Privacy Policy | TheoryChess

Effective date: 1 October 2026
Last updated: 12 November 2026

This policy explains how your personal data is processed when you use the TheoryChess website and service (the “Service”). For the detailed notice required by Turkish Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data (“KVKK”), see the KVKK Privacy Notice; for cookies, see the Cookie Policy.

Data controller

Your personal data is processed by Hasan Süzen, an individual, as data controller. Contact: [email protected].

Data we process

When you create an account

When you sign in with Google, Google sends us the following, which is stored with your account:

Identity and contact: the name, email address and profile picture link on your Google account.
Account data: your Google account identifier, whether Google has verified your email address, when the account was created and the account’s role. The access and ID tokens Google issues during sign-in are not kept.

When you make an account with a username through your coach’s invite

Students without a Google account can make an account with a username and password only through an invite link their coach sends to them personally. At sign-up the student is asked to confirm that their parent or guardian has agreed. The time of this confirmation is recorded with the account, deleted with it and included in its data export.

Username: used to sign in and as the display name.
Password: only a one-way hash is stored; neither your coach nor we can see your password. Passwords that are too easy to guess (common passwords, or the username itself) are refused. To protect against guessing, the number of failed sign-ins is kept per username for 15 minutes from the first failure and is used only to protect sign-in.
No email is asked for: so that the system works, the account gets a technical placeholder address. It is not a real mailbox and no email is ever sent to it; these accounts get no welcome, reminder or account-closure email either. Admins are not emailed about the sign-up of these accounts; in the daily admin report they appear only as a number.
Leaderboard: these accounts start hidden on the leaderboard; you can make yours visible in your account settings.

