LEGAL
Privacy Policy
Last updated October 29, 2026 · plain-language summary.
Bright Moves is built private-by-default. Every visibility and data-sharing switch starts off — you opt in only to what you want.
Optional phone alerts — controlled adult test
Phone-alert notice updated October 30, 2026.
Bright Moves is an unincorporated pre-release venture owned by Arnav; Karthi acts as manager. Privacy and removal questions: legal at algebrics.com.
Your choice
Alerts cover a direct game invitation and a game ready to join. You can play and use the inbox without them. Choosing Not now does not create a phone-alert provider identifier or register this phone. Enable alerts and the separate phone permission are deliberate choices; existing account and test eligibility still apply.
What the delivery services receive
On Android, Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging and Firebase Installations process an installation identifier and delivery address, necessary app/project information, network and service metadata, and the generic alert text and expiry or a short-lived enrollment verification message.
On iPhone, Apple’s push notification service (APNs) processes the delivery address, necessary app/topic/environment and network/service metadata, and generic alert or enrollment verification data. This iPhone path does not use Firebase.
These delivery messages contain no player names, account or game IDs, results, AI conversations or free text. Phone-alert processing does not add analytics, advertising or opening-tracking. Technical identifiers and metadata are not anonymous data. Provider retention follows the applicable service terms; this notice makes no data-residency promise.
What Bright Moves keeps
- One current binding for each enabled phone links the recipient to its installation/binding key, delivery address, platform/app identity and current enabled version. Known revocations remove that association when acknowledged; stale addresses have an upper limit of 180 days, not a reason to keep a known-invalid address.
- We keep your current alert choices, pause, explicit alert time zone and preference version. Changes replace the old choices; there is no travel or time-zone history. Account erasure removes these account preferences. This phone separately remembers a current choice to keep alerts off, without an account identifier or history. That choice remains until you explicitly enable alerts again; it does not expire or switch on when cleanup finishes.
- Enrollment verification state lasts at most 120 seconds and is removed on completion, refusal, revocation or expiry. Temporary foreground, protected-play and inbox flags expire within 120 seconds; updates overwrite them rather than record your activity.
- Delivery intents and bounded attempts last only while the invitation/game update is useful, plus the limited time needed to finish an in-flight call or lease. Personal/source links are removed after completion, suppression or expiry and that bounded cleanup. We do not keep an alert-event ledger or track which alerts you open.
- Contentless rate-limit counters identify the recipient, actor, channel and counter time, without an event, game, delivery address or message. They are purged after 25 hours and removed on account erasure.
- Separate encrypted removal-only authority lets this phone revoke its matching server binding without keeping sign-in or refresh credentials. It has no login or account-reading power and is kept only while needed to finish that removal.
Pause, turn off and shared phones
Pause keeps the setup for later: one hour, tomorrow at 08:00 in your alert time zone, or until you resume. Turn off alerts withdraws phone-alert processing consent, stops new submissions and starts binding/provider cleanup. This phone remembers that alerts are off until you choose to enable them again. Completing cleanup does not switch them on. Enabling again asks for your consent again. An alert already accepted by a provider may still arrive. Ordinary sign-out unregisters the existing setup; it is not a claim of provider erasure.
Generic alerts may still appear while a shared phone is PIN-locked. They show no player identity; opening them requires sign-in or a PIN and opens only the current account’s inbox. This lock retains no sign-in or refresh credentials. Switching accounts, security revocation or loss of consent revokes the previous binding.
Cleanup and provider retention
On Android, cleanup asks Firebase Installations to remove the previous installation. The request is not instant completion of all Google-held records or service metadata. On iPhone, cleanup unregisters the app from APNs, revokes its backend binding and clears local registration/delivered alerts; it does not delete every Apple-held record.
Android allows at most three automatic deletion attempts for the same installation within 24 hours of the first request. After failed attempts, it waits at least one minute, then fifteen minutes. If cleanup is uncertain, alerts stay off and the app shows pending or needs-help status; core sign-in and play remain available. Retry cannot bypass an unfinished deletion, reset its automatic budget or target a newer installation.
