Welcome to Chess Max Academy!
This Privacy Policy (“Policy“) outlines how Chess Max Academy collects, uses, protects, and discloses personal information obtained from anyone who uses our Services (“Users“), anyone who creates an account on the Chess Max Academy online school website or any related content, features, mobile and web applications and other services (collectively the “Services“) which are brought to you by Chess Max Academy and its affiliate companies.
This Policy addresses requirements in the New York Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the New York Privacy Rights Act (“NYPA“), as well as any other applicable international, national, and state requirements related to data collection, usage practices, and disclosures.
Please read this Policy closely. By using the Services, you agree to the handling of your information in accordance with this Policy. If you provide us with your information (directly or indirectly through our service providers) we will treat your information according to this Policy. If we need to use your Personal Information for any other purpose, other than as disclosed herein, we will update this Policy or ask for your previous consent, if necessary.
Summary of Key Points
We encourage you to read this entire Policy and our Terms of Service, but here are some key points that may be of your interest:
Personal Information (“PI“) means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.
During registration, we may ask you to provide an email address, a username and if registration with a telephone number is available in your country, we will ask you to provide a telephone number.
We will never ask you to provide us with sensitive PI.
Paying Users are asked for payment information when they purchase anything from our Services. Please see Section “Information Collection“ for more information about how we safeguard payment information.
Because the security of your PI is important to us, we only ask for PI where it serves a business purpose and try to limit the collection of PI to only what is necessary to accomplish those purposes. We also use commercially reasonable physical, technical, and administrative security measures designed to safeguard all information collected by the Services.
Table of Contents
1. Definitions
2. Children’s Privacy
3. Information Collection
4. How We Use Information
5. When We Disclose Information to Third Parties
6. How to Exercise your Right to Access, Change or Correct your Information
7. How to Exercise your Rights to Cancel and Delete your Account and How to Request
Reactivation
8. New York Privacy Rights Act (NYPA)
9. Links to Other Services
10. Location of Information Processing
11. Security
12. Changes to Our Privacy Policy
13. Contact Us
14. Chess Play & Learn (Arcade Version)
1. Definitions
GDPR
GDPR collectively refers to the European Union (“EU“) and the United Kingdom (“UK“)
General Data Protection Regulations.
Personal Data
Personal Data, as that term is defined in the GDPR, means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. An identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person. Personal Data and Personal Information will be used as synonyms for the purposes of this Policy.
Usage Data
Usage Data is data collected automatically either generated by the use of the Service or from the Service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit). Usage Data may include pseudonymous data where applicable.
Cookies
Cookies and/ or similar technologies (collectively referred to as “Cookies“): are small pieces of data stored on your device (computer or mobile device).
Data Controller
Data Controller: means the natural or legal person who (either alone or jointly or in common with other persons) determines the purposes for which and the manner in which any PI is, or is to be, processed. For the purpose of this Policy, we are a Data Controller of your Personal Data.
Data Processors
Data Processors: means any natural or legal person who processes the data on behalf of the Data Controller and follow their instructions, normally it refers to our service providers. We use the services of various Data Processors in order to process your data more effectively.
Data Subject
Data Subject is any living individual whose Personal Data we process.
2. Children’s Privacy
Chess Max Academy is not targeted towards minors, meaning a person under the minimum age required to consent to the processing of their personal information as determined by applicable laws in their state or country of residence.
3. Information Collection
There are two general categories of information that we collect.
A. Information Users Provide to Us
As more fully set forth below, we and our third-party service providers collect information that Users provide when using the Services, including when Users create an Account, sign up for Services, or contact us with a question, comment, or request.
To register an Account, Users are assigned a user name and a password, which they can later change, an email address, and/or telephone number (which is optional if you choose to register with an email).
There is also other information provided that depends on the type of Account. For example:
Payment information such as credit or debit card information and billing address is collected from Users who purchase a group class or a private lesson, including those who gift a paid service such as a gift card or a lesson to others. For your convenience for recurring services, we do store your credit card number in our databases but we and our payment service providers may retain only the first six digits and/or last four digits to identify your Account and respond to your requests and questions and to process the payment.
When you contact us directly by any means we will collect your email address, name
and any information you provide.
B. Information We Collect from Users
We and our third-party service providers collect PI directly from Users of the Services in the form of the actions they take and activities they complete when using the Services. For example, from all Users, we may collect information about patterns of usage and order history.
