Your privacy is important to us. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, how we process it, and your rights.

When you visit this website

We collect technical data to understand how the site is used. This includes the visited pages, browser, operating system, and your country (based on IP geolocation). This information is collected using a self-hosted instance of Umami (a privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics).

All data is collected anonymously. No IP addresses or user IDs are stored in the process and the data is not shared with third parties.

When you sign up

To create an account, you can either sign up with your email and a password or use a third-party to login via Chess.com, Lichess, or Google. Choosing a third party, ChessMonitor stores an OAuth identifier token about you, but the password is not transferred in the process. Depending on your option, we additionally store the following:

• Email and Password: We store your email address and a securely hashed version of your chosen password.
• Chess.com: We store your account name and your email address.
• Lichess: We store your account name and your email address.
• Google: We store store your email address. You can withdraw the token for ChessMonitor anytime in your Google permissions settings.

As you can connect multiple chess profiles to your account, we may end up storing multiple profiles.

We store information you set or upload yourself like your public profile name, uploaded PGNs, or even suggested features.

We will send you transactional emails to notify you about activity in your account or important security events. To send these transactional emails, we use the provider SMTP2GO. Your email address and the contents of the email will be sent to and processed by SMTP2GO.

If you choose to receive marketing emails from us, the same provider SMTP2GO will be used to send these emails.

If you receive an email from us and don't wish to continue to do so, you may unsubscribe from the email list by clicking the link in the footer of that email. You can also disable marketing emails in your user account settings. Finally, you can, at any time, contact us through this website or by email and ask us to remove you from the email list.

To provide the service, ChessMonitor downloads your chess games from Chess.com and/or Lichess.org to provide you statistics. This contains various information like the profile URL, player name, number of wins/draws/losses, title (e.g. GM), openings, moves, start times and more. This data is already publicly available on Chess.com or Lichess.

When you subscribe to ChessMonitor

If you choose to purchase a subscription, the payment process is handled by our payment provider Paddle. As part of this process, Paddle collects your full name, your country and billing address, together with your payment details (e.g. credit card, PayPal information). Paddle will store this information in their systems and collect your payment information to process your subscription.

Paddle will contact you via email about your subscription, including invoices and payment reminders. You can also contact Paddle about your subscription at any time. Paddle will share your transaction history with us to facilitate product fulfilment, order processing, fraud prevention, and product support.

If your account currently has or ever had a subscription, we will share any updates to your email address with Paddle.

As subscriber, you can link your Discord and/or Reddit account (via OAuth) to your ChessMonitor profile to gain special subscriber roles. In both cases, we store your user ID and username from that service.

When you send us a message

When you send an email though the contact or cancel form, SMTP2GO (as mentioned above) is used to process the email.

If you send us an email directly, it will be processed and stored by our email provider Migadu-Mail GmbH (located in the European Union). Currently, any message you send us may be retained in our inboxes indefinitely. Of course, you may request your message to be deleted after we replied to and acted on it.

When you play chess publicly

ChessMonitor also processes public chess games, which may include games played by users who do not have a ChessMonitor account. These games are collected from publicly available online sources, such as Chess.com, Lichess, or tournament databases.

Some games may include player names, titles (e.g., GM), and other metadata that was published with the game. This data is publicly accessible.

Where is your data stored?

All data collected and processed by ChessMonitor is stored on a self-hosted server located in a data center in Germany, operated by Relaix GmbH. The server is secured and maintained by us, and no third parties have access to it.

Which third parties help us provide the service?

To deliver certain parts of our service, we use a few trusted third-party providers. These providers only process data to the extent necessary to fulfill their function:

• Paddle: Payment processing (billing data, transaction info)
• SMTP2GO: Email delivery for transactional and marketing emails
• Migadu: Email hosting for direct communication (e.g., contact form, support requests)
• Bunny.net: Content delivery (website traffic passes through their network)
• Cloudflare: DNS (resolving domain names)
• RelAix Networks: Data center provider where our self-hosted server is located

All third-party providers comply with applicable data protection regulations. We ensure that data is only shared to the extent necessary for providing our services and maintaining functionality of ChessMonitor.

Under the European Union’s GDPR, the United Kingdom's GDPR, and California’s CCPA, you have the following rights regarding your personal data. At ChessMonitor, we extend these rights to all users regardless of where you live.

1. Right to Information: You have the right to know what personal data we collect, how we use it, and with whom we share it. You can find this information in this privacy policy.
2. Right to Access: You can request a copy of all personal data we store about you. This includes your account information and any other data associated with you.
3. Right to Rectification: You can update or correct any inaccurate or incomplete personal data in your account settings or by contacting us.
4. Right to Erasure: You can request that we delete your personal data. Please note that deleting your account will prevent us from providing services linked to your data, and some data may be retained as required by law.
5. Right to Restrict Data Processing: You can ask us to limit the use of your personal data in certain situations, for example, if you believe the data is inaccurate or unlawfully processed.
6. Right to Data Portability: You have the right to receive your personal data in a machine-readable format to transfer it to another service if you wish.
7. Right to Object: You may object at any time to the further processing of your personal data, including for purposes such as email marketing.

Please note that some data we process, like your chess games and public profile info, originate from third-party platforms such as Chess.com and Lichess. If you want this data removed from ChessMonitor, please contact those platforms directly, as we obtain that information from their public sources. Removal from ChessMonitor does not delete or affect the data stored by those platforms.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us via our contact form or email us directly. We will respond promptly and support your request in accordance with applicable laws.