Privacy
Your data, plainly.
How this site handles information about you. Last updated 22 October 2026.
Draft — pending legal review.
This page describes, in plain language, how the site works today. It has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer and will change before launch.
The short version
- You sign in with a passkey. There is no password, and we never see your passkey’s private key.
- Playing needs no e-mail address, real name or phone number. If you join the mailing list, we keep the e-mail address you give us for that purpose only.
- We set one session cookie to keep you signed in. No advertising trackers, no analytics scripts, no third-party cookies.
- Your profile, games, ratings and public chat are public, because chess is played in the open.
- Our database is hosted in the United States.
- We will delete your account and data if you ask.
What we keep
- Account
- Your handle, and anything you choose to add: display name, country, a short bio and a link to your stream. The time your account was created.
- Guest account
- A random name such as Guest-k3Xq9P and the same activity records as below. Guests can play casual games; voting in Earth vs Moon needs an account.
- Passkey
- The public half of your passkey, its ID, a signature counter, hints about how your device connects, the device type, whether the passkey is synced, and when it was created and last used.
- Play
- Your games (moves, clocks, results), ratings and rating history, tournament entries, team membership, your votes in Earth vs Moon, and your Founding Crew number and message if you sign up.
- Chat and reports
- Messages you post, with your handle, and reports you file: what you reported and why.
- Mailing list
- Only if you sign up on the coming-soon page: your e-mail address, and if you give them, your name, what you are interested in (player, partner, investor, press) and a short note. We use it to tell you when the platform opens and about real milestones. We never sell it or share it, except with an e-mail delivery service acting for us when we start sending.
- Network address
- Your IP address is used briefly, in memory, to limit abuse such as mass guest sign-ups. We don't store it in our database. Our hosting provider may keep standard request logs.
We don’t collect payment details, precise location, contacts or anything from your camera or microphone.
What is public
Anyone can see your handle, profile details, games, ratings, rankings, team, tournament results, Founding Crew message and the messages you post in public chat. Team chat is visible only to members of that team. Reports are visible only to Mission Control.
Please don’t put anything in your profile or in chat that you wouldn’t want the world to read.
Passkeys
A passkey is a pair of keys. The private key stays on your device or in your device’s passkey manager, which may sync it between your own devices. We store only the public key, which can check a signature but cannot sign in on its own. Passkeys are tied to this website, which makes them hard to phish.
If you lose every device holding your passkey, we cannot recover the account, because we hold no password or e-mail to fall back on.
Where data lives
- Neon
- Hosts our Postgres database, in the United States (AWS us-east-1 region).
- Vercel
- Our planned web host. It serves the pages and runs our server code and a scheduled job that keeps games and tournaments moving.
If you visit from outside the United States, your data is transferred there. Links to other sites, such as a stream link on a profile, take you to services with their own privacy policies.
Chat moderation
Every message is checked automatically when you send it: a filter blocks slurs and some sexual terms, and limits catch flooding. Reported messages are read by people in Mission Control. A moderator can hide a message; hidden messages are kept in our records so decisions can be reviewed and appealed. See the chat rules.
How long we keep it
We keep your account and its records until you ask us to delete them. We keep a mailing-list address until you remove it. The session cookie expires after 60 days. We have not yet set automatic deletion periods for inactive guest accounts or for hidden chat messages; this policy will state them before launch.
Your choices
- You can change or remove your display name, country, bio and stream link at any time in Settings.
- You can take your address off the mailing list at any time with “Remove my email” on the coming-soon page, or with the unsubscribe link in any e-mail we send.
- You can ask us to delete your account. We will delete your profile, passkeys, chat messages, team membership and Founding Crew entry. Finished games may be kept with your name removed, so that your opponents’ records and ratings stay correct.
- You can ask for a copy of the data we hold about you.
- Depending on where you live, you may have further legal rights over your data, and the right to complain to a data-protection authority.
How to ask
Children
This site is for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13. Children under 13 should not create an account on their own. If we learn that we hold an account of a child under 13 without the right consent, we will delete it. A school programme, run through teachers, is being designed; see the Academy.
Changes and contact
We will post any change on this page with a new date. The legal name of the operator, a postal address and a privacy contact will be added before launch, when this draft has been reviewed by a lawyer.