Privacy Policy

What this site collects

ChessShelf is a static reference site. Reading openings, tactics, strategy, and endgame pages requires no account and no personal information. Data is collected only where you actively provide it — subscribing to the newsletter, submitting the contact form, or making a purchase — or through the analytics and advertising scripts described below, which run in the background of every page.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics (GA4) to understand which pages are read and how visitors navigate the site, and Vercel Web Analytics for aggregate, privacy-focused traffic metrics. GA4 sets cookies and may build an aggregate profile of site usage tied to a browser identifier, in line with standard Google Analytics behavior; it does not receive your name, email address, or payment details from this site. You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking broadly using Google's official browser opt-out tool, or by using browser settings that block third-party analytics scripts.

Advertising

ChessShelf carries display advertising served by Google AdSense, which helps fund the site alongside the Repertoire Starter Pack and reader support. Google and its advertising partners use cookies to serve and measure these ads, and depending on your Google settings the ads may be personalised based on your visits to this and other websites. Visitors in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom are shown Google's consent message first: personalised-advertising cookies are set only if you agree, and you can change that choice afterwards.

Advertising has no influence on the analysis. No opening recommendation, tactical explanation or endgame verdict is sponsored, and advertisers neither see a page before publication nor have any say in what it concludes.

To review why an ad was shown, or to switch off personalised advertising, visit Google My Ad Center; to opt out of interest-based ads from participating companies, use aboutads.info. Google explains how it uses advertising cookies at policies.google.com/technologies/ads.

Payments

Purchases (the Repertoire Starter Pack) and contributions (Support Us) are processed by Stripe. This site never receives or stores your full payment card details — Stripe handles that directly, and this site only receives confirmation that a payment succeeded, along with the email address needed to deliver a digital purchase.

If you subscribe to the newsletter, your email address is stored with Brevo, our email service provider, and used only to send updates about new site content and occasional site news. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes your address from future sends.

Contact form

Messages submitted through the contact form are delivered to the site's inbox through Brevo, the same email service that runs the newsletter, so the information you provide (name, email, and your message) can be used to reply to you. It is not added to the newsletter list unless you separately subscribe.

Affiliate links

Where a page discusses something you might buy, such as an opening book, a chess clock, a set or a scorebook, it may link to that product category on Amazon as an affiliate, and we may earn a commission on a resulting purchase at no extra cost to you. Those links are marked where they appear and explained in full in the affiliate disclosure.

Children's privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under that age.

IndexNow

This site notifies Bing and Yandex when pages are added or updated using the IndexNow protocol, which shares only page URLs — never any visitor data — to help those search engines discover new content faster.

Data retention

Contact form messages are retained only as long as needed to respond to and resolve the inquiry. Newsletter addresses are retained until you unsubscribe. Payment records are retained by Stripe according to its own retention policies, which are typically driven by financial recordkeeping requirements rather than by this site's own preferences.

Your choices and contact

You can decline cookies through your browser settings, unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time, and request that any information you've submitted through the contact form be deleted by reaching out through the Contact page. This policy may be updated occasionally as the site's tools and integrations change; the date below reflects the most recent update.

Last updated: October 9, 2026.