Privacy Policy

• Account details — email address, username, password (stored hashed by our authentication provider), country, and whether you signed in with Google. Guests get an anonymous account with no email.
• Chess activity — your games and moves, ratings, time spent per move, puzzles, lessons and training progress, tournament and club participation.
• Things you write — chat and direct messages, club posts, study annotations, reports you file, and the reasoning you type or speak into Coach Verbal Review.
• Payments — your membership tier, payment references, amounts and dates. Card and bank details are handled by Paystack; we never receive them.
• Technical data — basic logs (such as IP address, device and browser type, and errors) kept by our hosting providers to keep the Service secure and working, and online/offline presence while you play.

Voice input in Coach Verbal Review is turned into text by your own browser's speech recognition; we receive only the text, never audio recordings.

• To provide the Service (performance of our contract with you): running games, ratings, matchmaking, tournaments, clubs, messaging, training and memberships.
• Fair play and safety (legitimate interests): detecting cheating and abuse, moderating content, and keeping accounts secure.
• Payments and records (legal obligation and contract): processing payments, refunds and keeping financial records.
• Improving the Service (legitimate interests): understanding which features are used and fixing problems.
• Emails you ask for (consent): for example correspondence-move alerts. You can turn these off at any time.

When you use an AI coaching feature, we send the relevant chess information (such as a position, your game moves and engine evaluations) and any text you wrote for the coach to our AI provider, Google (Gemini), to generate the explanation. We do not send your name or email with these requests. Google may process this data under its own terms, including to improve its services, so please don't include personal information in what you write to the coach. Using these features is optional.

We don't sell personal data. We share it only with:

• Other players — your username, ratings, public games, profile and club posts are visible to others as part of the Service.
• Service providers who process data for us: Supabase (database and authentication, hosted in the United Kingdom), Vercel (website hosting), Paystack (payments, Nigeria), Google (AI explanations and, if you choose it, Google sign-in), and Upstash (short-lived data such as online presence and rate limits).
• Coaches and clubs you choose to book or join, who see what they need to work with you.
• Authorities when the law requires it, or to protect the safety of our users.

Some of our providers store or process data outside Nigeria, mainly in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. Where we do this, we rely on the safeguards permitted by the NDPA, such as contractual protections and the providers' security commitments.

• Account and game data: while your account is open.
• Guest accounts: deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
• Payment records: kept for as long as Nigerian tax and accounting law requires, even after you close your account.
• Fair-play records: kept as long as needed to protect the integrity of ratings and tournaments.

When you delete your account we remove or anonymise your personal data. Games you played may remain in anonymised form so your opponents' histories stay intact.

Under the NDPA you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of your personal data, including in a portable format;
• correct data that is wrong;
• delete your data or your account;
• restrict or object to some processing;
• withdraw consent you have given, at any time.

Email support@hamduk.com.ng and we will respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (ndpc.gov.ng).

Many of our players are young. Anyone under 18 needs the consent of a parent or guardian to use the Service, and schools that register students must obtain that consent. Parents can contact support@hamduk.com.ng to review or delete their child's data. We do not knowingly use children's data for marketing.

We use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in and to remember settings such as your theme and puzzle progress. We don't use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

We protect data with encrypted connections (HTTPS), access controls on every database table, and hashed passwords and API keys. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data, we will notify you and the regulator as the NDPA requires.

We will post any changes here and update the date above. If a change is significant, we will also tell you in the app or by email. See also our Terms of Service.

Hamduk Chess Club, Lagos, Nigeria. Email support@hamduk.com.ng or call +234 706 227 3586.