When you use the Service

Learning records: the variations you studied and their review schedule, your favourite openings, your quiz results and the move you gave for each quiz question.
Leaderboard: your study and quiz points, worked out from these records, are shown on the public leaderboard under your first name and the initial of your last name (“First L.”). You can choose not to appear on it in your account settings. Accounts made with a username start hidden and appear only if their owner turns it on in the settings. On the leaderboard, a “Coach” mark is shown beside an approved coach and a “Works with a coach” mark beside someone linked to an approved coach. The mark comes on its own: if you appear on the leaderboard with a Google account and link to a coach, it appears beside your name; if you do not want that, you can hide yourself from the leaderboard in the settings. Which coach you work with is not shown. Coaches appear there under their own short name too, and can hide themselves in the settings as well. While the site is new, the leaderboard also lists sample standings that belong to no real person.
Session and security records: the session key, the IP address and browser/device information (user agent) of the session, when the session started and expires, and when the account was last used. To prevent abuse, your IP address is also held for a few minutes in a counter of requests.
Usage events: when you created your account, started and finished a variation, started a practice game, finished a quiz, asked for and received a game report, said you were interested in Premium, applied to be a coach, were approved as a coach, made an invite link, accepted a coach’s invite, saved your own opening, gave a student an assignment and completed an assignment (with the opening, variation, site and kind of report, and the mistakes or score). They are kept in our own database to measure whether the Service works for people and to apply the daily report limit; no cookie is used. If you are linked to a coach, the only part of them that coach sees is how many times you played a variation to the end in the last 7 days; they are not shared with any other third party.
Days on the site: for each day you use the Service signed in, only the date (no time). Kept in our own database to see how many days in a row people come back and whether the Service brings them back; shown to your coach if you are linked to one, and not shared with any other third party.
Coach link: when you accept an invite link a coach made for you, which coach you are linked to and since when, and the label the coach gives you to recognise you in their list (for example your name or lesson day). The coach you are linked to sees, on the site in their own panel, your display name and profile picture, whether it is an account made with a username, the label they gave you, the date you linked, when and on which day you were last on the site, your study of the catalogue openings and of their own openings (including what you studied before you linked; the openings and variations you studied, your mistakes, your review schedule, your quiz results per opening, the positions you answered wrongly most often in quizzes over the last 90 days, the days you were on the site in the last 30 days, how many times you played a variation to the end in the last 7 days), and the assignments they gave you, your progress on them and how many of their assignments you have open and done. They never see your email address, game reports or opponent prep. If you are linked to several coaches, each sees your study of the catalogue openings, your study of their own openings and the assignments and notes they themselves gave you, never your other coaches’ openings, your study of them, or the assignments and notes those coaches gave you. You can leave a coach at any time, and a coach can remove you from their list; once the link is gone the coach can no longer see your data. Which coach you work with is never shown anywhere public.
Assignments: a coach you are linked to can give you an assignment: an opening (all of it or the variations they choose), an optional due date, an optional quiz target (50–100%) and an optional note to you (at most 500 characters). The note is one-way: the coach writes it and you read it. What is stored: the coach who gave it and the student it is for, these settings and the note, when the assignment was made and last changed, when it was first completed and, if the coach deleted it or the link ended, when it was archived. The result of a quiz you take for an assignment is kept with all of its answers (a quiz taken for an assignment always records its answers), together with which assignment it was taken for. Whether an assignment is complete is worked out on its own from your study (your latest run of each of its variations since it was given having no mistake and, if there is a quiz target, reaching it in a quiz taken for the assignment; if the coach’s edit of the opening has left no position to ask about, the target counts as met); the time it was first completed is recorded once, and a later mistake does not undo it. You see your assignments and their notes with the display name and profile picture of the coach who gave them; if a coach’s coaching is suspended, their assignments of catalogue openings stay in your list, their own openings and the assignments of them leave it until the coach is restored, and their notes are not shown to you while the suspension lasts. Apart from you, only the coach who gave an assignment sees it and its note; TheoryChess may see assignments and notes only when looking into a complaint or carrying out a data request. Your other coaches never see that assignment or its note. If it is an assignment of a catalogue opening, the quizzes you took for it appear, like your other quizzes and without saying which coach it was for, in the quiz results per opening and the positions answered wrongly that they see; if it is of that coach’s own opening, your other coaches do not see those quizzes either. Under the Coach Terms, coaches must not put in notes any personal information about the student that working on chess does not need, nor any sensitive personal data; if you see a note that is not right, write to us.
A coach’s own openings: if you make your own opening as a coach, the opening’s name, its side (white or black), its PGN text including any notes (PGN comments) you write, and the study lines built from it are stored, along with when it was made and last changed. It is kept until you delete it or your coach account is deleted. An opening is seen only by you and by the linked students you assign it to, unless we need to review a complaint: for as long as the assignment is active, the student is still linked to you and your coaching is approved, the student sees the opening’s name, its moves and the name of each line, and can study it. A note you write on the last move of a line becomes that line’s name (at most 80 characters, anything longer is cut), which students see. Students do not see your notes on moves along the way; but if an edit makes such a move the last move of a line, its note becomes that line’s name. The PGN text is not sent to students; with those notes it is in your own data export, and TheoryChess may see it only when looking into a complaint or carrying out a data request. An opening is never shown publicly: not in the catalogue, in search or in sharing. When you delete an opening, its assignments are archived (as under “Assignments” above); the students’ study records on that opening stay in the database but are no longer shown, while the study points they earned stay. Studying a coach’s opening counts towards your study points; the quizzes on it do not count towards quiz points on the leaderboard. Under the Coach Terms, coaches must not put personal data in opening names, line names or notes; if you see a name that is not right, write to us.
Invite links (for coaches): for each invite link you make as a coach, the label you wrote, its status, when it was made and expires and, if it was accepted, which account accepted it and when. The link itself is not stored, only a one-way hash of it, and it is shown to you only when it is made.
Password-reset requests: when the password of an account made with a username is forgotten, its owner types the username to make a request and sees a 4-digit check code on screen, shown only on the owner’s own screen. The request appears, with the username but without the code, in the panel of every approved coach the account is linked to (or, if there is no approved coach, in the admins’ panel); whoever approves it learns the code from the account’s owner, types it in and approves it, and never sees the password. A wrong code does not approve the request; every wrong try is written to the admin record, and five wrong codes end the request, so the owner has to make a new one. After approval the new password is set in the browser that asked, and every open session of the account is signed out. Approving a request allows a new password to be set through it; since a coach knows your username, that approval rests on the trust placed in your coach (or the admins). So when your password is changed through a reset request, your profile and account settings show on which date, and whether your coach or a site administrator approved the request; if it was not you, tell your coach or us. What is stored: the check code, a hash of the request’s secret, its status, who approved it (a coach or an admin) and when; and on your account, when the password was last changed through a reset request and whether a coach or an admin approved it. The secret itself is kept only in the browser that asked (see the Cookie Policy).
Coach application: if you apply to be a coach, your club or school (optional), your city, how many students you work with (as a range), a short description of yourself and an optional website or profile link; when you applied, the decision, the admin who made it, when, and the reason for a rejection. Applications are reviewed by the operator of the site. A parent or guardian who works with their own child can apply through the same form; if approved, they count as a coach in this policy (same panel, same rules, same mark). Applying as a coach requires signing in with Google. The display name, profile picture and club of a coach are shown to their students and to anyone who opens their invite link.
Your chess accounts: the lichess and Chess.com usernames you type for a game report or add in your account settings. A username is saved to your account, spelled as that site spells it, once its report has been made; you can change or remove it in your settings.
Game reports: when you ask for a report, the latest public games (up to 20) of the username you give are fetched from the public interfaces (APIs) of lichess or Chess.com and compared with opening theory. The report keeps, for each game, its date, time control, whether it was rated, its result, its link, the opening played, and the move and position where the theory was left; a report on your own games also holds your opponents’ usernames and ratings. Whole games (all the moves) are not kept. A name you give the report is kept too.
Opponent prep: when you type another player’s username, that player’s public games are processed the same way. This report does not keep the usernames of the people that player met, only their ratings. Information for the people whose games are analysed is under “Players whose games are analysed” below.
Premium details: your Premium period (if one was given), when you used your free report, and when you said you were interested in Premium, if you did.
Email settings: the language of your emails, whether review reminders are on, and when the last reminder was sent.
Administrative records: notes admins keep about your account, the reason for a suspension if there was one, and a record of administrative actions on your account (which may include your email address or username). Decisions on coach applications and approvals of password resets (including the coach or admin who approved) and wrong reset codes typed are also written to this record.
Preferences: language, board theme, sound, move commentary, hint, engine-suggestion, opponent strength once the theory ends and daily study goal settings. These are not stored on our servers; they are kept as cookies in your browser.
Correspondence: your message and email address if you email us.
Feedback: the message you send with the feedback form and its subject, the page and language it was sent from; if you are not signed in and give one, your email address. New feedback is forwarded to the administrators by email.
Where your account came from: where the visit that opened your account came from: the campaign tag of the link, the domain of the linking site, the first page opened and the country.
Cookieless visit statistics: the page opened, where the visit came from (campaign tag or linking site), the country (as Cloudflare reports it), the device type, whether you are signed in and what you do on the site (such as starting a variation or finishing a quiz) are recorded without cookies. IP addresses and browser details are not stored: they are hashed one way, beyond recovery, with a secret key that is replaced every day and deleted by the next day at the latest, and used only to count that day’s visitors, so a visitor cannot be recognised from one day to the next.
Analytics (only with your consent): if a measurement tool is enabled and you accept it in the cookie notice, the pages you visit, online identifiers assigned to your browser and whether an account was opened after an ad click (Google Ads conversion measurement). Your name, email or account id is not sent to Google.

