What a Lazy K account holds, and who can see it.

Lazy K Horsemanship, based in Columbia Falls, Montana, is responsible for the information described here. Contact kat@lazykhorsemanship.com about privacy. This policy describes our practices and does not limit rights the law gives you.

You do not need an account

Every guide, every calculator and the whole trail search work signed out. An account adds saving and reading rider reports. Nothing on this site requires you to create one.

Account identity and signing in

Accounts are handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google service. You can sign in with an email address and a password, or with Google. The sign-in form sends your password to Firebase Authentication. Our profile database does not store it and staff cannot view it in the portal. If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your account identifier, your email address and, if you have one, your display name.

What is stored in the Lazy K database about you as a person is deliberately small: a display name if you enter one, your email address, your unit preference, which horse is your default, and two display settings. The rules require the stored email to match your sign-in account. Email verification is separate; an unverified email is not proof of ownership. Profiles can also contain a profile photo, a preferred place, client status and the policy version and time of acceptance.

Horse profiles

If you add a horse, we store what you type: a name, coat, and the notes and details you choose to enter. Horse records are private to your account. Another member cannot read them, and the security rules refuse any attempt.

Tool records: two different things

This is the part people most often misunderstand, so it is worth being exact.

• Browser history stays on your device. Several calculators can keep a short history in your own browser's storage. That never leaves the device, is not visible to Lazy K, and disappears if you clear your browser data. Signing in does not upload it.
• Saved records go to your account. Seven tools (bodyweight, vitals, care calendar, trip checklist, annual cost, hay price comparison and pasture planning) can save a result to your account when you are signed in and press save. Those are stored in the Lazy K database under your own account and can be reopened from your dashboard.

The remaining tools have no history at all. A full, current inventory is kept in the project's SAVED-TOOLS.md and is updated when a tool changes.

We will not move your browser history into your account without asking you first. If that ever becomes possible, it will require a deliberate press, it will copy rather than move, and declining will be remembered.

Horse care and vitals information

Vitals, care calendars and similar records are information about an animal that you chose to type in. Treat them as your own notes. They are stored the same way as any other saved record, private to your account, and authorized staff may read them to support you or provide care-related help.

Trail reports

Reports about parking, footing and conditions are written to be read by other members, so a report you submit is not private. The report format deliberately has no field for an email address, a name, a phone number or payment information, and the security rules refuse a report that carries one. The only identifier attached is the opaque account ID the rules need to prove the report is yours.

Reports are reviewed before other members see them. Both writing a report and reading another member’s now need a Horse Hub Plus subscription. That changed on August 27, 2026: it used to be enough to be signed in. The official trail information, the map, the search and the base details did not move and stay public to everyone, signed in or not. What is behind the subscription is what other riders wrote.

Photographs, and the metadata that does not survive them

This is the strongest privacy promise the site makes, so it is worth setting out exactly.

A photograph you upload is re-encoded, and the metadata does not come with it. Your camera or phone writes a great deal into a photo file that is not the picture: where it was taken to within a few meters, when, the camera or phone serial number. We do not keep any of it. The file is re-encoded into a display copy and a thumbnail, which carry no metadata at all, and then the original file you uploaded is deleted. The GPS position never reaches the copy that other members see, and it is not stored anywhere else.

The one thing carried across deliberately is the orientation, so the picture is not sideways. It is applied to the pixels and then the tag goes with the rest.

What is stored alongside the photograph is what you typed: a caption, a category, the date you say it was taken, and the label you chose to be credited by. Plus the trail it belongs to and the opaque account id that proves it is yours.

Nothing in our file storage is readable by a browser, ever. A photograph is delivered through a link that our server signs for the occasion and that stops working after fifteen minutes. There is no permanent public address for your photograph to be found at or shared.

What other members see, and what they do not

For anything you publish, another subscriber sees the content, the category, the date, and the label you chose to be credited by.

They never see your account, your name or your email address. The label may be blank, and if it is, your contribution is simply uncredited. Contributions carry an account identifier, which can connect contributions to each other. Do not put personal information in a credit label or contribution unless you intend it to be seen.

Your horses, saved tool results, property plans and favorite trails are not published to anyone. Favorite trails are private to you, and readable by Lazy K administrators in the same way as everything else in your account.

Comments

A comment is public to other subscribers the moment you write it, and is read by a moderator afterwards rather than before. If a moderator hides one, it stays visible to you and you can still edit or delete it; other members cannot see it.

