Your information
Privacy Policy
Who is responsible
ZinKai Labs LLC, based in Texas, United States, operates Ultimate Chess League and this website. In this policy, “we” refers to ZinKai Labs LLC. Contact us at [email protected] about your information.
This policy covers Ultimate Chess League. Other products operated by us have their own information practices; sharing a hosting provider does not make them part of this game's account system.
Information used by the game
- Accounts: your username, email address, account identifier and sign-in information. Passwords and their confirmation are sent securely when registering; the server stores a password hash. Sessions use access and refresh tokens. A guest account can also have a persistent identifier.
- Gameplay and social activity: game participants, moves, results, ratings, progression, selections, rewards, friend relationships, invitations and preset chat selections associated with moves. When you enter a username to send a challenge, we use it to find the intended player. The submitted name can appear in service logs, including unsuccessful attempts; successful invitation records include the participants’ usernames and account identifiers. Usernames and gameplay information may be shown to other players.
- Purchases: product and transaction identifiers, store receipts, account binding and entitlement records, including restore, refund and subscription information. Apple or Google handles store checkout. We do not receive your payment-card details through the game’s purchase request.
- Technical and security information: network addresses, request and session identifiers, device or software information where supplied, errors and service logs. Advertising providers may also collect device identifiers, approximate location derived from network addresses, ad interactions and diagnostic information.
- Support: your contact information and the information you choose to send when asking for help or exercising privacy rights. Please do not send passwords, authentication tokens or payment-card numbers.
Game saves, settings and caches can also remain on your device. Information that stays only on your device is different from information sent to us or a service provider.
Why information is used
We use account and gameplay information to provide the game, authenticate players, manage progress and friends, validate purchases, restore entitlements and answer support requests. We use security and technical information to operate and troubleshoot the service, prevent abuse and duplicate purchase redemption, and protect accounts.
Where applicable data-protection law requires a legal basis, providing the services you request relies on performance of our agreement with you; security and service reliability rely on legitimate interests, subject to your rights; compliance records rely on applicable legal obligations. Advertising tracking and device access that require permission must rely on the relevant consent. A store permission or acceptance of the Terms is not a substitute for that consent.
Advertising and choices
No ads are shown today. The game includes Google Mobile Ads, but we switch advertising on one region at a time, and no region is switched on yet. Until one is, nobody is shown an ad, an advertising consent or opt-out message, a privacy-options entry for advertising, or the age and region question described below. When advertising is switched on, the alpha is intended to use test ads. Neither a test ad nor advertising being switched off establishes that the advertising software sends no information. Google may process advertising/device identifiers, network-derived approximate location, ad activity and diagnostics for advertising, measurement and fraud prevention, depending on the platform and your choices.
Once advertising is switched on in a region, it works like this. The game first asks your age group and where you live. Your answer stays on your device and is not saved, so the game asks again after it restarts or the account changes. Ads go only to players who say they are 18 or older and live in a region where advertising is switched on; everyone else plays without ads. Where your consent is required before ads, as in the European Economic Area, Google’s consent tool, the User Messaging Platform, asks for it before any ad is requested. Wherever a way to opt out or to change your choice later is required, a “Privacy options” entry appears in the game’s settings. In the US states that give you a right to opt out, that entry is how you do it: it opens Google’s US-states message, which holds the opt-out choice, and that message is not shown before ads. Ads in this game are never personalized, whatever you choose.
On iPhone and iPad, Apple also asks whether the game may track you. If you choose Allow, Google uses your device’s advertising identifier to measure ad performance and to limit how often you see the same ad. If you choose Ask App Not to Track, if tracking is restricted on your device, or if you have not been asked, you are shown ads that do not use tracking instead, and a rewarded ad gives the same reward either way.
See Google’s privacy policy and how Google uses information from apps using its services.
Service providers and other recipients
DigitalOcean hosts the game service and this website. Database backups are also stored with Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare R2. Sentry can receive server error reports and related diagnostic context. Google and Apple process purchases on their respective stores. Google provides the advertising services described above and the consent tool that shows advertising choices, its User Messaging Platform. Unity's purchasing software, which runs inside the game, connects it with the Apple and Google stores, and Unity may receive diagnostic information from it.
