Effective 27 July 2026.
Your email, your chess, and your conversations with the clerk. That is all that is kept. None of it is sold, and none of it is used for advertising.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address and account ID | To sign you in and attach your credit to you |
| Your games, posts and analysis | So they are still there tomorrow |
| Conversations with the clerk | So it can follow the thread, and so problems can be found and fixed |
| Moves you played and puzzles you attempted | To estimate your strength and work out what you keep getting wrong |
| Credit balance and a record of every charge | Because it is your money and the arithmetic has to be checkable |
| Approximate location, from your IP | Only to know your time zone. It is never stored |
No tracking pixels. No advertising identifiers. No third-party analytics.
Card numbers. Payment goes straight to Stripe and never touches our servers.
ChessClerk runs on other people's infrastructure, and those companies handle data on our behalf:
Your data is not sold, rented or traded. Ever. It would be disclosed if the law required it.
Analysis that survives an engine check may be added to the public chess library. Positions, evaluations and plans go in. Nothing identifying goes with them.
The library has no authors, and this is structural rather than a promise: there is no field recording who contributed a line, so there is nothing to leak, subpoena or accidentally publish. Provenance is not hidden. It does not exist.
Ask the clerk, and you can:
Deletion is real deletion. What has already entered the public library stays, because it has no name attached and cannot be traced back to you — including by us.
ChessClerk is for anyone who wants to play chess, at any age. There is no minimum.
Playing needs no account at all — the board, the clock and the engine run in your own browser and collect nothing. A child can use all of it without signing up for anything or giving us a thing.
An account is only needed to talk to the clerk, and an account means an email address and stored conversations. For a child under 13, a parent or guardian should be the one to create it and should stay aware of it. If you are a parent and want an account and its data removed, ask the clerk and it will be done.
Sign-in is handled by Firebase. Payment is handled by Stripe. Your stored data is scoped to your account by database rules, and the keys that reach the language models live on the server and are never sent to your browser.
No system is perfectly secure. If something is breached that affects you, you will be told.
On servers in the United States. If you use ChessClerk from elsewhere, your data is processed there.
This page may change. Material changes will be posted here with a new effective date and announced in the app.