Last updated: October 22, 2026.
This Privacy Policy explains how Golden Grading LLC (“Golden Grading,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, uses, and shares information about you when you visit goldengrading.com (the “Site”) or submit cards to us for grading (our “Services”). By using the Site or our Services, you agree to this Privacy Policy.
Golden Grading is a sports and trading card grading company. You may create an optional online account to save your contact and shipping details and access your linked grading submissions. We do not sell your personal information for money.
1. Information We Collect
Information You Give Us
Optional accounts — if you create an account, we keep the email address and authentication information needed to provide it, the contact and address details you save, and records used to verify and connect your grading submissions. Account access and access to linked grading orders use separate security checks.
When you submit cards, contact us, or check your order status, you may provide:
- Contact and shipping details — your name, business name (optional), mailing address, phone number(s), and email address.
- Order information — the cards you submit, the service tier you choose, return-shipping and insurance preferences, and any notes you include.
- Order-status lookups — when you check an order online, you enter your invoice number and the email address on that invoice. We use these only to locate and return the status of your order.
- Communications — the content of emails or messages you send us.
Payment Information
We invoice and collect payment through a third-party payment processor. Payments are processed on its systems under its own privacy policy. We do not collect or store your full card or bank-account numbers on our Site.
When you separately authorize a saved payment method, our payment processor stores the card details. We keep its payment reference, brand, last four digits, expiry, and records of the authorization you accepted; we do not store the card security code.
Under the new reusable authorization, a card may be used for eligible later online or paper grading orders and stays saved until removed, replaced, or unusable, without removal just for inactivity. Identity, address, and security checks and your choice of an invoice still apply. Older authorizations retain their original scope and retention terms; a one-submission save remains limited to that submission.
Removing a payment method stops future use of that credential, not retention of historical payment, authorization, order, or grading records under Section 5. Account deletion and payment-method removal are separate requests; do not rely on account deletion to revoke a saved method.
Information Collected Automatically
Like most websites, our host and security tools automatically receive basic technical data — such as your IP address, browser type, the pages you view, and the date and time of your visit — to keep the Site running, secure, and reliable. We, and the tools described in Section 2, also collect information about how you use the Site, such as the pages you visit, the links you click, how you found us, and the device and browser you use. Some of these tools capture how pages are used, such as clicks, scrolling, and mouse movement, so we can find and fix problems; they do not capture what you type into forms. If you give us your email address (for example, when you submit cards, sign up for our emails, or look up an order), we may connect it with your visits to the Site.
2. Cookies and Similar Technologies
We use cookies and similar technologies (such as pixels and scripts) for these purposes:
- Strictly necessary cookies that allow the Site and its forms to function, keep you signed in when you choose to use an account, and help keep the Site secure.
- Security and spam prevention — tools on our forms that check for spam and abuse using information about your device and browser.
- Analytics — to see how people use the Site, measure our results, and fix problems.
- Marketing and advertising — to keep track of our relationship with customers, follow up with people who contact us, and measure and show our ads on other websites and social media. Our advertising partners may use cookies and similar technologies to collect information from our Site and elsewhere online to measure ads and show you ads that may interest you.
Your choices. Use the “Your privacy choices” link in our footer to turn off analytics, or marketing and advertising, at any time. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we turn off marketing and advertising for you automatically. Most browsers let you refuse or delete cookies; note that disabling strictly necessary cookies may prevent our forms from working.
3. How We Use Your Information
- To receive, process, grade, and return your card submissions.
- To create and send invoices and process payment through our payment processor.
- To ship your cards back and provide tracking, including optional return-shipping insurance.
- To respond to your questions and provide customer support.
- To create and secure your optional account, save and update the details you provide, verify access to linked submissions, and handle account or shipping-address changes. Our staff can see account signup dates and aggregate account and saved-payment statistics to operate the service.
- To operate, secure, and improve the Site and our Services, and to prevent fraud and abuse.
- To understand how people use the Site, keep track of our relationship with customers, and measure and show our ads, including to people who have visited the Site.
- To comply with our legal, tax, and record-keeping obligations.
We rely on these uses to perform our Services for you, to pursue our legitimate interests in running a secure and reliable business, and to meet our legal obligations. Where the law requires your consent (for example, for certain non-essential communications), we will ask for it, and you may withdraw it at any time.
4. How We Share Your Information
We use service providers to host our website, manage account and grading information, deliver account and order emails, process payments, measure how the Site is used, manage customer relationships, and arrange shipping. We share information with them as needed to provide and secure these services.
We share personal information only as needed to run our business:
- Service providers who work on our behalf, including our payment processor, shipping and tracking tools and shipping carriers, spam-prevention, website analytics, and customer-relationship tools, and our website host. These providers may use your information only to perform services for us.
- Advertising partners — which may collect information through their tools on our Site to measure and show our ads (see Section 2).
- Legal and safety — when required by law, subpoena, court order, or other legal process, or when we believe disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, property, customers, or safety, to enforce our agreements, or to prevent or investigate wrongdoing.
- Business transfers — if Golden Grading is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, customer information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will provide notice before your personal information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
No Sale of Personal Information. We do not sell, rent, lease, trade, or license personal information to any third party for money, and we have never done so. We do not give your name, email address, or other contact details to advertising partners, and we do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes. Our use of advertising tools, described in Section 2, may count as “sharing” for targeted advertising under some state privacy laws; you can opt out at any time as described there. We will not sell or share personal information collected before this change without your consent. A transfer of customer records in connection with a business transfer described above does not constitute a sale.