An unresolved cleanup keeps one necessary, backup-excluded current record of ownership/configuration/generation, first-request time, bounded attempt count, next attempt and hold reason, plus the separate removal authority. It contains no delivery address, account ID, alert content or sign-in credentials, and no attempt history. Confirmed matching cleanup removes obsolete cleanup and ownership fields while preserving the current choice to keep alerts off; unresolved authority is not silently discarded when a timer ends.
Privacy and removal questions
If cleanup remains uncertain, use the existing Privacy help route or contact legal at algebrics.com. The held-case process calls for triage of reported cases within two business days and Privacy review within seven days of notification. A case unresolved at thirty days, or the applicable rights deadline, requires a concrete remedy and a finite next review date. An offline, unreported phone is not automatically escalated, and these dates do not mean its provider records were erased.
Sharing your own game through a browser source
This source is being prepared and is not open for real-user broadcasting. Before it opens, this notice must identify the actual controller and privacy contact, processors and hosting locations, transfer safeguards, verified backup retention, and applicable participant and parent requirements. These facts are not yet verified; this preparation does not authorize real use.
Your choice and the data used
A browser source is intended to share a minimized view of your own online game. Each human participant must choose Play for that exact offered game before it can be shared. Declining has no game or rating penalty. The source shows the board position, last-move highlights, clocks, pockets where relevant, anonymous side labels and the outcome. It omits player identities, ratings, chat, account details and private analysis. Bright Moves’ app, database and live game service process the requested board and account-linked permission records. Those internal records are not anonymous. This source adds no AI or analytics service.
Separate recipients and recordings
The owner’s browser and OBS receive the source. Anyone given its link can view or record it. A streaming platform selected by the creator, and that platform’s audience, can receive the board under the platform’s own policies. These are separate recipients, not automatically Bright Moves processors or subprocessors. Bright Moves cannot remove recordings people have already made or set a deletion deadline for copies held by others.
How long source records remain
A source is valid for 48 hours by default and no more than 7 days. Its inactive metadata is eligible for deletion 24 hours after it is first disabled or expires. Pending and declined offers are eligible for deletion 24 hours after expiry. A used offer’s acceptance proof becomes eligible 24 hours after the game starts, only once no still-usable bound source needs it. Eligible records are removed in bounded cleanup runs scheduled every 15 minutes. A backlog or database outage can delay removal, so the eligibility cutoff is not a guaranteed physical-deletion deadline. This is not a promise about backup deletion: the actual backup window still needs verification before real use.
Temporary observer history expires after 910 seconds without activity and is removed within the next 60-second sweep. Ordinary retained game history is separate and survives publication withdrawal; it follows the account and game deletion rules elsewhere on this page. Player details for a game chosen for sharing stay hidden after sharing stops. Recordings held outside Bright Moves have no Bright Moves-controlled deletion clock.
Stopping sharing, deletion and supported apps
Any participant can stop sharing that game through its sharing control, including in a supported app while account access is paused. This removes future Bright Moves access for every source sharing it and both boards of a Bughouse match. The game continues, its result and rating do not change, and sharing cannot restart for that game. A new game needs its own offered choice. Supported apps must understand the current notice before Play is available; updating or opening this policy does not accept an offer. To request deletion, object to processing or ask about your account-linked permission records, use the privacy controls and rights route on this page. No real-user source processing begins before the contact and other required facts above are supplied.
What we collect
Your account details, the games and puzzles you play, and the conversations you choose to have with the AI. We do not run third-party analytics and never sell your data.
Statistics about your games
From the games and puzzles you play on Bright Moves, and the games you import from lichess or chess.com, we work out statistics about your own play: your ratings and how they change, how often you play, your streaks, the openings you choose, your puzzle results, and how you use your clock. This is part of the service you signed up for. Your statistics page is visible only to you. It also shows where some of your numbers sit among other Bright Moves players, always with how many players that is, and where your lichess rating sits among lichess players, using the figures lichess publishes. Nobody else sees where you sit.
To work out those comparisons, we count players' numbers without their names: each count says only how many players have a number in a range. Your numbers are counted the same way for other players, but only from the games and puzzles you play on Bright Moves. Games you import from lichess or chess.com, or paste in, are used only for your own statistics and never count in anyone else's comparison. We do this because comparisons are part of what the statistics page offers everyone. You can ask us to leave your numbers out of the counts by writing to us at legal at algebrics.com.