Data we do not process

We do not process payment data, national ID numbers, precise location or any special category of personal data. We never ask for the password or login of your lichess or Chess.com account; only public usernames and games are used. The chess engine runs in your browser; moves you play while signed out are never sent to our servers. The list of variations you finish while signed out (variation, number of mistakes and date) is kept only in your browser, and is moved into your account when you sign in so that your progress is not lost.

Why we use it

To create your account, recognise you and keep you signed in.
To show you your progress, favourites, quiz scores and mistake analysis, and to remind you of lines that are due for review, on the site and (unless you turn it off) by at most one email a day.
To run the coach system: reviewing coach applications, linking students to their coach through private invite links, showing a student’s opening study to the coach or coaches they are linked to, letting coaches give their students assignments and study their own openings, working out from the student’s study when an assignment is complete, resetting passwords of accounts made with a username with the approval of the coach or an admin, and showing the coach marks on the leaderboards.
To make game reports and opponent prep: fetching public games from lichess and Chess.com, comparing them with the theory and showing you the report.
To manage Premium access: the beta, the free report, the daily report limit and Premium periods given by an admin.
To send the emails your account needs: a welcome email, and a confirmation when you close your account.
To keep the Service secure, prevent abuse and suspend accounts that break the rules.
To improve the Service using aggregate statistics (for example, which openings are studied most, and how many new accounts come back), including measuring how the site is used without cookies and without recognising anyone, and recording which source new accounts came from.
To review ideas and bug reports sent with the feedback form, and answer them if you wish.
With your consent, to measure use of the site and how many new accounts our ads bring.
To answer your questions and requests, meet legal obligations and protect our rights in a dispute.

