Privacy Policy

Who we are

E4 Chess Trainer is a personal chess-coaching product operated by a sole trader based in Malta.

• Data controller: Dan Ghitza
• Contact: support@e4chess.academy

What we collect, and where it lives

Every piece of student, guardian and coach data — accounts, lesson plans, progress, consent records, class rosters and reports — is held in our database, behind a single access layer that every part of the app goes through. On your phone or in your browser, your sign-in session is kept in the device's secure system storage, not in ordinary app storage.

Who processes it on our behalf

We use a small, fixed set of specialist providers to run the service. None of them may use your data for anything other than providing E4 Chess Trainer to you.

• Supabase — hosts the database above: accounts, lesson plans, progress, consent records, rosters and reports.
• Anthropic (Claude) — receives the text of a coaching conversation and the board context needed to answer it. This happens on our server only; the app on your device never talks to Anthropic directly.
• Microsoft Azure — handles both directions of your child's voice: turning the coach's written explanation into spoken audio, and turning a recorded lesson into text for review. Azure also screens content for safety.
• Fly.io — receives the audio bytes when a coach uploads a lesson recording, streamed directly to our processing service.
• Expo push — relays push-notification delivery to mobile devices (device token and notification text only). Mobile only.

Sign-in and push delivery

Two things happen on your device rather than on our server, so they are described separately from the providers above. Neither processes data on our behalf — they are the operating system's own services, and their own privacy policies apply to what they receive.

• Apple and Google (sign-in) — if you choose "Continue with Apple" or "Continue with Google" instead of an email and password, the sign-in itself happens between you and Apple or Google. They tell us only that the sign-in succeeded, plus the email address you chose to share. If you would rather they were not involved at all, sign up with an email address and password instead.
• Apple and Google (push delivery) — a notification we send is handed to Apple's or Google's push service, which is the only way any app can deliver one to a phone. They receive the delivery token for your device and the text of the notification. On Android this is Firebase Cloud Messaging, a Google service.

Minors and guardian consent

Anyone under 18 is treated as a minor for AI-processing consent — a stricter line than the legal minimum, so we ask more often, not less.

A minor can never turn AI coaching on for themselves. A parent or guardian must approve it first, by email. That approval link expires after 7 days for safety, so an old, unused link simply stops working and a fresh one can always be requested.

One combined approval covers AI coaching chat, spoken explanations and lesson-recording transcription together. A parent or the student can switch it off again at any time.

What we never do

The app on your phone, tablet or browser never talks to Anthropic, Microsoft Azure or Fly.io directly — every request to them is made by our server, never by the app itself. The exceptions are the sign-in and push-delivery services described above, which are handled by the device itself, and the registration of a push token, which the app performs directly with Expo when notifications are switched on.

We run no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, and no advertising or attribution SDK, and we do not read your device's advertising identifier.

How long we keep data

A lesson recording is streamed straight through to transcription and is never stored by us as an audio file.

The written transcript produced from a lesson is deleted the moment a coach approves or discards the draft built from it. If a draft is never actioned at all, an automatic backstop after 30 days deletes its transcript anyway. The coach's own written note about the lesson is deliberately kept — it is coaching record, not the raw transcript.

We do not keep a copy of coaching-conversation content beyond what is described above. The providers listed earlier operate their own retention schedules under our agreements with them; if you need the current detail for a specific provider, contact us and we will tell you what it is at that time.

Your rights

Access: you can request a full export of your account's data at any time.

Erasure: you can request deletion. We track every erasure request and carry it out across every place we store data, including the account record itself.

A small amount is deliberately kept even after erasure, because it is the legal proof that consent was given in the first place: the record that a guardian approved AI coaching, the record of the guardian–student relationship, and the log of the erasure request itself.

Where a provider above has nothing left to delete on their side (for example, because they never stored the data at rest), we record that honestly as "nothing to delete" rather than claiming an erasure that could not have happened.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your data: support@e4chess.academy.