Privacy

Last updated 28 September 2026.

Kibitzr is a small chess coaching site. It is run by Michael O'Kelly of Nashua, New Hampshire, in the United States. This page says what we store about you, who else gets to see it, and how to get a copy or have it deleted. If anything here is unclear, write to [email protected] and ask.

Security concerns can be sent to [email protected]; we read every report and do not run a bounty program.

What we store

• Who you are. You sign in with Google, and we keep what it tells us: your email address. If you link a Lichess account, we keep your Lichess username. If you add a photo, members of your ladders can see it.
• Guess Your Elo. The positions you were shown, the moves you picked and the rating we read back.
• Ladders. If your club runs a ladder here: your membership, your rating and results, your challenges and disputes, your availability, and a record of the emails we sent you. Clubs may ask you a few questions when you join a ladder. Your answers are shown to that club's organizers, and the club can choose to show one on its standings, either to its own members or to anybody with the link. The ladder says which, next to the question, before you answer it.
• Ordinary web records. Your browser sends an IP address with every request. It goes into our server logs and into the Guess Your Elo event log, and we keep it to spot abuse.

Your browser also keeps your own settings on your device: board size, panel layout, which tips you have dismissed, the last game you looked at. That never reaches us.

Who else touches it

• Cloudflare sits in front of the site and sees every request. Our nightly database backups are stored in Cloudflare R2.
• PostHog receives crash reports and page views. Their servers are in the United States.
• Resend sends our email, so they see the address and the message.
• Google handles sign-in. It tells us who you are; we never see your password. Lichess tells us your username if you link your Lichess account.
• Anthropic runs the model that writes the coaching comments. It receives board positions, lists of moves and a rating estimate. It gets no name, no username, no email address and no link to the game.

Analytics and cookies

Analytics events carry a random account id rather than your name, your username or your email address. That id is the only one we send to PostHog, and it is the same id whether the event comes from your browser, from the web server or from the chess engine. Nothing about you went into making it, so nothing about you can be read out of it. When you close your account we delete your account id, so the events already at PostHog can no longer be tied back to your account.

Signing in sets a session cookie and a CSRF cookie, and the site does not work without them. PostHog sets one more cookie, which is how it recognizes the same browser on a later visit. We run no advertising, and we do not sell or share your data with advertisers.

If a club invited you and you have not signed in

Club ladders run on invitations. If an organizer invited you by email and you never signed in, what we hold is the address they typed, the invitation itself, and a record of the emails we sent to it. Reply to any of those emails, or write to [email protected], and we will delete the address and stop writing to you. You do not need an account to ask.

How long we keep it

While your account is open, we keep it. When you ask us to close it, we take your name off it. Backups are kept on a rolling fortnightly cycle, so a copy can survive there for about two weeks longer and is then overwritten. Ladder results stay in the club's standings history, because they are the club's record as much as yours, but we can take your name off them.

Getting a copy, or getting rid of it

Write to [email protected]. Ask for a copy of your data and we will send you one. Ask us to close your account and we will take your name off it and cut the tie to everything we hold. Either way you get an answer within 30 days.

Age

Kibitzr is for people aged 13 and over. Younger players can take part when a parent, guardian or the club organizer looks after their account.

Changes

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.