Support messages pass through the email services used to deliver and handle them. Incoming mail to our support address is delivered by our domain registrar's forwarding service. For messages the game sends to you — such as confirming an account-deletion request made on the web — we have selected Amazon Web Services' Simple Email Service, operating in its Frankfurt region; it is designed not to keep the contents of those messages; we will confirm that under its data-processing terms before it is switched on. That sending capability is not yet in operation. We may disclose information when required by applicable law or when necessary to protect the service, users and legal rights.
Where information is processed
ZinKai Labs LLC is based in the United States. The game server is hosted in the United States. Information is processed in the United States, and our providers may process it elsewhere under their standard data-processing terms. We have not completed a transfer assessment; until we do, the game is offered in the European Union only for testing. We do not treat use of the game as blanket consent to international transfers.
Retention and account deletion
You can delete your account from inside the game, or ask us to delete it by email. Deleting from inside the game, including a guest account’s cancel button, has been built but has not yet been tested end to end against the live service; the email route does not depend on it and is open now. The account-deletion page describes the email route and the information we need in order to identify an account. You can also ask us for access to your information, or for a correction.
Deleting your account is reversible for 14 days
When you ask us to delete your account, we schedule the deletion for 14 days later and tell you the exact date and time, in UTC, at which it becomes permanent. Nothing is removed during those 14 days and the account keeps working normally. The waiting period is there so that an account deleted by mistake — or by someone who should not have had access to it — can be recovered. It is our own choice and not a legal requirement, and asking a second time does not shorten it.
Signing in again during those 14 days cancels the deletion and keeps the account. That is deliberate, and it is worth knowing before you do it: if you want the deletion to go ahead, do not sign in again. If you play as a guest there is no password to sign in with, so for a guest account the cancel is a button in the game's account settings instead.
When the 14 days are up the deletion runs automatically, as a single operation that either completes in full or leaves the account untouched to be retried. From that moment you can no longer sign in, and any session or live game connection you still had stops working immediately.
What deletion removes
We destroy your username, your email address, your password hash and the token that linked your account to store purchases. We remove the copies of your username and of the in-game names you chose wherever they were stored alongside games, moves, invitations and administrative records. Records that belong only to you are deleted outright: progress, campaign and tutorial history, daily challenges, statistics, ratings, experience, badges, inventory, cosmetic selections, friendships, friend and game invitations, notification settings and device registrations. Analytics events are disconnected from your account and from your device in the same operation.
Finished games, the moves in them and the match records built from them are kept, because they are also the record of the players you played against. They are kept without your name attached. Your account record itself cannot be removed, because those games and other records refer to it; it survives stripped of everything that identifies you.
What is kept, for how long, and why
Some records are kept for a stated period and a stated reason, and are then either deleted or permanently disconnected from your account. Most of that is done by a job that runs every night; analytics events are cleared by a weekly one, and log files and backups are aged out by the systems that hold them. Where a period below has no automatic deletion behind it, it says so:
- Sign-in sessions and their device and network details — 90 days after the session stops being usable, to investigate account compromise and abuse.
- Rewarded-ad verification records — 90 days, to resolve advertising-fraud disputes.
- Purchase notifications from Apple and Google — 90 days once we have finished processing them, so that a payment notification can be replayed if something goes wrong. One we have not been able to settle is kept until we have.
- Purchases and subscriptions — the link to your account is removed at most 24 months after your deletion becomes permanent, and sooner if the record itself has been untouched that long. 24 months is our choice; it comfortably covers the card networks' chargeback and dispute windows, the longest of which is 540 days. Removing the link takes your account identifier off that record; it does not delete the record. The financial record itself — what was bought, when, at what price, and the store's transaction identifiers — is kept for no more than 7 years. That is a ceiling we hold ourselves to rather than a schedule: nothing deletes those records automatically when it is reached. We set that ceiling ourselves, and we do not claim here that any law requires it. Which business record-keeping rules apply to a company like ours, and whether any of them reaches one player's purchase record, are questions we have not settled and are not answering here. We will settle them before the game operates in the European Union other than for testing, and this page will say what we conclude.
- Moderation and abuse cases — 2 years, to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, after which the case and its history are permanently disconnected from your account. A case that is still open, still under appeal, or still carrying a restriction that has not expired stays connected until it is finished.