Your data is never sold and never used to build advertising profiles. We send account holders no commercial electronic messages (email, SMS or the like with advertising, offers or promotion); the only emails we send to your account are the service messages listed above. The one exception is introduction emails an administrator writes one at a time to chess clubs, schools and similar organisations; they are sent without using any data from site accounts and are described below under “Organisations and people we send introduction emails to”. Saying you are interested in Premium does not mean you will be emailed; news about Premium is announced on the site only. The coach system sends no email either; notices for coaches and students are shown on the site only.

Legal bases

Performance of a contract (KVKK art. 5(2)(c); GDPR art. 6(1)(b)): account, session and learning records; the game reports you ask for, your chess usernames and your Premium details; accounts made with a username, coach applications, invite links, coach–student links and showing a student’s opening study to the coach they are linked to, assignments and their notes, coaches’ own openings, the coach marks on the leaderboards, password-reset requests.
Data made public by the person, and legitimate interests (KVKK art. 5(2)(d) and 5(2)(f); GDPR art. 6(1)(f)): the usernames, ratings and game details of other players in opponent prep and in your own game report, which lichess and Chess.com publish for anyone to see. They are processed only for chess preparation, as little as needed and for a limited time. The corporate contact details that organisations we send introduction emails to publish on their own websites for anyone to see rest on the same bases.
Legitimate interests (KVKK art. 5(2)(f); GDPR art. 6(1)(f)): security records, request counters and abuse prevention, usage events and aggregate statistics, cookieless visit statistics and the source an account came from, feedback messages, review reminder emails, introduction emails to organisations and people who wrote to us first or whom we were introduced to, and the block list of addresses that refused.
Establishing, exercising or defending a right (KVKK art. 5(2)(e)): records of administrative actions and correspondence.
Legal obligation (KVKK art. 5(2)(ç); GDPR art. 6(1)(c)): lawful requests from competent authorities.
Consent (KVKK art. 5(1); GDPR art. 6(1)(a)): analytics cookies and Google Ads conversion measurement. You can withdraw consent at any time from the “Cookie preferences” link at the bottom of every page.

Google: to provide Sign in with Google. Google is a separate controller for its own processing; see the Google Privacy Policy.
Email delivery: Resend, Inc. (USA). Your name, email address and the content of the email are passed on to send welcome, reminder and account-closure emails, to forward new feedback to the administrators and to send introduction emails to organisations.
Infrastructure providers: the provider hosting our servers and database, and Cloudflare, Inc. (USA). All traffic to the site passes through Cloudflare for security, speed and content delivery, which means Cloudflare processes your IP address and request details; blog images are also stored at Cloudflare (R2). These providers process data only on our behalf and on our instructions.
lichess and Chess.com: when you ask for a game report or opponent prep, the username you type is sent to the public interface of lichess.org (Lichess, France) or Chess.com (Chess.com, LLC, USA) to get the public games. Your name, email or any other detail of your TheoryChess account is never sent to them.
Measurement services: Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion measurement and Google Tag Manager (Google LLC, USA), only with your consent. Your name, email or account id is not sent to Google; if you do not consent, none of their scripts load.
The coach or coaches you are linked to: if you accepted a coach’s invite, what is listed under “Coach link” above, including the assignments that coach gave you as described under “Assignments”, is shown only to that coach, on the site in their own panel; when you ask for a password reset, your username is shown too (the check code is not; only you see it). Under the Coach Terms, coaches must use this only to work with you on TheoryChess, must not keep copies of it and must not share it for any other purpose.
Competent authorities: where the law requires it, limited to what is requested.

The admins who run the Service may export the list of accounts (CSV) or one account’s data for support and security; every export is written to the audit log.

International transfers

Sign in with Google and measurement services (Google LLC, USA), email delivery (Resend, Inc., USA), content delivery and security (Cloudflare, Inc., USA) and some infrastructure services may run on servers outside Turkey and outside your country; for game reports, usernames are sent to lichess (France) or Chess.com (USA). These transfers rely on the conditions in article 9 of the KVKK, in particular appropriate safeguards such as the standard contracts published by the Turkish Personal Data Protection Board, and, for EEA users, on the safeguards required by Chapter V of the GDPR.