We and our third-party service providers also use a variety of technologies, such as Cookies, to automatically collect certain technical information from your computer or mobile device over time and across different websites.
We and our third-party service providers may use the information collected through these technical methods for several purposes, including delivering content, tracking and enhancing our Users' experience with the Services, and delivering advertising to visitors of our Services when they visit other websites and applications. For example, when you return to the Services after logging in, Cookies help the Services recognize who you are without having to log back in. More information about the use of Cookies is set forth below.
We collect several different types of information for various purposes to provide and improve our Service to you.
Types of Data Collected
1. PI
While using our Service, we may collect certain PI. PI may include but is not limited to:
Required Information (First and Last name, Age of the student, address, phone number, email address, as applicable)
Optional Information (School Name, allergies, OTB rating, and any other information the User chooses to share in the Quiz form and/or registration form.
We may use your PI to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information that may be of interest to you, we will ask for your previous consent, if that is required by the applicable legislation. You may opt out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or instructions provided in any email we send, by changing your notification settings in your profile or by contacting us.
If you use our App for the Apple or Android platform, we may ask, with your permission, to collect your contact list information (including email addresses and phone numbers) to share with Apple or Google for the exclusive purpose of finding your friends and connections.
2. Cookies Data
We use Cookies to provide you with the Services, to track the activity on our Service and to hold certain information. We use the following types of Cookies to recognize your device and to provide and improve our Services:
Essential Cookies
These Cookies are essential to provide you with services available through the Services and enable you to use some of its features. For example, they allow you to log in to secure areas of our Services and help the content of pages you request load quickly. Without these Cookies, the Services that you have asked for cannot be provided, and we only use these Cookies to provide you with those Services. You may not disable these types of Cookies.
Functionality Cookies
These Cookies allow us to remember choices you make when you use our Services, such as remembering your language preferences, remembering your login details, and remembering the changes you make to other parts of Services which you can customize. The purpose of these Cookies is to provide you with a more personal experience and to avoid you having to reenter your preferences every time you visit our Services.
Analytics and Performance Cookies
These Cookies are used to collect information about traffic to our Services and how Users use the Services. It includes the number of visitors to our Services, the websites that referred them to our Services, the pages they visited on our Services, what time of day they visited our Services, whether they have visited our Services before, and other similar information. We use this information to help operate our Services more efficiently, to gather broad demographic information, and to monitor the level of activity on our Services.
Social Media Cookies
These Cookies are used when you share information using a social media sharing button or “like“ button on our Services or engage with our content on or through a social networking website such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and also if you choose to sign up using your social media account. These cookies are also placed on your browser if you access to a section of our Services that provides you with embedded videos from YouTube, Twitch or other third-party websites. Some of these cookies may be considered essential if you log in using your social media account.
Marketing Cookies
Marketing Cookies are used to serve you with advertisements that may be relevant to you and your interests. Third parties might use information gathered by cookies and/or web beacons for the purpose of online behavioral advertising. The types of information that is gathered by third party cookies and/or web beacons as well as the purpose(s) for which this information is used, are set out in the privacy policy of said third parties which we encourage you to review. Chess.com declines all and any liability for any third party cookies or web beacons deployed by third parties for whatever purpose.
Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our Service. Google's use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our Service or other websites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick Cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting the Google Ads Settings web page: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences.
Depending on your country of residence, you may allow or reject the use of non- essential Cookies when using our Services by changing your Cookie preferences here. However, please note that if you reject or block certain categories of Cookies from the Services, the Services may not function as intended. For example, you will not be able to remain logged into your Account, and therefore you would have to log in during each page transition.
You may also opt out of the use of cookies by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at http://www.privacychoice.org/companies or http://www.aboutads.info/choices.
To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit www.networkadvertising.org.
