SparkChess Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting your personal information. We want our services to be safe and enjoyable environments for everyone. This page aims to help you to understand what information we might collect about you and how we use it.

Table of Contents

1. What information we collect and why
2. Information collected automatically
3. How we use the collected information
4. How we share the information with Third-Parties
5. Security of information
6. Your rights
7. Information and children
8. Cookies
9. Manage consent
10. California Consumer Privacy Act

What information we collect and why

We collect only the minimum amount of information needed to fulfill our contractual obligations to our customers and users, to protect their vital interests and for the legitimate interests to operate the services.

• On the website, if you post a comment to an article or if you contact us through the contact form, we collect your name, email, IP address and the name of your browser, to provide support. They are only used to respond to you and for no other purpose.
• For purchases, we collect name (optional, when using PayPal), email, IP address, and country of residence. Email is used to send customers a download link and to inform them of upgrades. Name is used for addressing only. IP is used for fraud prevention. We do not collect, transmit or store credit card information on our systems. We also optionally collect billing address, if the customer provides one for invoicing.
• For Premium Live, we collect just the email address (used for login) and IP address to prevent abuses.
• Within the multiplayer service we collect the username, IP address and email address which is used for password recovery.

Information collected automatically

Some non-personally-identifying information is collected automatically in the course of your accessing of the website and services in the form of an access log. This includes your browser, operating system, IP address, network type, page loading time, and referral URL. This is needed to optimize visitors’ experience on the website.

How we use the collected information

As a company registered within the European Union, we collect and process the information about you only when we have a legal basis for doing so, meaning under either of the following circumstances:

• We need it in order to provide you the services, including access to the public website, log in to Premium Live and Multiplayer service, process your purchases and provide customer support.
• It satisfies a legitimate interest, such as  to protect our legal rights and obligations, to monitor and improve quality of service and to prevent and mitigate security issues and Terms of Service violations.
• You give us consent to do so for a specific purpose.
• We need to process your data to comply with a legal obligation.

We use non-personally identifiable information that we collect to improve the design and content of our site, to personalize our visitors’ experience or to offer products, programs, and services. We may also use this information in the aggregate to analyze site usage, as well as to offer products, programs, or services. We do not use the information to create profiles or to uniquely identify and track users.

We use the information you provide to log you in, provide customer support and process transactions. We use your name and email address to confirm purchases, inform you about important product upgrades, to resolve account issues, to log you in and to provide customer support. We do not send periodic newsletters.

We use IP addresses and country of residence to calculate taxes, to prevent fraud, identify service violations and for multiplayer matchmaking.

How we share the information with Third-Parties

We do not disclose personally identifiable information to third parties with the exception of BrainTree, our payment processor, which receives your email address and your IP, along with your credit/debit card information and MailChimp, our mail processor, which sends important upgrade emails only (not newsletters) to our customers on our behalf. Both of them are only data processors – they do not control your information.

We use Google for anonymous visitor statistics and to serve ads when you visit our Web site. Google and SparkChess may use information (not including personally identifiable information) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements on this site and other sites about goods and services that may be of interest to you.

We use a third-party to provide monetization technologies for our site. You can review their privacy and cookie policy.

Security of information

Our hosting provider (Digital Ocean) and Content Delivery Network (CloudFlare) are GDPR-compliant.

All data we collect is transmitted protected via SSL encryption.

We have implemented procedures to safeguard and help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data security, and correctly use the information we collect. However, no security system is impenetrable and due to the inherent nature of the Internet, we cannot guarantee that data while stored on our system or otherwise in our care, is absolutely safe from intrusion by others.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us what personally-identifiable information we have about you and to ask us to delete or modify this information. You must submit a request for this.

Information and children

We have additional safeguards for users who identify themselves as children under 16 years old. If you are under 16, please make sure you have consent from you parent or legal guardian before using SparkChess. We do not ask for childrens’ email addresses when using the multiplayer service.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that store user preferences about a site. We use cookies to store your settings and preferences. Here are the types of cookies we use:

• Preferences – we store your site and game settings and preferences,  for example the current state of the game, or if you have already purchased SparkChess.
• Anonymous analytics – we use Google Analytics to analyze metrics like the number of daily visitors and technical information about their browsers, in order to improve the website. We do not collect personal information.
• Third party advertising cookies – we use Google AdSense to serve ads, which are vital for us in order to be able to continue operating the site. Google has their own privacy policies, and we have no access to read or write these cookies. Google may use their cookies to anonymously target advertising to you on other websites, based on your visit. You can tailor the use of cookies in ads through the Digital Advertising Alliance in the US, the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada in Canada, or the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe.

Manage consent

You can change your privacy settings by clicking the following button:

California Consumer Privacy Act

This Privacy Notice for California Residents supplements the information contained in our general privacy policy and applies solely to visitors, users, and others who reside in the State of California (“consumers” or “you”). We adopt this notice to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) and any terms defined in the CCPA have the same meaning when used in this notice.

Information We Collect: We collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or device (“personal information”). Please refer to our general privacy policy for details on the types of personal information we collect.

Use of Personal Information: We may use or disclose the personal information we collect for the business purposes disclosed in our general privacy policy. We will not collect additional categories of personal information or use the personal information we collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes without providing you notice.

Your Rights Under CCPA:

• Right to Know: You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past 12 months.
• Right to opt-out: Use the link in the footer “Do not share my personal information” to opt-out from your information being used by ads.
• Right to Delete: You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions.

Exercising Your Rights: To exercise your rights under CCPA, please contact us. We will respond to your verifiable request within 5 days, unless we need more time, in which case we will notify you of the extension period.

Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights. Unless permitted by the CCPA, we will not:

• Deny you goods or services.
• Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or other benefits.
• Provide you a different level or quality of goods or services.