What a moderator sees

Kat, and anyone given a trail moderator role, sees every photograph submitted, including ones that were rejected and never shown to anybody. That is what moderating before publication means. The same is true of rider reports and trailheads.

Moderator notes exist and are not shown to you. When a moderator records why something was rejected or flagged, that note is kept in a separate staff-only area of the record. That separation is deliberate and it is technical: the database this site uses cannot hide one field of a record from somebody who can read the record, so a note stored as an ordinary field would have been delivered to everybody who could see the item. Ask Kat what a note says and she will tell you.

Reporting something, and who knows

When you report a contribution, the report carries your account id, so it is not anonymous to us. A moderator can see who raised it. That is how we tell a genuine problem from somebody working through a grudge.

The member you report is not told who reported them. They may be told that something was raised, and what was decided.

Reporting something does not hide it. It puts it in front of a person.

What Lazy K administrators can see

An administrator can see everything you save. Not a category of it, and not only what you have chosen to share: anything held in your account, of whatever kind, including kinds of record this site may add in future. You do not have to share anything for that to be true, and you are not asked.

It is written this way on purpose. A list of the particular things they can open would be out of date the week something new is added, and reading it as a limit would be reading it wrong. Treat the account as visible to Lazy K in its entirety.

They can read what you save; they cannot change it. The portal shows records; it does not edit them. What an administrator can add is a care-team note, written under their own name and visible to you. What you save stays yours to correct and yours to delete.

Who holds that access can change. It belongs to the people running Lazy K and to anyone they have given a records role to: someone helping with client care, for instance. Only they can grant it; it is not something a member, or a trail moderator, can arrange for themselves. We name roles here rather than people on purpose, so that this page does not quietly become wrong the day the team changes. Ask who currently holds it and we will tell you.

The administration portal records certain staff actions, but does not provide members with a complete history of staff reads. Google Cloud supports audit logging; the availability of a particular record depends on configured logging and retention. Authorized infrastructure administrators and server systems can access data for operation, support, security and legal needs.

Optional analytics choices

Google Analytics is off unless you choose to allow it on this browser. If allowed, Google receives page visits, browser and device information, a referrer and an approximate location derived from your IP address, and uses cookies to measure visits. We do not send account IDs, horse records, payment information or device coordinates to Analytics. Advertising personalization and Google Signals are disabled in our site code.

Optional analytics is for adults only. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control override an analytics opt-in. Essential sign-in storage and aggregate usage counters are separate. Refusing analytics does not affect your account, purchases or tools.

I am 18 or older and want to allow optional Google Analytics on this browser.

Keep optional analytics off Allow optional analytics

Optional analytics is off by default.

You can withdraw your choice here at any time. We remember it for six months on this browser. Withdrawal stops future collection and removes Analytics cookies we can access; it does not erase information already received by Google. Clearing this site's browser storage also resets your choice and may sign you out. These controls require JavaScript; without it, Analytics does not load.

Account visibility and your choices

Your account has no sharing settings. It used to, and they were removed: once the owners could read the whole account, a row of permission checkboxes decided nothing while still looking like a lock. Leaving them there would have been the misleading part. Somebody could have turned everything off and believed their records were private.

So there is one honest position and this page states it: save it here and Lazy K can read it. What you still control is what you put in and what you take out. You can delete any horse, note or saved record yourself, at any time, and you can ask us to delete the account altogether.

This changed on August 25, 2026. Before that date the owner portal showed only what a member had explicitly shared.

Who else is involved

• Google Firebase Hosting, Firebase Authentication and Firestore host the site, handle sign-in, and store account data. Google processes this under its own terms.
• Google Maps serves the directory search, and receives what that search contains.
• Public map and weather sources (the Forest Service, the Park Service, the BLM, OpenStreetMap, the National Weather Service and open forecast APIs) are contacted by your browser when you use the trail or weather pages. Those requests come from your browser and carry the usual information any web request carries.
• No advertising, no cross-site tracker, and one tally. Lazy K has installed no advertising network and no cross-site tracker, and nothing of ours follows you between pages or between sites. What we do keep is a count. When a page is opened, when a calculator or planner is run, and when a visit passes one, five and fifteen minutes, the site adds one to a number for that thing for that day. The record it writes holds three things: which thing, how many, and the date. It has no visitor identifier, no session identifier, no address, no location, no referrer and nothing about your device, and the database rules refuse a record that carries any of them. It exists so we can see which pages and tools are worth improving and which are not used. It cannot tell us who used one, when in your day you did, or what you looked at before or after, and it cannot join two counts into one person's path through the site, because there is no identifier to join on. Google Analytics is separate and is described below.
• Google Analytics: optional, off by default, and controlled by the choices above. Service providers still receive ordinary connection information, such as IP address, when your browser requests hosting, sign-in, map and weather services.