4. How We Use Information
We and our third-party service providers may use the information collected from Users
as follows:
To permit you to register and use the Services, including, for example, to send you communications about your Account, or to allow you to provide feedback through the Support or Contact Us Sections. (Lawful Basis: to comply with our legal obligations and performance of our contract with you)
To complete and fulfill your purchase, such as to process your payments, communicate with you regarding your purchase, and provide you with related customer service. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, to comply with our legal obligations and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To respond to your inquiries and fulfill your requests, retrieve your password, or provide technical support. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, to comply with our legal obligations and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To provide you with information, newsletters, marketing communications, publications and other communication via various mediums to keep you informed (Lawful Basis: your consent, performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To deliver our advertising to you based on your visits to the Services. (Lawful Basis: your consent and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To measure the effectiveness of our advertising. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To allow us to assess and improve the Services, its educational content, and other services we provide (for example, to improve our content and User experience); to research, evaluate, and improve the educational efficacy of the Services; and to inform our understanding of the Services' User base. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To verify your identity or conduct appropriate checks for fraud prevention and detection (Lawful Basis: to comply with our legal obligations and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To customize, adapt, and personalize Users' viewing and content-consumption experience. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, your consent and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To maintain and analyze the functioning of the Services. (Lawful Basis: necessary for our legitimate interests)
To manage and conduct our business (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
As we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) to comply with applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public and governmental authorities, including authorities outside your country of residence; (d) to detect violations of and enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations or those of any of our affiliates, including the security of the Services; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety, or property, or that of our affiliates, you, or others; and (g) to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain (collectively, (a)-(g) are Other Uses and Disclosures). (Lawful Basis: to comply with our legal obligations and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To send you push notifications, SMS, alerts and or other types of notifications on your mobile device. You may choose to stop receiving push notifications at any time by changing the settings on your mobile device. If you provide us with your mobile phone number, we may send you SMS text messages about your account with your previous consent if required by law. Please note that your carrier may charge you for the text messages you receive. To permanently stop receiving SMS text messages from us (if you are located in the U.S. or Canada) text STOP, CANCEL, or UNSUBSCRIBE in reply to any SMS text message sent by us. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, to comply with our legal obligations and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To research and develop new products and services (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To publish your name in case you are the winner of a contest, sweepstake, tournament or events in general. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, your consent and necessary for our legitimate interests)
For administrative purposes (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To conduct our competitive events and to prevent, detect and investigate violations of our Fair Play Policy, Competitive Events Policy and the rules of any event organized by us. (Lawful Basis: performance of our contract with you, to comply with our legal obligations, your consent and necessary for our legitimate interests)
To carry out any other purpose described to you at the time the information was collected.
5. When We Disclose Information to Third Parties
Information collected from Users will not be disclosed except for the following purposes, which include our operations purposes:
To service providers such as payment processors, financial institutions, technological, analytical, marketing, advertising service providers and partners and third party professional advisors (i.e., auditors, law firms, etc.), provided that, the service providers agree to keep the information confidential.
To our affiliates and business partners and their employees for business purposes, when necessary for the purpose of the provision of our services or when such affiliates provide services to us.
As needed to conduct our competitive events and to prevent, detect and investigate violations of our Fair Play Policy, Competitive Events Policy and the rules of any competitive event organized by us.
As we believe to be necessary or appropriate as set forth above in Other Uses and Disclosures.
With government bodies and law enforcement or where we believe that disclosure is in accordance with, or required by, any applicable law or legal process, including lawful requests by public authorities to meet national security or law enforcement requirements. If required or permitted to do so under the law, and if deemed necessary or warranted, we may provide notice to Users prior to the disclosure.
Subject to confidentiality agreements, the terms of this Policy, and applicable law, information may be disclosed to service providers, advisers, potential transactional partners, or other third parties in connection with the consideration, negotiation, or completion of a corporate transaction in which we or any of our affiliates are acquired by or merged with another company, or we sell, liquidate, transfer, or license all or a portion of our assets in bankruptcy or otherwise. This means that if some or all our assets are acquired or otherwise transferred or licensed, including in bankruptcy, that such acquirer shall be subject to the same commitments stated under this Policy.
We may use third-party advertising networks and other affiliates in association with cookies, pixel tags, I Frames or similar technologies to: (1) deliver interest-based advertising to those Users, including our advertising, when those Users visit third-party websites; and (2) provide us with statistics about the effectiveness of our advertising on third-party websites. These third-party advertising networks may use this cookie information in accordance with their own privacy policies.
To a third-party that uses or supports referral links to our Services only if you click on a referral link.
Any third-party where such disclosure is required in order to enforce or apply our Terms of Service or other relevant agreements.
Any third-party if necessary to protect the rights, property, integrity or security of our company, our customers, or others (including, without limitation, you).
