Privacy

Tiny Chess has no ads and no tracking, and you never need an account to play. The game itself collects no personal data. The few things that do cross the network — an online move, a board position you ask the VIP coach about — are listed below, exactly as they are.

Your settings (including the name you type), star progress and badges, online win–loss record, friend list, daily-puzzle streak, and any unfinished game are stored on your device and nowhere else.

If you choose a photo as your portrait, it is resized on the device and saved locally. It is never uploaded — online opponents always see one of the eight drawn avatars, never your photo.

There is no sign-in and no email or phone number. Your identity online is a short code like MIA-4827, generated on your device and containing nothing personal. When you connect, the server receives that code, the nickname you chose (or the code itself if you didn’t), which drawn avatar you picked, a country flag taken from your device’s region setting — not from your location — and your in-app rating.

During a game the only things that travel are chess moves and a fixed set of six emoji reactions. There is no free-text chat, so nobody can type anything at you or your child.

The lobby keeps players in memory only while they are connected. There is no database of players; when you disconnect, the server forgets you.

If you want your progress to survive a new phone, you can sign in with Apple or Google. We then store one thing: a snapshot of your progress, keyed to an opaque identifier from the sign-in provider. That identifier is never shown to other players, and no feature of the game is locked behind signing in.

To remove it, disconnect the account in Settings or write to us and we will delete the snapshot.

VIP features run on our server, and they send something only when you explicitly ask — the app’s own rule is “nothing is sent unless you tap it.” When you play a master-strength opponent, request a hint, or tap “Why?” after a move, the app sends the current board position and the move in question. No name, no identifier of yours beyond what is needed to check the subscription, and no game history.

Engine moves are calculated by Stockfish running on our server. The written explanations are generated with Anthropic’s Claude API, which receives the position and the moves being compared — never who you are.

Payment, when the stores are live, is handled entirely by the App Store or Google Play. We never see your card or payment details.

Tiny Chess is built to be safe for a child by construction, not by policy: no ads, no free-text chat, no photos shown to strangers, no location, and no account. There is nothing to moderate because there is no way to send anything that would need moderating.

If what the app collects ever changes, this page will change first, and the date at the top with it.

Questions or deletion requests: [email protected]