Chess and Stilz Publishing House
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Direct Notice to Parents — Children's Privacy

Chess and Stilz Co. LLC

Who this notice is for. Federal law — the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 15 U.S.C. § 6501 et seq., and its implementing rule, 16 CFR Part 312 — requires us to give you this notice and obtain your consent before we collect any personal information from or about your child. Please read this notice before you create an account or pay.

Chess and Stilz Co. LLC ("we," "us," or "Chess and Stilz") operates an interactive storytelling subscription web application for children age 9 and older (the "Service"). You — the parent or legal guardian — are the account holder. Your child does not have a separate account, login credentials, an email address, or any purchasing capability.

Your account has two zones. The Kid Zone is the child-facing story reading interface — stories, story choices, and character interactions. The Parent Zone is the parent-only settings and management area, protected by your Parent PIN — a separate credential from your account password. Do not share your Parent PIN with your child.

We collect the minimum information needed to deliver a personalized story experience and to keep you informed.

Your child's character name. You choose this during child profile setup. We block spaces at input and encourage nicknames or fantasy names — your child's real name is not required and we do not ask for it. Your child never sees or enters a free-text field. You need your Parent PIN to change it.

Reading session telemetry. While your child reads, the Service automatically records: which story choices were made, how quickly choices were made, how long your child stayed on each scene, signals about which characters and story threads engaged them, pace signals, session start and end timestamps, and whether a story thread was declined.

Reader Dial (behavioral inference). The Reader Dial personalizes your child's story experience in three layers. Layer 1 is built entirely from settings you control: reading age, bravery tier, safety settings, Dark Content toggles, and your child's past story ratings. Layer 2 adds a single in-session signal — the reading lean — reflecting whether your child is engaging in a kinetic (faster-paced) or atmospheric (slower, character-forward) way during an active reading session. Layer 3, which would involve deeper behavioral inference from aggregated session telemetry, is not active in the current version of the Service; if introduced in a future release, we will obtain a new verifiable parental consent from you before activating it for your child. The Reader Dial is never shown to your child, never expressed as a score or number, and never used for advertising. You see a plain-English summary in your Reader Recap.

World-entry preference choices (set once per world). At first entry into each story world, your child picks from pre-authored answer options (no free-text input) to indicate persistent preferences for that world — currently a reaction-style preference and a character-affinity preference. These are stored choices, not behavioral inferences. They are sent to AI providers as part of the story-state payload and persist until you reset the child profile or delete it.

What we do not collect about your child: birth date, real first or last name, email address, photograph, voice recording, location data, or biometric information.

We do not condition your child's participation in the Service — or in any feature of the Service — on disclosure of more personal information than is reasonably necessary to deliver the story experience.

  • Your name and email address
  • Payment method (processed by Stripe — we do not store your card number)
  • Your child's reading age (an integer you set; default is 9) and bravery tier (levels 1, 2, or 3, which you set)
  • Your choice on the optional Dark Content toggle, which is off by default for every child
PurposeData UsedShared Outside Chess and Stilz?
Generate the next story segment (core service — required)Character name, current story state, choice made, Layer 1 Reader Dial values (your guardrail settings and past-ratings), your child's world-entry preference choices, and the Layer 2 reading lean signal (in-session kinetic vs. atmospheric lean) — not raw telemetryAI model provider only — see Section 5. The provider retains this information for up to 30 days under its standard data-handling terms, solely to operate and secure the service, and then permanently deletes it. It is not used to train the provider's models. A rare exception for provider safety-flagged content (up to 2 years) is described in Section 5.
Tune story to your child (Reader Dial)Session telemetryRaw telemetry: No — stays internal. Layer 1 and Layer 2 Reader Dial inputs only: included in the story-state payload above, sent to AI provider and retained under the same 30-day standard terms described above.
Reader Recap email to youReader Dial narrative summary + session snapshotEmail delivery provider only — see Section 5
Billing and account managementYour name, email, payment methodStripe only
Inform Chess and Stilz's internal story developmentAnonymized aggregate signals drawn from 500 or more readers — never linked to your child's individual profileInternal use: never shared. Aggregated, anonymized signals (500+ readers): may be shared in aggregate form with educational research and curriculum development partners, subject to written agreements prohibiting re-identification, commercial use for advertising, and further sharing. Never linked to your child's individual profile.

We do not sell your child's information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not share it with third parties for their own purposes.