Who can read what you save

Other members cannot read your private records. The Firestore Security Rules scope every horse, note and saved tool record to the account that created it, and that is verified by an automated rule suite (152 tests at the last run) covering cross-account reads and writes, role forgery and sharing grants.

Since August 25, 2026 this is not only a statement about database access in principle: the administration portal shows your saved records directly, as set out under “What Lazy K administrators can see” above.

Location, and the three places it is used

Three pages have a location control, and each behaves differently:

• Horse Services Directory. "Use my location" sends coordinates to Google as the center of a Maps Embed search. Nothing is stored, by us or in your browser.
• Today at the Barn. Device coordinates are rounded to two decimal places , roughly a kilometer, before anything is stored or sent, and one place is saved in your browser's local storage so the page opens on it next time. The rounded pair goes to the National Weather Service, Open-Meteo and BigDataCloud. Full-precision coordinates never leave your browser.
• Horse Trails. "Use my location" centers a search. The coordinates are not stored, but a bounding box around them is sent to the agency and OpenStreetMap services so they can return what is inside it.

These three device-location controls do not write coordinates to your account. Separately, a preferred place or property plan that you deliberately save to your account can contain location information and is visible to authorized Lazy K staff. The full detail is on the site privacy page.

Your information and privacy requests

Contact kat@lazykhorsemanship.com to request access or a copy of your information, correction, deletion, or help with a minor's information. Account Settings also links to these requests. You do not need a paid subscription. Tell us the account email and the type of request; do not email passwords, card details or identity documents. Sending the email submits a request for review, not an immediate account deletion.

We verify that the request comes from the account holder, or an authorized representative, before releasing information or deleting an account. We normally use the existing account email and may ask for proportionate additional information if needed. A parent or guardian can contact us about a child's account; we verify their authority before sharing information.

We acknowledge requests within seven days and aim to complete them within 30 days of receipt. We meet any shorter deadline that applies. If verification, a lawful exception or an allowed extension prevents completion, we explain the reason and expected timing within the original deadline. We do not make you buy a subscription or give up an unrelated right to make a request.

If we refuse all or part of a request, we explain why, identify any records retained, and tell you how to appeal. Reply with “Privacy appeal”; we review it and respond within 30 days, or a shorter applicable deadline. You may also complain to the Montana Attorney General or the privacy regulator where you live. Applicable privacy and consumer rights are preserved.

How long we keep information

This is our retention policy, administered by Lazy K. Whole-account deletion and retention reviews are handled by a person; there is no automatic account-expiry service.

• Account and saved records: kept while you maintain the account and need its saved information. You can remove individual horses and saved records in the account. On a verified whole-account deletion request, we remove the sign-in account, profile, private saved records, property plans and associated uploads from our active systems within the request timetable above. We review information no longer needed, including known minors' information, rather than treating inactivity as a reason to keep it forever.
• Published contributions: stay available when a subscription ends. Ask for removal without paying, including where an item has no delete control. During account deletion we remove your photographs, comments and reports, or retain only genuinely de-identified trail facts where lawful. We check free text and remove account IDs, credits and other identifying details; replacing a name with an account ID is not anonymization.
• Payment, tax and transaction evidence: only the information needed for accounting, refunds, disputes and legal obligations is retained, normally for up to seven years after the relevant transaction or account settlement. This is a business retention period, not a claim that every record is legally required for seven years. Saved horse records and property plans are not kept under this exception.
• Unpaid checkout attempts: reviewed for deletion after 90 days once no live checkout, payment, retry or dispute depends on them. We do not delete a record still needed to match a delayed payment.
• Privacy requests and security/support records: keep the minimum evidence of the request, action and reason, normally for up to two years after resolution. We remove unnecessary copies of the underlying account data.

A specific legal obligation, unresolved dispute or documented security investigation may require limited records to be kept longer. We restrict access, record the reason, and remove them when that need ends. We do not use retained deletion-exception records for marketing.