How long we keep it

Account and learning records: for as long as your account is open. When you close your account yourself in your account settings it is deleted at once; when you ask by email, within 30 days of your request.
Coach data when your account is deleted: your coach links, the assignments given to you and your password-reset requests are deleted at once; if you are a coach, your application, the invite links you made, your links to your students, the openings you made and the assignments you gave are deleted at once too. The results of quizzes your students took for those assignments stay in their own learning records and are only unlinked from the assignment. Their study of your openings is no longer shown, while the points they earned stay. An invite link you accepted as a student is unlinked from your account; its record, without the coach’s label, is deleted when the period below ends.
Sessions: a session expires after 7 days without use; using it renews it. The record of an expired session (with its IP address and browser information) is deleted 30 days later.
Usage events: 2 years; deleted at once when your account is deleted.
Days on the site: 2 years; deleted at once when your account is deleted.
Game reports: at most the latest 10 reports per account, each for at most 90 days; older ones are deleted on their own. You can delete a report from the My games page at any time; all your reports are deleted at once when your account is.
Chess usernames and Premium details: until you change or remove them, or while your account is open. Withdrawing your interest in Premium deletes that record.
Request counters: counters holding your IP address expire on their own within a few minutes.
Feedback: 2 years; when your account is deleted, messages are unlinked from it.
Cookieless visit records: 90 days; the daily totals made from them, which cannot be linked to anyone, are kept. The daily secret key used to count visitors is deleted within 2 days at the latest.
Where your account came from: while your account is open.
Coach applications: pending, approved or suspended applications while your account is open. A rejected application is deleted 180 days after the decision, together with any invite links and student links tied to it.
Invite links: an invite link stops working 14 days after it is made. Whether it was used, unused or cancelled, its record is deleted 90 days after it expired; when the record of an accepted invite is deleted, the coach–student link stays.
Coach–student links: until the student leaves the coach, the coach removes the student or either account is deleted; when the link goes, the label the coach gave the student goes with it; the same label stays on the invite link’s record, in the coach’s own list of invites only, until that record is deleted. When the student deletes their account, the coach’s label on the invite link record they used is cleared too.
Password-reset requests: a request is valid for 24 hours; used or not, it is deleted 7 days after it expired.
Failed sign-in count: the number of wrong passwords tried on a username sign-in is kept per username for 15 minutes from the first failure and then deleted on its own; it is cleared at once by a successful sign-in or when the password is reset.
Assignments: completed or not, until the student’s or the coach’s account is deleted. When the coach deletes an assignment or the coach–student link ends (the student leaves the coach or the coach removes the student), the assignment is archived with its note: it is no longer shown to the student or the coach and is deleted on its own 90 days after it was archived. When an assignment is deleted, the results of quizzes taken for it stay in the student’s learning records and are only unlinked from it.
Coaches’ own openings: until the coach deletes the opening or the coach’s account is deleted. When an opening is deleted, its assignments are archived (as under “Assignments” above, and deleted 90 days later); the students’ study records on that opening stay in the database but are no longer shown, while the study points they earned stay.
Unfinished invite sign-ups: a username account left behind by an invite sign-up that was not finished, which is linked to no coach and has no study and no days on the site, is deleted on its own by the first nightly clean-up at least 1 hour after it was made (this clean-up covers an account’s first 7 days).
Administrative records: a record of administrative actions on accounts (such as a suspension) is kept for 2 years to keep the Service secure. When your account is deleted, personal details such as your email address and any suspension reason are removed from these records at once.
Correspondence: up to 2 years after your request is resolved.
Introduction emails: the record of the organisation or person and the emails sent, for at most 2 years after the last email; addresses that refused stay on the block list for good, so that we never write to them again (only the email address, the date of the refusal and how it was made).
Analytics data: up to 14 months in the measurement service.

Where the law requires a longer period, or while a dispute is ongoing, data may be kept for that period. Data past its retention period is deleted or anonymised.

Players whose games are analysed

At a user’s request, TheoryChess analyses chess games published for anyone to see on lichess and Chess.com. If a user types your username for opponent prep, or you appear as an opponent in their own game report, your public username, rating and the opening details of your games (date, time control, result, opening played, the move where the theory was left) may be processed in that user’s report. This is used only for chess preparation, is never sold or used for advertising, and is kept for at most 90 days. Your name, email or anything on your account on those sites that is not public is never processed. Even without a TheoryChess account you can exercise the rights below, object to the processing and ask for reports about you to be deleted by writing to [email protected].

Organisations and people we send introduction emails to

To introduce the coach system (Coach Beta), TheoryChess may send introduction emails to chess clubs, schools, academies and courses, and later to chess content creators. These emails are never sent in bulk: an administrator writes, reviews and sends each one by hand, and the number sent per day is limited. We only write to the corporate contact address an organisation publishes on its own website for anyone to see, to an address that wrote to us first, or to an address we were introduced to through someone we know. Data from site accounts is not used for this.

