Privacy Policy

01We never sell your data

A coach’s contact details are revealed to a student who pays for a booking. That is a delivery of something bought, to one named person, at their request — it is the product working, and it is the one disclosure we charge for. We do not hand those details to anyone else.

02Who holds your data

ChessDial is run by ChessBase India. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we are the Data Fiduciary for everything described here, and you are the Data Principal.

Legal name

ChessBase India 64 Squares Private Limited

CIN

U93000MH2016PTC272155

Registered address

301, Damji Shamji Trade CentreKirol Road, Vidyavihar (West)Mumbai 400086, Maharashtra, India

Privacy and grievances

support@chessbase.in

03What we collect

From everyone with an account

• From Google, when you sign in: your name, your email address, your profile picture, and an identifier for your Google account. We never see or store your Google password.
• Your country, worked out once from your IP address at your first payment and then stored. It decides your currency and which payment gateway you use.
• Your phone number, when you give it — needed so a coach can actually reach you.
• Your FIDE ID, rating and title, if you choose to link them.

When you book a session

• The booking itself: which coach or academy, which centre and trainer where that applies, the amount, the currency, the message you wrote to the coach, and which version of the booking terms you accepted and when.
• A reference to your payment from Razorpay or Stripe. We do not receive or store your card number, UPI PIN, CVV or bank credentials — the gateway handles all of that on its own pages.
• Which profiles you have revealed a contact for, and when — so your bookings page can show them again for a year.
• If you report a problem: the ground you picked and anything you wrote about what happened, which we show to the coach so they can respond.

If you list as a coach or academy

• Your public profile: name, photo, bio, locality, city and state, languages, teaching modes and venues, fee range, coarse availability and timezone, session formats, experience and student-count bands, achievements, FIDE details, and for an academy its centres and trainer roster.
• Your contact details — email, mobile and WhatsApp number — and which of them you want students to reach you on.
• Two map points: the pin you actually dropped, which stays private, and a deliberately shifted version of it, which is published. See section 6.
• Payout details: the account holder name, the IFSC, the UPI ID, and only the last four digits of your bank account number and of your PAN. We do not retain the full account number or the full PAN.
• An identity document, if you send one. See section 7.
• Booking and reliability figures we calculate — how many bookings you took, how often you scheduled, how many disputes went against you — over a rolling 90-day window.

About students listed on a profile

A coach can list notable students they have taught. For those people we hold a FIDE ID, a name, titles and a photo, plus what is needed to confirm the claim: whether they are an adult or a minor, a contact number, and — for a minor — the name of the parent or guardian who confirmed it and their identity document. For anyone under 18, the contact number we hold is the guardian’s. We hold no contact details for under-18s.

From using the site

• Profile views:which profile was viewed and when, and your account if you were signed in. This powers the view counts a coach sees on their own dashboard. A coach’s own visits to their own profile are not counted.
• Reviews you write — the rating and the text. We store who wrote a review so that nobody can review twice, but it is never published or sent to the coach.
• Feedback you send through the Feedback button, and the email address you attach to it.
• Server logs: IP address, browser and device string, which pages you requested and when. Used for security, rate limiting, bot detection and debugging.

04Why we collect it

Every purpose below is either necessary to give you what you asked for, or necessary to keep the marketplace honest. There is no category of data we collect “in case it is useful later”.

Running your account

Signing you in, knowing which profiles are yours, and showing you your own bookings.

Taking bookings

Charging the right amount in the right currency, revealing the contact you paid for, and passing your name, phone and message to the coach so they can arrange the session.

Paying coaches

Working out what is owed, holding it for the dispute window, and settling it to the account you gave us.

Reviewing listings

Letting a person read every profile — and its identity document, where there is one — before students can see it.

Deciding disputes

Reading both sides of a reported problem and refunding where the session did not happen.

Keeping it honest

Anti-bot checks, rate limits, spotting faked bookings and reviews, and calculating the reliability figures shown on profiles.

Discovery

Search, distance sorting, filters, and the anonymous activity feed on the landing page — which shows that a booking happened, never who made it.

Support

Answering you when you write in, and fixing what you report.