5. Data Retention
We retain personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, as described in this Privacy Policy. Because the authentication and provenance of graded cards remain relevant for as long as those cards remain in circulation, certain records may be retained indefinitely. In determining the appropriate retention period, we consider, among other factors:
- the purposes for which the information was collected and whether those purposes remain ongoing, including our continuing business relationship with you;
- the ongoing authentication, provenance, and certification significance of grading records, including our ability to verify cards we have graded, respond to inquiries regarding a certification, and detect counterfeit or altered cards, holders, and labels;
- the resolution of disputes, the administration of our guarantees, the handling of claims (including shipping, insurance, and lost or damaged item claims), and the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims;
- the prevention of fraud and abuse, and the security of the Site and our Services;
- retention periods required or permitted by applicable tax, accounting, commercial, and other laws, and applicable statutes of limitation; and
- any litigation hold, audit, investigation, or other legal requirement.
On the basis of these criteria, we retain the following categories of information as indicated:
- Customer, submission, and order records (including optional account details, verified order links, address-change records, contact and shipping details, order and payment history, the items submitted, and associated grading results, notes, and images) — for as long as we provide grading and certification-verification services, which may be indefinitely.
- Certification records (including card descriptions, grades, certification numbers, and images) — indefinitely. Our public certification lookup relies on these records and does not display customer names or contact information.
- Customer support correspondence — for as long as it remains relevant to an order, a certification, or a potential future inquiry, which may be indefinitely.
- Automatically collected technical data and server logs — for as long as reasonably necessary for security monitoring and troubleshooting by us and our hosting and security providers.
- Website analytics and marketing data — for as long as needed for the purposes above, under the retention settings of the tools we use.
- Financial and tax records — for no less than the period required by applicable tax and accounting laws.
- De-identified and aggregated information (such as population reports and grading statistics) — indefinitely. We do not attempt to re-identify such information.
We may retain personal information after our relationship with you has ended. Personal information that we retain remains subject to this Privacy Policy, including the safeguards described in Section 7 (Security), for as long as it is retained. The retention of personal information does not mean that it is sold; as stated in Section 4, we do not sell personal information.
Deletion Requests. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may request the deletion of your personal information as described in Section 9, and we will respond to such requests in accordance with applicable law. Where we honor a deletion request, we may nonetheless retain information to the extent permitted or required by law, including certification records for cards we have graded (without associated contact information), records required for tax, accounting, or legal purposes, information necessary to complete a pending order or to resolve a dispute or claim, records maintained for fraud prevention, and a record of the request itself. Residual copies may persist in backup systems until they are overwritten in the ordinary course of business.
6. International Data Transfers
Golden Grading operates in the United States, and our service providers are generally located in the United States. If you access the Site or use our Services from outside the United States — including from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland — your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where data-protection laws may differ from those in your country. Where required by law, we rely on appropriate safeguards for these transfers. By using the Site or our Services, you understand that your information will be processed in the United States.
7. Security
We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards to protect your information. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, however, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
8. Children’s Privacy
Our Site and Services are not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.
9. Your Privacy Rights
California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)
If you are a California resident, you have the right to:
- Know and access the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, the sources, the purposes for collecting it, and the categories of third parties with whom we share it;
- Delete personal information we collected from you, subject to legal exceptions;
- Correct inaccurate personal information we maintain about you;
- Opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information — use the “Your privacy choices” link in our footer or turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser; and
- Non-discrimination for exercising any of these rights.
The categories of personal information we collect are identifiers (such as name, address, email, and phone), customer-records and commercial information (your submissions and transactions), and internet or network activity (such as the pages you view and how you use the Site). To make a request, contact us using the details below; we will verify your request against information we already hold. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf, subject to our verification of their authority. Under California’s “Shine the Light” law, we do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes.
EEA, UK, and Switzerland (GDPR / UK GDPR / FADP)
If you are located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, Golden Grading is the controller of your personal data, and you have the right to:
- Access your personal data and receive a copy of it;
- Rectify inaccurate or incomplete data;
- Erase your data, subject to certain conditions;
- Restrict or object to our processing of your data;
- Data portability — receive your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format; and
- Withdraw consent at any time where we rely on consent.
We process your personal data to perform our contract with you (grading and returning your cards), to comply with legal obligations, and for our legitimate interests in operating, securing, and improving our Services. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection supervisory authority.
How to Exercise Your Rights
Email us at grade@goldengrading.com with your request. We may need to verify your identity before acting.
10. Do Not Track
Some browsers offer a “Do Not Track” (DNT) signal. Because there is no common industry standard for DNT, our Site does not currently respond to DNT signals. We do honor the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal: if your browser sends it, we turn off marketing and advertising for you.
11. Third-Party Links
Our Site may link to third-party sites, including our social-media pages. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those sites; please review their own policies.
12. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do so, we will revise the “last updated” date above and post the revised Privacy Policy on this page. If we make a material change to the manner in which we use or share personal information that we have previously collected, we will provide notice before the change takes effect and, where required by applicable law, obtain your consent.
13. Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or your personal information, contact us at:
Golden Grading LLC
P.O. Box 87078
Baton Rouge, LA 70879
Email: grade@goldengrading.com