Your photos and screenshots stay on your device
When you scan a photo or screenshot, the board is read by a small model that runs inside your browser or the app. The image is not uploaded. The chess engine (Stockfish) also runs on your device. After the first visit the app works offline.
What is sent, and only when
- Visit counts. Each visit sends one anonymous count with the source it came from (for example "direct" or a link tag) and a count when a scan is used. No cookies, no advertising ID, no account. Your IP address is used briefly to block abuse and is kept only as a salted hash that changes every hour, never as the address itself.
- Sharing a board (optional). If you press Share or tick "Help improve PicChess", a picture of the board drawn by PicChess (not your original photo), the position and your corrections are sent to our server so a link can be made. Shared boards are public to anyone with the link and may be used as free CC0 training data.
What we do not do
No accounts, no ads, no tracking across sites, no selling or sharing of data with third parties. The app asks for no Android permissions beyond internet access; picking a picture uses the system file picker.
Hosting
The site is served by Cloudflare Pages and the share server runs on Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare processes network requests as our host.
Children
PicChess is a general audience chess tool and does not knowingly collect personal data from anyone.
Contact and deletion
To ask about your data or to have a shared board removed, open an issue at github.com/Tharun2075/picchess-app/issues with the share link.