Deletion removes information from active systems. Backup, recovery and provider log copies may expire later under the provider's retention settings. We cannot promise an unverified backup expiry date. We include provider-held copies in the deletion review, restrict their use to recovery, security or legal needs, and reapply completed deletions if a backup is restored. Square and other providers may retain records they need under their own legal obligations; we explain relevant exceptions when responding to your request.

Account deletion includes checking and stopping any linked recurring subscription before closing the sign-in account. You can also cancel it yourself in the dashboard. You do not have to cancel separately as a condition of requesting deletion. Deletion does not automatically create a refund; the refund policy and your statutory rights still apply. Browser-only histories remain on your devices until you clear them.

Security and purpose

Connections use HTTPS. Access controls restrict private records to the account holder and authorized staff or systems. No service can guarantee absolute security. These are horse-owner notes, not a human medical record service; do not upload human medical records. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information, or use saved records for targeted advertising.

Payments, and what Square receives

Horse Hub Plus is paid for through Square, on Square’s own checkout page.

• No card details are entered on this site, and none are stored here. This site could not take a card number if it tried; the page you type it into belongs to Square.
• Square becomes your payment processor and has its own privacy policy. What you give them, they hold. We do not see your card.
• What we send Square is the plan you chose and your email address, so they can attach the subscription to a customer record and send you a receipt.
• What Square sends back, and what we store on your account, is: their customer id, their subscription id, which plan you are on, the status, when the paid period runs to, and when a payment last landed. Not a card number, not the last four digits, not an expiry date.
• We keep a record of each checkout that was started, and of the payment notifications Square sends us, so that a payment can be traced afterwards.

Canceling is done from your dashboard, and it tells Square. We retain necessary subscription evidence after it ends under the retention schedule above.

Merchandise, shipping and payment providers

You can buy merchandise without a member account. Before checkout we use your basket, state and ZIP code to obtain a shipping quote from Printful. Square collects the payment and shipping details on its checkout page. To fulfill a paid order, our server retrieves the recipient's name, postal address and, when supplied, email and phone number from Square and sends the necessary information and ordered items to Printful. Printful and its delivery providers use it to make, ship and support the order.

We retain order items, amounts, shipping quote details, status, payment/order identifiers and an account link or email when available for fulfillment, customer support, accounting and disputes. Order records are restricted to owner administrators and authorized backend services. We do not receive or store full card numbers or card security codes. The retention schedule above covers these records, including guest orders. Guest buyers can make a privacy request using their order reference and checkout email.

See Square's privacy policy, Printful's privacy policy and our merchandise terms. These providers may have independent legal duties as well as processing information to supply your order.

Children and teenagers

You must be at least 13 to create a free account. If you are 13 to 17, a parent or guardian must review these terms and the privacy policy with you and permit your use. You must be 18 or over to buy a subscription or merchandise; a parent or guardian may purchase using their own account. The sign-up confirmation is an eligibility statement, not verified parental consent or proof of age. We do not request a date of birth or identity document in the sign-up form.

We do not offer accounts to children under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we restrict its use, contact the appropriate adult where possible, and remove its personal information promptly, subject only to necessary legal or security exceptions. A parent or guardian can report this at kat@lazykhorsemanship.com. Permission from a parent does not make an under-13 account eligible.

For known minors, we limit information to what is needed for the requested service, do not sell it or use it for targeted advertising or decisions with legal or similarly significant effects, and do not enable optional analytics. We do not repurpose a minor's information without the consent required by law. We review retention and reasonably foreseeable risks to minors, including location and information shared with other people.

Use a town or ZIP code instead of device location when possible. Do not post a child's full name, school, home address, contact details, live location or identifying photographs in trail contributions. A parent should supervise uploads. Free accounts do not make saved records public, but authorized Lazy K staff can read them as explained above. Ask us to remove identifying content or unnecessary information without buying a subscription.

Changes and questions

We identify material changes here and display a notice in Account Settings. When a change needs consent under applicable law, we ask before applying it; continued use alone is not treated as that consent. The September 9, 2026 update adds retention periods, a privacy-request process, minors safeguards, merchandise disclosures and optional analytics controls.

Email kat@lazykhorsemanship.com with a privacy question, a deletion request or an export request. Read the member terms. Directory privacy · directory terms.

Version 2026-09-09.1. Effective September 9, 2026. Written in-house; no lawyer has reviewed this policy. This is not legal advice.