For service efficiency purposes, some of these affiliates and third parties are located in territories outside the EU/EEA, and from time to time we may transfer your personal data to a third country not being approved by the European Commission as a safe country for such transfer (adequacy decision). If you are a EU/EEA resident and whenever applicable we will use the Standard Contractual Clauses to ensure an equivalent level of protection as granted within the EU/EEA or other lawful grounds for carrying out said transfer.
6. How to Exercise your Right to Access, Change or Correct your Information
Any User can review or change the information they provided when they registered for the Services by updating the information on their Account profile or by contacting us at office@chessmaxacademy.com. In addition, Users may contact us at any time as described in Section “Contact Us“ below, to request that we provide for their review any PI they have provided, or to cease collecting PI from the User.
When we change any PI at your request, we will make reasonable efforts to make the changes in our then-active databases as soon as reasonably practicable and always within the applicable legal term. Changing setting options may not result in immediate changes to the settings, which are subject to our operations and maintenance schedules.
7. How to Exercise your Rights to Cancel and Delete your Account and How to Request Reactivation
Users may cancel your Accounts at any time sending us an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com requesting cancellation of all services and removal of all data.
Please bear in mind that after an Account is canceled, the PI and other Account information is not deleted permanently. We will delete the credit card information, but will store the other User information to allow the User to reopen their Account at any time. However, we provide no guarantee, and shall have no liability or obligation to ensure, that all Account Information and Services-related progress will be available or accessible or all learning or personalization features will be able to be recovered or resumed.
Upon Account cancellation or execution of a deletion request (as explained below), anonymized User information may nonetheless persist internally in our backup, archive files or similar databases, and may still be used anonymized, for our internal support, administrative, and record-keeping purposes including, but not limited to, allowing us to improve the Services and other services we provide through research, evaluation, and analytics as permissible by applicable law and for other purposes specifically outlined in this Policy. We may also keep certain information in backup or archive records if required by law or if it is relevant to preventing fraud or future violations of our policies or for legitimate business purposes when permitted by applicable law. All retained data will continue to be subject to our Policy in effect at that time
Following cancellation of an Account, to reactivate your Account and potentially recover previous information and resume where the relevant User left off you will need to request it to office@chessmaxacademy.com
8. New York Privacy Rights (NYPA)
This Section supplements the information contained in our Policy and applies solely to Users who reside in the State of New York. We adopt this notice to comply with the NYPA. Any terms used in this Section have the same meaning as defined in the NYPA. Please note that we may claim legal exemptions for certain types of PI and certain of our Services from all or certain parts of the NYPA.
The NYPA provides New York residents with specific rights regarding their PI. This section describes your NYPA rights and explains how to exercise those rights. In this section “you“ or “your“ refers to California residents. Under the NYPA, we are required to disclose the categories of sources from whom we collect PI, and the third parties with whom we share it — which we already have explained above in Section “Information Collection“, Section “How We Use Information“, and Section “When We Disclose Information to Third Parties“.
Only you as a New York resident or a person registered with the New York Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable consumer request related to your PI.
The verifiable consumer request must:
Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected PI or an authorized representative. We will verify your request by asking you to provide information related to your interactions with us. We will not otherwise ask for PI from you that we would not otherwise maintain as part of us providing our Services.
Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.
We cannot respond to your request or provide you with PI if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the PI relates to you. Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an Account with us. We will only use PI provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor’s identity or authority to make the request.
To exercise your rights you can always request it to us by sending an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com or by following the steps described below:
Right to access PI. You may be entitled to receive information regarding the categories of PI we collected, the sources from which we collected PI, the purposes for which we collected and shared PI, the categories of PI that we share and the categories of third parties to whom the PI was shared with, and the categories of PI that we disclosed for a business purpose in the last 12 months. You can exercise this right by sending us an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com
Right to data portability. You may be entitled to receive a copy of your electronic PI in a readily usable format so you can transmit this data to another organization. You may only make a verifiable consumer request for access or data portability twice within a 12-month period. You can exercise this right by requesting it by sending us an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com.
Right to Correct. You have the right to request that we correct inaccurate PI that we maintain about you. You are also able to correct any inaccurate PI manually by sending us an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com
Right to deletion. You may be entitled to request that we delete the PI that we have collected from you. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to honor your request, in compliance with applicable laws. Please note, however, that we may need or be required to keep such information for our legitimate business purposes or to comply with applicable law. To know how to exercise your right to deletion, please refer to the section titled: “Account Cancellation and Reactivation; Data Deletion“ from this Policy.
