Last updated: 15 September 2026
This page explains, in plain language, what happens to your data when you use chessbranching.com.
You can use this site without an account, and then nothing you write is sent to us at all — your studies stay in your own browser. If you make an account, your email address and your studies are stored on our server so they are there on your other devices. That is the only reason we hold anything. If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address and an ID for your Google account — nothing else. If you subscribe, the card is typed on our payment company's own site and never reaches ours. There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone.
The chessboard, the move tree, the notes and the analysis engine all run inside your browser. Your studies are saved using your browser’s local storage, which is a private area on your own computer or phone. They are not uploaded, not backed up by us, and not visible to us or to anyone else.
Practical consequences worth understanding:
If you choose to make one, we store:
That is the whole list. We do not ask for your name, your age, your country or your rating, and we do not build a profile of how you use the site.
This section covers only what Chess Branching receives when you choose Continue with Google.
openid and
email permissions, and nothing else from your Google account.
We never see your card. Subscribing takes you to Dodo Payments, on their own website, and the card number is typed there. It goes to them and to the bank, and no part of it — not the number, not the expiry, not the security code — is ever sent to this site or stored on our server. We could not show you your own card if you asked.
Dodo Payments is our merchant of record: they are the seller on your receipt, they collect and remit the tax for your country, and the payment happens entirely on their systems. What they collect in order to do that — your name, your billing address, your card details, your invoices — is held by them under their privacy policy, not by us and not under this one.
A card used here without its owner's permission is a matter for Dodo Payments, not for us. They took the payment, they hold the card details, and the checks that catch a stolen card, the refund and the chargeback all happen on their side. We are not able to look into it, because there is nothing on our side to look at. If a payment to Chess Branching appears on a card that is not yours, write to Dodo Payments and to your bank. Telling us as well is welcome — we can close the account the payment opened — but we cannot see, refund or reverse the payment itself.
In the other direction: if our database were ever stolen, no card would be in it. That is not a promise about our security so much as a consequence of never holding the data.
There is one cookie that keeps you signed in, set only after you sign in. Signing in with Google uses a second one for a few minutes: it holds a random value that makes sure the sign-in coming back from Google is the one this browser started, and it is deleted as soon as you return. Both are strictly necessary for a service you asked for, so there is no consent banner — and there is nothing to consent to, because we set no cookie for advertising, analytics or tracking. Your theme choice and your studies are kept in local storage rather than in a cookie, and are never sent to us.
One honest caveat. Our database is Cloudflare’s, and Cloudflare keeps its own automatic backups so that a database can be recovered after an accident. Deleted data can therefore survive in those backups for up to 30 days before they roll off, and that is true of every service built this way. Nothing is read out of them except to recover from a failure.
The two days on a deleted study are a different thing: they exist so you can undo a mistake, and the study stays yours the whole time. If you want one gone sooner, empty the bin — it goes within the hour.
This site carries no advertising. It loads no advertising library, no tracking pixel and no third-party script of any kind. We run no analytics of our own and no visitor statistics. The chess engine is a WebAssembly program that runs on your machine; the positions you analyse are never sent anywhere.
If that ever changes, this page will say so before it happens, and anything the law requires — a consent prompt above all — will be in place first.
Cloudflare, for everything the site itself does. The site, the database that holds accounts and studies, and the service that sends confirmation and password-reset emails are all Cloudflare’s. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes technical connection data such as IP addresses in order to deliver the page, to send those emails, and to limit how often sign-in and sign-up can be tried — which is what stops somebody guessing at your password. We do not keep an identifiable log of who visited.
Google, and only if you choose Continue with Google. Google shows its own sign-in screen, and what it sends back to us is the three things listed above. What happens on Google's side is covered by Google's own privacy policy. Our use of information received from Google adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy.
Dodo Payments, and only if you subscribe. They are the payment company described above; nothing reaches them unless you start a checkout, and what reaches them then is your email address and whatever you type on their own page. If you never subscribe they are not involved in your use of this site at all.
Nobody else.
We do not sell data, we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers, and there is no third analytics or marketing company involved at any point.
This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect any information from them. If you believe a child has made an account here, write to us and we will delete it.
If you have an account, you can see everything we hold about you inside the app: your email address is shown in the top corner and your studies are the studies. You can correct them by editing them, take them with you using export PGN, and delete the account and everything in it yourself, without asking us.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to object to how it is handled, or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to us and we will answer.
If this policy changes, the “last updated” date above will change with it. Significant changes will be noted on this page.
Questions about this policy, or anything above: info@chessbranching.com