Privacy
A board game site does not need much about you, and this one takes about as little as a rated game allows. Here is all of it.
Updated
Accounts, including guests
Signing in is handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google service. There are three ways in: a Google account, an email address and password, or nothing at all.
That third one is a real account. When you start playing without signing in we create an anonymous account for you and store its identifier in your browser. It has no email address and no name attached, but it is an account: it holds your games and it can hold a rating. If you later sign up properly, we link the new credentials to the same account rather than making a second one, so your history follows you.
A guest account lives in your browser. Clearing the browser’s stored data for this site, or opening the site on a different device, gives you a new one, and the old games stay attached to the old account with no way for us to reunite them. That is the trade for not asking you for anything.
What we store
| What | Where it comes from | Why |
|---|---|---|
| An account identifier | Generated when you first play | To attach games and ratings to somebody |
| Email address | Only if you sign up with one, or with Google | Signing in, and account recovery |
| Username and display name | Chosen by you | So opponents and leaderboards can name you |
| Country | Optional, chosen by you | Country leaderboards and the opponent passport |
| A short profile note and an avatar | Optional, chosen by you | Shown on your profile |
| Every move of every game you play | Play | Running the game, replays, and rating it |
| Clock times, results and reasons | Play | The same |
| A rating per pool, and its history | Rated results | Leaderboards and matchmaking |
| Coins and the ledger behind them | Play | The site’s own reward counter |
| Chat messages sent inside a game | You | Shown to your opponent and stored with the game |
| Rough timestamps of when you were last online | Play | Showing who is available, and detecting a walkout |
We do not ask for your real name, your date of birth, your phone number or your address, and there is nowhere to put them.
What is public
Also public: your username, display name, avatar, country and ratings, wherever they appear on a leaderboard or a profile. Leaderboards can be filtered by country, so choosing one makes yours visible.
Not public: your email address, and the identifier of an account that has not played a public game.
Who else touches it
- Google, as the operator of Firebase. Authentication, the database that holds accounts and games, and the hosting that serves these pages all run on Google infrastructure, which means Google processes this data on our behalf and can see the same records we can.
- Our own game server, which runs the rules, decides results and updates ratings.
- Nobody else. This site does not sell data, does not load advertising, and does not embed third-party trackers or social widgets. If that ever changes, it changes here first and the date at the top of this page changes with it.
What we keep in your browser
A small number of settings live in your browser’s own storage and are never sent to us: your chosen language, your light or dark theme, the last rule set you played for each game, and the identifier of your current session. Firebase also stores your sign-in session there so you are not signed out every time you close the tab.
These are not advertising cookies. There are none of those. Blocking site storage will mostly work, but the site will forget your preferences and will treat you as a new guest each visit.
Children
These are family games and children play them. We do not knowingly collect more from a child than from anyone else, which is to say almost nothing, but a child who signs up with an email address is giving us that email address. If you are a parent and would rather your child played without an account, the guest option needs no details at all. If you believe a child’s account holds something it should not, write to us and we will remove it.
Seeing it, correcting it, deleting it
Write to hello@chess.co.za and say which account you mean. We will tell you what is stored, correct anything that is wrong, or delete the account.
One honest limit: deleting your account removes your profile, your email address and your ratings, but a game has two players and the other one has a right to their own record of it. Finished games stay, with your side of them shown under a placeholder name rather than yours.
We keep what is described above for as long as the account exists. Chat messages inside a finished game are kept with that game.
Changes to this page
This page describes what the site does today, not what it might do. When the site changes, this page is updated in the same release, and the date beneath the title moves.