure hash; we never see or store the password itself). If you sign in with Google, Google sends us your name, email address and a link to your profile photo.

Onboarding details you choose to share. About your dog (name, breed, life stage, training challenges) or your business (stage, state and city, revenue band, goals), and how you heard about us. All of it is optional and skippable.

Learning activity. Which lessons you complete, your notes and bookmarks, quiz attempts and scores, and certificates you earn. For the at-home puppy exercises, also how long you keep an exercise open each day, which demo clips you play, and the days you tell us you practiced with your dog, so your trainer can see how the homework is going.

Payment details. Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card number never touches our servers; we store only what we need to manage your purchase (what you bought, when, and the payment reference).

Messages. If you use “Ask a trainer”, submit homework, book a session, send feedback, or email us, we keep the conversation so we can help you.

Site chat. If you use the “Questions?” chat, we save the conversation, the page you started it on, and your email if you share it. Your messages are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to write the replies. Please don’t share sensitive personal details in the chat.

Free guides and workshops. If you request a free guide or use a free workshop, we collect the email you enter and your workshop answers, plus a record of what you agreed to and when.

Basic usage analytics. We use cookieless analytics from our host, Vercel, to count visits, see which pages are used, and measure how fast pages load. It does not track you across sites or build a profile of you.

The link that brought you here. If you first arrive through a link with campaign tags (for example from one of our social posts), we note the tags: which site, campaign and post the link came from. We keep them with your free-guide request or account, and pass them to Stripe with a purchase, so we can see which posts help people find the academy.

• Providing the courses, quizzes, certificates, and features you signed up for.
• Processing purchases, refunds, and subscriptions.
• Sending service emails you’d expect: receipts, sign-in links, password resets, course access, certificates, and booking confirmations.
• Sending marketing email only if you opted in (see Marketing email).
• Personalizing the site with your onboarding answers and, if you opted in to marketing, the emails we send you.
• Answering questions in the site chat and improving those answers.
• Keeping accounts secure, for example by limiting repeated sign-in attempts.
• Improving the academy. Site traffic is measured in aggregate only; the learning activity above is kept per account so a trainer can support you.
• Meeting legal obligations (tax, accounting, fraud prevention).

Only the service providers that run the academy, and only what each needs to do its job for us:

• Stripe: payment processing; your card details go directly to Stripe. If you choose to pay in installments, Klarna or Affirm handle that payment.
• Resend and Loops: sending our email. Loops holds the contact details, onboarding answers and course milestones of people who opted in to marketing, so we can send relevant emails.
• Anthropic: the AI model behind the site chat. It receives the messages you type there. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, it does not train its models on them.
• Cloudflare: stores and serves course videos and certificate PDFs. When you watch a lesson, your browser loads the video from Cloudflare, which sees your IP address as any web host does.
• Cal.com: scheduling 1-on-1 sessions. We pass it your name and email to fill in the booking, and the video call runs on its video service.
• Vercel (hosting and analytics) and Neon (database): running the site. Our database is in the United States.
• Google: only if you choose “Continue with Google” to sign in.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for targeted advertising, and we do not give it to other companies for their own marketing. We may disclose information if the law requires it. If the business is ever sold or merged, your data would transfer with it under this same policy.

Marketing email goes only to people who opted in. You opt in by ticking the box when you create an account, request a free guide, or finish a free workshop, or by saying yes when the site chat offers you something by email. We keep a record of what you agreed to and when.

If you have an account, we may also send a few reminders tied to something you started with us, such as a checkout you didn’t finish or a course you’re partway through.

Every marketing email and reminder has a one-click unsubscribe link. Using it, or emailing us, stops all of them from both of our email tools and switches off the marketing setting on your account. Service emails (receipts, sign-in links, password resets, course access, booking confirmations) still arrive, because your account doesn’t work without them.

Each certificate has a serial number so employers and clients can check it is real. Anyone who has the serial can look it up on our verification page and see the holder’s name, the city and state on their profile, the issue date, and their course scores. The certificate PDF is stored with Cloudflare at a link that isn’t published anywhere but works for anyone who has it.

The certificate shows the name on your account, so set it before you finish. If no name is set, the email address you signed up with is shown instead. Verification pages are hidden from search engines.

Your account and learning records are kept while your account exists; course access and certificates are lifetime, so we keep the records that back them. Purchase records are kept as long as tax law requires. Free-guide and workshop details, chat conversations, and feedback are kept until you ask us to delete them. If you unsubscribe, we keep your email on a do-not-email list so we never message you by mistake.

When you delete your account, your personal information is removed from our systems straight away, and any membership is canceled. Copies held by our service providers are removed within 30 days. Purchase records stay, without your name, as tax law requires, and Stripe keeps its own payment records.

Wherever you live, we honor these for everyone: you can ask us to access, correct, export, or delete the personal information we hold about you, and you can object to or restrict our use of it. California residents have these rights under the CCPA/CPRA; EU/UK residents have them under the GDPR (our lawful bases are contract, consent for marketing, and legitimate interest for security and analytics, and you may complain to your local supervisory authority).

Do it yourself: on your account page you can download a copy of your data at any time, and delete your account (we email you a link to confirm it’s you).

For anything else, or if you don’t have an account, email hello@topdogsfacademy.com from the address the request is about. We respond within 30 days and will never discriminate against you for asking. Because we don’t sell personal information, there is nothing to opt out of there, but you are welcome to send a request anyway.

We don’t use advertising cookies or third-party trackers. We use:

• Sign-in and security cookies that keep you signed in and protect forms from forgery. The site doesn’t work without them.
• A “pet parent or professional” cookie (180 days) that remembers which side of the academy you chose, so we show you the right courses.
• A homepage test cookie (90 days) holding a random letter, so you see the same version of the homepage headline while we test which reads better. It doesn’t identify you.
• A campaign cookie (90 days), set only if you arrive through a link with campaign tags. It holds those tags, is set once and never updated, and is how we credit the post that first brought you here.
• Your browser’s session storage to keep the site chat open as you move between pages. It clears when you close the tab.

Our analytics are cookieless. That’s why you don’t see a cookie banner here.

We don’t track you across other websites, and we don’t let third parties do so on ours. So we treat every visitor the same whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal.

All traffic is encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, and repeated failed sign-ins are blocked for a while. Access to production data is limited to the people who run the academy, and changes staff make to accounts are logged. No system is perfect; if a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you promptly, as the law requires.

The academy is for adults: you must be 18 or older to hold an account. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18; if you believe a minor has created an account, contact us and we’ll delete it.

If we make a material change, we’ll update the date above and, for significant changes, email account holders. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated policy.