Right to opt-out of certain sharing with third parties. We do not sell your personal information to third-parties. We only disclose certain information to our service providers when it is necessary to fulfill our business purposes and in accordance with this Policy.
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.
Even though we do not share your information in exchange for compensation, if you are a New York resident, you have the right to request us to not disclose your PI to third parties for monetary or other valuable consideration.
You can exercise such right to opt-out by sending an email to office@chessmaxacademy.com
9. Links to Other Services
In certain sections of our Services, we may include links to third-party websites or applications (for example, Facebook and Twitter). These websites and applications are governed by their own privacy policies or information collection practices, which may be substantially different from ours. We do not guarantee and are not responsible for the privacy or security of these websites, including the accuracy, completeness or reliability of information found on these websites. If you follow links to websites not affiliated or controlled by us, we encourage you to review the privacy policies and information collection practices of any external websites and apps, as those parties’ practices would not be subject to this Policy.
10. Location of Information Processing
Our Services are controlled and operated by us from the United States. Your information may be stored and processed in any country where we have facilities or in which we engage service providers, including the United States, which may have data protection laws that are different from those of your country. In addition, your information may be subject to access requests from governments, courts, or law enforcement officials in countries where it may be processed, under the laws of those countries.
11. Security
The security of your PI is important to us, and we employ physical, technical, and administrative security measures designed to safeguard the information collected by the Services. We use industry standard SSL (secure socket layer technology) encryption to transfer PI. Other security safeguards include, but are not limited to, data encryption, firewalls, and physical access controls to buildings and files. We also conduct periodic audits of our security (no less than annually) to apply best practices and reasonable industry standards. However, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. If there is a breach of our security, we will notify you where required by law or deemed necessary and appropriate under the circumstances.
Account holders create a password in the registration process. You can help protect against unauthorized access to your Account and PI by selecting and protecting your password appropriately and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your Account. At registration, we assign a Member ID to each Account and use those Member IDs to authenticate logins, allow access to the subscription content, and monitor compliance. The Member ID is also used to authenticate users when requesting technical support. Access to information is limited (through user/password credentials and two-factor authentication) to those employees who require it to perform their job functions.
Some of the precautions we take to protect PI includes: (a) limiting employee access to PI to only those employees with a need to such access to fulfill their job responsibilities; (b) conducting background checks on our employees and, specifically, upon all employees that may have access to PI; (c) requiring employees to sign confidentiality agreements upon hiring; (d) conducting regular employee privacy and data security training and education; and (e) protecting PI with commercially reasonable technical, contractual, administrative, and physical security safeguards.
Please be aware, however, that no information system can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure, so we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your information. Moreover, we are not responsible for the security of information you transmit to the Services over networks that we do not control, including the internet and wireless networks. If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is not secure, please contact us as described in Section “Contact Us“ below.
12. Changes to Our Privacy Policy
We constantly try to provide the best services, and accordingly our Policy will change from time to time. If we substantially update this Policy, we will notify you by posting the revised Policy on our Services, and for certain revisions that materially expand the ways in which we use or share the information previously collected from you through the Services, either display an alert next to the Policy, display an alert upon login to the Services, or directly communicate with you (e.g. via our messaging service or the email address associated with your Account).
13. Contact Us
Chess Max Academy is in the United States of America and we are the operator for all our Services. You may contact us at office@chessmaxacademy.com if you have any questions, complaints, or other issues related to this Policy and issues related to your information.
For all Accounts
Mailing address:
Chess Max Academy
110 West 79 th Street, New York, NY 10024
Maxim Dlugy
email: office@chessmaxacademy.com
14. Chess Max Academy (Arcade Version)
This Section contains the provisions that only apply specifically to our mobile application known as Chess Max Academy (Arcade Version) (the “App“). This section is intended to complement the Policy above and it does not apply to our Sites or other Services.
Data Collection and Use
The App collects non-identifiable gameplay data to send to Apple iCloud, specifically to record a User’s progress (win record) vs. the App’s built-in roster of computer opponents. We do not store any of this data, but it is sent to Apple services (iCloud and Game Center) for storage and use.