- Analytics events — deleted 90 days after they were recorded, by a weekly cleanup. Your account and device identifiers are removed from them when you delete, rather than waiting for that.
- Service logs — 30 days. Error reports sent to our error-reporting provider — 30 days.
- Database backups — up to 15 days on our own server and up to about 12 months in off-site backup storage. If we ever restore a backup, your deletion is applied again to the restored copy before it is returned to service.
The error-report and backup periods above are the periods we have set. We have not yet checked the retention settings that our error-reporting, hosting and backup providers apply to their own copies. Support messages, including the copies in our mailbox, are kept for as long as we need them to handle your request and to show that we handled it; we have not yet set a fixed period.
Three kinds of record keep the account identifier after everything else is gone: the ledger of what was granted to an account and revoked from it; anti-fraud evidence — the material that makes it possible to reverse rewards obtained by cheating; and the record of administrative actions taken on an account. None of the three is on a clock. The first two are deliberately not placed on one, because their value is precisely that they outlive the account that abused the game; and nothing removes the account identifier from the third either, so it keeps it for as long as the record itself is kept. One kind of administrative record is the record of a deletion request: when you ask us by email and a person carries it out, we write one record when we accept the request and another when we carry it out, as proof that we handled it. Deleting the account from inside the game writes no such record. That does not make it traceless, and what it does leave is covered by periods stated above: the request and the deletion are each named, with the account, in a dated line in our service logs, which are kept for 30 days; anything the account still held is revoked, and the revoking is written to the ledger named at the start of this paragraph, which is on no clock; and your sign-in sessions are closed, their rows kept for 90 days. Your own account record keeps the date of the deletion and by then holds nothing that identifies you. None of the three holds your name, your email address or any other way of contacting you: the copy of your username stored alongside an administrative record is removed when the account is deleted. That includes the two records of an email request: the username on the first is removed when the deletion runs, the second is written without it, and the only note either keeps of how we established the account was yours is the fixed words “operator-attested”.
What that leaves is an account record with nothing in it that identifies you, pointed at by anonymised games and by the three kinds of record above. One connection outlives all of it. If you ever bought anything, the ledger keeps a reference to the store transaction on the same row as the account identifier, and nothing removes that reference: the 24-month period above takes your account identifier off the purchase record, but it does not reach the ledger. We hold nothing that turns that reference back into a person — the store that took the payment does. We would rather say this plainly than describe what is left as anonymous, because it is not.
Deleting a game account does not cancel a store subscription. If you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play you must cancel it there, or you will keep being charged. Refund requests go through the same store. Removing the app from a device is not an account-deletion request, and deleting your account does not by itself remove game files from your device.
Your rights and requests
To hold an online account you need to give a username, an email address and a password; without them you can still play as a guest. Depending on where you live and the law that applies, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or obtain a copy of your information, object to or restrict some processing, withdraw consent, or opt out of certain advertising-related uses. You can object at any time to processing we base on our legitimate interests. Contact [email protected] with your request. We need to verify the account before disclosing information or acting on a deletion request. We will not ask you to email your password.
Where applicable, you may complain to your local data-protection authority. Withdrawal of consent does not change the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal. We respond within one month, extendable where the law allows. If we decline a request, you can appeal by replying to our decision, and we answer appeals within 60 days.
Age and children
Ultimate Chess League is intended for players aged 13 and over and is not directed to children under 13. A 13+ audience selection does not verify a player’s age or satisfy every region’s consent rules. Registration does not ask for a date of birth. Once advertising is switched on in your region, the game asks your age group and where you live before any ad, as described under Advertising and choices. That answer stays on your device and is not saved. If you say you are under 13, ads stay off and a new online account cannot be created, and you can still play. The question is not an age check, and we do not offer a parental-consent service. If you believe a child has supplied personal information improperly, contact us using the details above.
This website
These pages contain no advertising scripts, analytics scripts, embedded third-party media, web forms or cookies set by our page code. The hosting and network services still process information needed to deliver and secure requests, such as network addresses and requested URLs. Those logs are kept by our hosting provider under its own settings, which we have not yet checked. Choosing an email link uses the relevant application on your device.
Changes and contact
When this policy changes, we will identify the updated version and effective date and provide additional notice where required. For privacy or account help: ZinKai Labs LLC, Texas, United States; [email protected].