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This policy explains what Vibe Chess collects, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived, so it says what actually happens instead of reserving every right we could think of.
Vibe Chess is an over-the-board chess club and a set of free tools for running chess tournaments: this website, a chess clock, a board editor and the tournament app that runs in a browser and inside Telegram. What the project is and what it deliberately does not do is set out on the about page.
This policy covers the website at playvibechess.com and the tools linked from it. Our servers are located in Kazakhstan.
You can read every page of this site, use the chess clock and use the board editor without giving us anything at all. We do not ask for your name, your email address or your phone number anywhere on the site, and there is no sign-up form.
Personal data appears in one place only: the tournament app, where you sign in through Telegram so that the app knows whose result it is recording. Everything below is the detail of that.
Browsing pages, using the clock or the board editor, we collect:
The chess clock keeps your settings - time control, player names for the current game - in your own browser's storage. That data stays on your device and is never sent to us.
The app needs to know who is playing, otherwise it cannot pair you or record your result. When you open it through Telegram, Telegram passes us your account details, and you may add more yourself:
We do not ask for and cannot see your phone number, your Telegram contacts or your messages. We never receive your password: signing in is handled entirely by Telegram.
Chess is played in public, and a tournament only works if the players can see the pairings and the standings. So inside the app, other participants of the same event see your display name, your photo if you added one, your table, your opponent, your results and your rating.
Club rating tables are also shown on the website and on the screen in the venue. They list display names and scores only. Your Telegram ID, username, city, contact details and date of birth are never published, and those pages are closed to search engines.
If you would rather not appear under your real name, set a nickname in your profile: the tables use whatever name you have chosen.
We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising. It reaches three parties, and only for the reasons below:
We will also disclose data where the law requires it, and to protect the service from abuse. There is nothing else.
You can ask us to:
There is no self-service delete button in the app yet, so for now these requests are handled by hand: write to us on Telegram and we will action it. We aim to answer within 30 days.
One honest caveat about deletion: results of tournaments that have already been played stay in the crosstables of those events, because removing one player's games would change everybody else's score. We can remove your name from them and leave the games anonymous.
The service is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. Children do play in club tournaments - in that case the account belongs to a parent or a coach, who signs the child up. If you believe a child has given us data directly, tell us and we will delete it.
The site and the app are served over HTTPS, and access to the database and the servers is limited to the people who run the project. No service can promise perfect security, and we do not: what we can promise is that we hold as little as possible, which is why there is no password to steal here and no payment details anywhere in the system.
When the service changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top is updated. We do not quietly broaden what we collect: if a change means collecting something new, it is described here before it starts.
Questions about this policy, or a request about your data: message us on Telegram. A real person reads it - the same people who run the tournaments.