Where the law needs a legal basis for this, ours is your consent, given when you create an account or make a booking, and the necessity of processing to perform the contract you entered into. You can withdraw consent — see section 13 — though some of it we must keep for as long as tax and accounting law says.

05What is public, and what never is

Some of a coach’s data is meant to be seen — that is the point of a listing. The line matters, so here it is precisely.

Public to anyone, signed in or not

• A coach’s or academy’s profile: name, photo, bio, locality and city, languages, modes, fee range, availability bands, achievements, FIDE rating and titles, and the shifted map point.
• Their rating, review text, and reliability figures. Reviews appear without the reviewer’s name.
• Notable students a coach has listed, and whether each claim has been confirmed by the student.

Never public, to anyone

• Identity documents, and everything on them. Only our reviewers see these.
• Payout details. Even the partial ones.
• A coach’s exact pin. Visible only to them and to our reviewers.
• Who wrote which review.
• A student’s email, phone number or booking history, except to the coach they actually booked.
• Contact details for anyone under 18. We do not hold them at all.

Revealed only by a booking

A coach’s nominated contact channel, and for an academy the contact for the one centre a booking named. This is what the platform fee buys, and it goes to that one student for 365 days.

Public profile pages are indexed by search engines. Once a page has been crawled, unlisting it from ChessDial does not immediately remove it from a search engine’s cache — that is between you and them, though we will help.

06Your location on the map

A chess coach’s address is usually their home, and often their family’s home. So we do not publish it.

The point students see on the map is your real pin moved by a fixed distance of up to about a hundred metres, in a direction unique to you, drawn as a circle roughly a city block across. The circle always contains your real location without being centred on it, so a student can tell which neighbourhood you teach in and cannot work out where you live.

The shift is deliberately the same every time. If it were re-rolled each time you saved, someone collecting enough published points could average them back to the truth. It is derived from a secret we hold on the server, so it cannot be reversed by anyone reading our code.

Coaches who only teach online never drop a pin at all — their point is the centre of the area they named, which is enough to be found by a nearby search and is not a real location.

07Identity documents

If you send us an Aadhaar, PAN, passport or similar document to verify a listing, we treat it as the most sensitive thing you have given us.

• It is used for one purpose only: checking that the name on the document matches the name on the profile. We do not use it for anything else, and we do not build a database of ID numbers.
• It is never public, never shown to students, and never shown to another coach.
• It is stored in a private bucket, not on the public web. Our reviewers open it through a link that expires within a couple of minutes.
• We record the outcome, not the number. What stays on your profile is a verified flag and the name that was checked.
• Replace a document and the older one is retired from use.

Please do not send us an identity document we did not ask for, and do not send one by email. If you want a document deleted, ask us — see section 13.

08Children

Much of the chess coaching arranged through ChessDial is for children. The site itself, however, is not for children to use.

• You must be 18 or over to hold an account. A parent or guardian creates the account, makes the booking, and gives their own contact details.
• We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18, and we do not track, profile or advertise to children.
• The one place a child’s details can appear is a notable-student listing, and there the confirmation and the contact number come from a parent or guardian.

If you believe a child has created an account, or that a child’s details are on this site without a guardian’s consent, write to support@chessbase.in and we will remove it promptly.

09Who we share it with

We share data in four situations: with the coach you booked, with the companies that run parts of the service for us, where the law requires it, and where we must to stop fraud or protect someone. That is the complete list.

The coach or academy you booked

Your name, phone number, email and your message, so they can arrange the session. They are independent of us and responsible for their own handling of it. They may not add you to marketing lists or pass you on.

Companies that run parts of ChessDial

Each of these gets only what it needs to do its job, and none of them may use it for their own purposes.

Google

Sign-in, and the analytics described in section 10.

Razorpay

Payments and refunds in India. They receive your payment details directly; we do not.

Stripe

Payments and refunds outside India, on the same basis.

Amazon Web Services

Private storage of identity documents, and our message queues.

Bunny CDN

Storing and delivering profile and achievement photos.

MaxMind

Turning an IP address into a country, once, at your first payment.

Vercel

Hosting the website and telling us which country a visit came from.