Data processed: the name of the organisation or person, the email address, its kind (club, school, academy, course, content creator and so on), city, website and phone number; why we wrote to the address and, if it came from a website, the link to the page it was taken from; the administrator’s own note; whether a reply came or the email bounced; and for each email sent, its subject, text, time sent, status and its ID at the email service. Opens and clicks are not tracked. This data is used only to introduce TheoryChess and to carry on the correspondence, is never sold and never shared with anyone else; the emails are sent through Resend, Inc. (USA).

Legal basis: for corporate contact details published for anyone to see, that the person concerned made them public and our legitimate interests (KVKK art. 5(2)(d) and 5(2)(f)); for people who wrote to us first or whom we were introduced to, our legitimate interests (KVKK art. 5(2)(f)).

Every email ends with the sender’s name, a contact address, why we wrote to this address and a free refusal link that needs no sign-in. Opening the link and confirming, pressing your mail app’s “unsubscribe” button, or replying to say you do not want these emails is enough (a refusal sent by reply is entered by an administrator): your address goes on a permanent block list and the system never sends it another introduction email; the block cannot be lifted from the admin panel either.

Retention: the record of the organisation or person and the emails sent are kept for at most 2 years after the last email; sending, cancelling and blocking are kept in the administrative records for 2 years. Addresses that refused are kept on the block list for good, so that we never write to them again; the list holds only the email address, the date of the refusal and how it was made. Even without a TheoryChess account you can exercise the rights below and ask for your records to be deleted by writing to [email protected]; everything except the address on the block list is then deleted.

Your rights

Under article 11 of the KVKK you may ask whether your data is processed, request information about it, learn the purpose of the processing and who it has been transferred to, have incomplete or inaccurate data corrected, have your data deleted or destroyed, have those corrections or deletions notified to recipients, object to a result against you produced solely by automated analysis, and claim compensation for damage caused by unlawful processing.

If you use the Service from the European Economic Area, you also have the GDPR rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, objection and withdrawal of consent, and you may lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your country.

Once signed in, you can use the account settings page to download a copy of your data (JSON; it includes your coach application, invite links, coach links, the assignments given to you with the coaches’ notes and, if you are a coach, the assignments you gave, archived ones not yet deleted and the notes of suspended coaches included, the openings you made (id, name, side, PGN with the notes on moves along the way, created and updated dates), password-reset requests and when and with whose approval your password was last changed through a reset, without the secrets and check codes of links and requests; for an account made with a username the copy has no email address, and the coaches you are linked to are named), correct your name and chess usernames, turn email reminders off and delete your account yourself; you can also delete your account from your profile page. You can see the coaches you are linked to on your profile page and leave any of them at any time. You can delete game reports one by one on the My games page. Other ways to make a request are explained in the KVKK Privacy Notice.

Security

Connections are encrypted with HTTPS, and session cookies are kept out of reach of page scripts (HttpOnly). Only authorised accounts can reach the admin panel, and administrative actions are logged. No system is entirely without risk; if a data breach occurs, the Board and the people affected are notified as the KVKK requires.

Children

To make an account on your own with Google you must be at least 13; if you are between 13 and 18, ask a parent or guardian before making one. Children under 13 can make an account only through an invite link their coach sends to them personally, with a username and password; at sign-up they are asked to confirm that their parent or guardian has agreed. The time of this confirmation is recorded with the account, deleted with it and included in its data export. These accounts are not asked for an email address and are never sent email, they start hidden on the leaderboard, and which coach a child works with is never shown anywhere public; if the child turns on appearing there, only a “Works with a coach” mark is shown beside their name. Under the Coach Terms, coaches must get the agreement of the parents or guardians of students who are minors; an approved parent or guardian who works with their own child also counts as a coach under those terms. Parents and guardians may write to [email protected] with any request about their child’s account (a copy of the data, a correction, deleting the account). If we learn that a child under 13 made an account other than through a coach’s invite, or that an account was made without a parent’s or guardian’s agreement, we delete it. Players whose games are analysed in opponent prep may be minors; that is why these reports process only public chess data, as little as needed.

Changes

We may update this policy as the Service changes. The current version is always published on this page; for significant changes the effective date is updated and the change is announced on the site.

Contact

For any privacy question: [email protected].