We share information only with the following service providers, solely to operate the Service:

  • Stripe — payment processing. Holds your card data. Not involved in child data.
  • Resend — email delivery of your Reader Recap. Receives your email address. Receives no child personal information. Tracking pixels are disabled.
  • Fly.io — application hosting.
  • Cloudflare — content delivery and security.
  • AI model providers — US-headquartered, tier-one providers. Receive the story-state payload: the character name, the current story state, the choice your child most recently made, your guardrail settings (reading age, bravery tier, safety settings, and the Dark Content toggle state) and past-ratings, your child's world-entry preference choices, and the reading lean signal. They receive no parent identity and no raw telemetry. Our AI model provider retains this payload for up to 30 days under its standard commercial data-handling terms — the industry-standard retention period it applies to operate and secure its service — and then permanently deletes it. The provider does not use any information we transmit to train, fine-tune, or otherwise improve its models. In the rare case that a specific story-generation request is flagged by the provider's own automated safety-review systems as an apparent violation of the provider's usage policies, the provider may retain that flagged request for up to 2 years, and an associated safety classification score for up to 7 years, for the provider's own safety-enforcement purposes. This exception can apply even to content that fully complies with Chess and Stilz's own content safety standards — it reflects the provider's independent automated review, not a judgment about your child's specific story. This retention posture reflects the provider's standard terms of service; it is not a bespoke zero-retention arrangement negotiated for Chess and Stilz, and this Notice will be updated if the retention period, training posture, or flagged-content exception changes.
  • xAI — read-aloud voice. Receives the text of a story page your child asks to hear, the chosen storyteller voice and reading pace, and a list of character-name pronunciations. Receives no child personal information. The audio is stored by us. xAI keeps the text for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, then deletes it automatically, and does not use it to train its models.

We retain your child's information for the lifetime of the active account. There are two distinct deletion paths with different consequences:

Path 1 — Explicit deletion (COPPA right to delete). If you use Parent Zone → Privacy & Data to delete your child's profile or your account, deletion from Chess and Stilz's own systems is immediate and permanent. There is no waiting period, no freeze, and no undo. This is the COPPA right-to-delete path and is available at any time.

Path 2 — Subscription cancellation. Cancelling your subscription is not the same as deleting your data. When a subscription is cancelled without an explicit deletion request, your child's data enters a 90-day save-back hold — Chess and Stilz stops all processing during this period (no new data collected, no dial updates, no Recaps). At the end of 90 days, all data is permanently deleted from Chess and Stilz's own systems. If you want your data deleted immediately at the time you cancel, use Path 1.

Scope of these deletion paths. Both paths above describe deletion from Chess and Stilz's own systems. Story-generation requests already sent to our AI model provider are retained independently, under the provider's own terms described in Section 5: every request — regardless of whether it was ever flagged — is held by the provider for up to 30 days under its standard retention window, and a request flagged by the provider's own automated safety-review systems may be retained for up to 2 years (with the associated safety classification score retained for up to 7 years). In either case, that provider-held copy is not necessarily deleted by an action you take in the Parent Zone — Chess and Stilz has no visibility into individual retention or flagging determinations at the provider and no ability to expedite deletion there.

We do not retain behavioral data longer than reasonably necessary for the story-tuning and Recap purposes described above, consistent with 16 CFR § 312.10.

You have the right at any time to:

  • Review the personal information we have collected about your child
  • Refuse further collection or use of your child's information
    • Refusing further collection is accomplished by deleting your child's profile, which immediately ceases all data collection while leaving your account active.
  • Request deletion of your child's information

All three actions are available immediately and without email support in the Parent Zone → Privacy & Data section of the Service (your Parent PIN required):

  1. Download your child's data — exports as a JSON file
  2. Delete child profile — permanently removes all telemetry, Reader Dial data, and Recap history; your account remains active
  3. Delete account entirely — removes all data; your Stripe subscription is cancelled per subscription terms

The Parent Zone also includes additional account management features not described in this notice. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for full descriptions.

To exercise these rights by email, or with questions about this notice, contact us at:

Chess and Stilz Co. LLC 176 S. Sunset Dr. Vineyard, UT 84059 +1 801-477-7675 hello@chessandstilz.com

Under COPPA, 16 CFR § 312.5, which enumerates verifiable parental consent methods including the use of a credit or debit card in connection with a monetary transaction where the payment system provides notification to the account holder, your completion of payment through Stripe — a payment system that sends transaction confirmation to your account email address — constitutes verifiable parental consent to the collection and use of your child's personal information as described in this notice.

The following acknowledgment is required before you may proceed.

[ ] I have read and understand the Chess and Stilz Direct Notice to Parents. If I create a profile for a child on this account, I am that child's parent or legal guardian, and I consent to Chess and Stilz collecting and using that child's information — including the character name I provide, the world-entry preference choices my child sets, reading session telemetry, and Reader Dial behavioral inference — for the purposes of delivering and personalizing the story experience and sending me Reader Recap emails, as described in this notice. I understand I may revoke this consent at any time by deleting my child's profile or my account through the Parent Zone, or by emailing us at hello@chessandstilz.com.

This consent is required to use the Service.

By checking the box above and completing payment through Stripe, you provide verifiable parental consent under COPPA, 16 CFR § 312.5.