OpenFreeMap and Photon (Komoot)

Map tiles and place search. Your browser talks to these directly when a map loads or you type a place name, so they see your IP address and what you typed.

We also read FIDE’s published ratings to keep profiles accurate. That is us reading public data, not us sending anything to FIDE.

The law, and safety

We will disclose data where we are legally required to — a valid order from a court or an authority with the power to demand it — and where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to prevent fraud, enforce our Terms of Service, or protect someone from harm. Where a child’s safety is involved we will go to the authorities without waiting to be asked.

10Cookies and analytics

The cookie that signs you in

One cookie, cd_refresh_token, keeps you signed in. It lasts 7 days, is marked HttpOnly and Secure so scripts cannot read it, and is restricted to requests from this site. It is strictly necessary — refuse it and you cannot sign in. Signing out clears it.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to count page views and see which parts of the site get used. It sets its own cookies and reports your approximate location, device and browser to Google. We use it to make decisions about the product, never to build a profile of you, and we do not run advertising or remarketing tags.

You can block it — most browsers’ tracking protection does, as does any content blocker, or Google’s own opt-out add-on. Everything on ChessDial works normally with analytics blocked.

What we do not do

No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers beyond the analytics above, no cross-site profiling, and no selling of any of it.

11How long we keep things

Your account

For as long as you have one. Ask us to close it and we delete what we are not required to keep.

Bookings and payments

At least eight years after the financial year they fall in, because Indian tax and company law requires it. These survive account deletion — they are our books, not your profile.

Revealed contacts

365 days of access from the booking. The record that contact happened is kept longer, because it is what lets you review.

Identity documents

While the listing is live and for as long as we must be able to show why we verified it. A replaced document is retired immediately. Ask for deletion and we will delete it unless a dispute is open.

Reviews

Indefinitely, without your name. Delete your account and your reviews stay up, unattributed — removing them would rewrite a coach's public record.

Disputes

With the booking they belong to, for the same period.

Profile views

Rolling: counts and the 30-day chart a coach sees.

Server logs

A short rotation, for security and debugging only.

Anti-bot records

Deleted automatically when the challenge expires, within minutes.

12How we protect it

• Everything travels over HTTPS. The session cookie is HttpOnly, Secure and same-site.
• Identity documents sit in a private bucket, reachable only through short-lived links minted for a specific reviewer.
• We keep only the last four digits of a bank account number and of a PAN, so there is less to lose.
• A coach’s exact location is never sent to a browser other than their own.
• Access to production data is limited to the people who need it, and administrative tools are behind a separate permission that has to be granted deliberately.
• Payment credentials never touch our servers — Razorpay and Stripe hold them.

No system is perfect, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. If there is a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board as the law requires.

13Your rights

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can ask us to do all of the following, and we will not charge you for it.

See what we hold

A summary of your personal data, what we are doing with it, and who we have shared it with.

Correct it

Fix anything wrong, complete anything missing, update anything stale. Most of it you can edit yourself from your dashboard.

Erase it

Delete your account and data, except what tax, accounting or dispute-resolution law requires us to keep, and reviews, which stay up unattributed.

Withdraw consent

Stop us processing what we hold on the basis of your consent — which in practice means closing your account.

Nominate someone

Name a person who can exercise these rights for you if you die or become incapacitated.

Complain

Raise a grievance with us first — see section 15.

Write to support@chessbase.in from the email address on your account, or use the Feedback button. We will acknowledge within 48 hours and act within 30 days. We may need to confirm who you are before handing over or deleting anything — a request from an unverified address is a way to attack someone else’s account, so we check.

14Changes to this policy

We will update this page when the product changes, and the date at the top will say when. If a change means we start doing something materially different with data we already hold, we will tell you directly rather than rely on you re-reading this page.

15Grievance officer

For anything about your personal data — a request, a complaint, or a question about this page — contact our grievance officer:

Email

support@chessbase.in

Post

Grievance Officer, ChessBase India 64 Squares Private Limited301, Damji Shamji Trade CentreKirol Road, Vidyavihar (West)Mumbai 400086, Maharashtra, India

Response time

Acknowledged within 48 hours, resolved within 30 days.