You can show us that a lichess or chess.com account is yours. For lichess, you sign in to lichess from Bright Moves, and lichess tells us that account's id and username. For chess.com, we give you a short code to put in the location field of your chess.com profile; when you press Check, we read that profile once from chess.com and keep only the account's id and username. You can remove the code as soon as the check is done. We keep the id and username to mark the account as yours, until you unlink it or delete your account. Your imported games still count only in your own statistics.
Accuracy. Our chess engine checks the positions of your finished games on Bright Moves and of the games you import, on its own after each game or import, newest games first. From those checks we work out your accuracy: our engine's estimate of how well your moves kept your position. It covers only your own moves; we never work out your opponent's for you. We show it only to you, in your game reviews and on your statistics page: not to your opponent or any other player, not to a linked parent or guardian, and not to our AI. The accuracy saved for a game's review is kept until the game is deleted or your account is deleted; the accuracy on your statistics page is worked out each time you open it and is not saved. The engine's checks of a game are deleted when the game is deleted — a game played here is deleted when either player deletes their account, and an imported game when you delete it or your account.
If you are 18 or older and ask the chess AI about your own play, it can show you a summary of your own ratings, recent activity and clock statistics. It looks them up only when you ask, and only yours. The summary is shown to you; it is not sent to the AI service. For anyone under 18, or whose age we do not know, the chess AI does not look up any statistics.
We keep your statistics while your account exists. Rating history older than 90 days is kept as one reading per day. All of it is deleted when your account is deleted.
Your profile photo
A photo is optional. The original stays on your device; Bright Moves uses only the background-removed copy, visible only to you. If private account sync is available, you choose whether to save that copy to your account or keep it on this device. We do not use your photo for advertising, training AI, face recognition or inferring anything about you. You can remove the account photo or ask to review or securely export it through our privacy contact; photos are never emailed as attachments.
For photos you save to your account, including copies saved before new saves are paused, the following policy applies.
Private storage: Encrypted PostgreSQL storage on the Bright Moves application server hosted by VPSDime (Nodisto FZE). Region: United States. Operator: Bright Moves — unincorporated pre-release venture owned by Arnav; Karthi acts as manager.
Privacy contact: legal@algebrics.com.
We keep your current photo while private sync and your account are active. When the server confirms removal or replacement, the old photo is removed from active account storage and stops being delivered. Encrypted database recovery remnants are removed within 30 days. Scheduled account backups exclude profile photo data. Restoring account data requires a new photo choice.
You can remove the account photo. If offline, account removal stays pending until the server confirms it; another offline device may show its protected cache until it reconnects or expires.
You can ask to review or securely export your current copy through legal@algebrics.com; it is never emailed as an attachment.
Children
You must be 13 or older to create your own Bright Moves account. We ask for your birth month and year to check that. If you are 18 or over, we keep only that you are an adult. If you are 13 to 17, we also keep the month you turn 18, so your account changes on time. That month tells us your birth month and year, so we keep it only until it comes, then remove it. We never store your full date of birth.
We treat every account under 18 as a minor account, and where we cannot tell, we treat the account as a minor. These protections stand on their own and do not depend on a parent taking part: we do not show minors on public pages or in player search, there is no in-game chat or messaging between players, and a minor never pays — a guardian approves and pays for any coaching.
Guardian linking is still in closed-beta testing. Its identity and payment-card checks are simulated rather than real, and we do not yet confirm that an adult is a given child’s parent or guardian — so a guardian link today is not a verified one. We will update this page when those checks are real.
Safety notes
If something you send to the chess AI sounds like you might be in danger or being hurt, the chess AI does not answer it. It shows you where to get help, and we keep a short safety note.
The note records that this happened and when, which account, conversation and app it came from, and whether the account is an under-18 account. It never contains what you wrote. The Bright Moves team can look at these notes. We keep them to protect people who may be at risk.
We keep each note for one year and then delete it. If you delete your account, your safety notes are still kept until they are a year old.
We do not keep a note when the safety check removes an email address, phone number or street address from a message, or when it turns down a message that tries to change how the chess AI behaves. We only count how often those happen, with nothing that identifies you.
Your rights
You can download everything we hold about you, correct it, or delete your account after a 30-day grace period — all from Settings.
Do Not Sell or Share
We do not sell or share personal information. This control is provided to honour CCPA requirements regardless.
Questions? Contact support