Privacy, data, and payment

This site is designed to minimise observation. The absence of analytics, tracking, behavioural profiling, and advertising technologies is a deliberate choice, aligned with Sovereign Minds' concern for judgment, responsibility, and clarity under constraint.

I do not use cookies for marketing, analytics, or surveillance.

The payment processor used for digital purchases (Stripe Payments Europe Ltd, Ireland) sets technical cookies on its own checkout pages to make payment work and to prevent fraud. These cookies are scoped to the Stripe checkout domain and not to sovereignminds.io.

Data is processed only when you purchase a product, reply after purchase, or make a legal enquiry.

• Email address required to deliver the product and provide support.
• Order and invoice records required for accounting and EU VAT compliance.
• Buyer country, derived from the address you provide at checkout, required to apply the correct EU VAT rate.
• Shipping address, if physical goods are involved.
• Card details are never seen or stored by Sovereign Minds. Card payments are handled directly by Stripe on Stripe's own checkout page.
• For Peerage and other annual arrangements paid by bank transfer, my bank holds the record of your payment to me.

Two payment routes operate, depending on what is being purchased.

Direct one-time purchases, currently the digital books, are processed by Stripe Payments Europe Ltd, an Irish entity regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland under EU e-money rules. You enter your card details on Stripe's hosted checkout page; Sovereign Minds never sees your card number, expiry, or CVV.

Peerage subscriptions and bespoke commissions are paid by bank transfer. An invoice is issued on acceptance of the enquiry, with my bank details and a unique reference.

What I do not do, in either route, is correlate your purchase data across other surfaces. There is no analytics layer linking your transaction to a browsing identity, no advertising pixel, no enrichment data sold to brokers, no profile retained beyond what tax law requires me to keep.

Order-related email is sent from a sovereignminds.io address hosted by Proton Mail Business. Proton is a Swiss-based, privacy-respecting email provider operating under Swiss privacy law.

Sovereign Minds is a solo project. One person does the writing, the design, the code, the shop fulfilment, the tool-making, the dinner convening, and the correspondence. There is no team behind the author.

The project is self-financed from the author's own resources. There are no investors and no outside capital. There are no grants shaping what gets produced.

This is deliberate and structural, not incidental. A project with outside capital has to serve its capital providers. A project that depends on grants has to produce what the grantmaker expects to see. Sovereign Minds is designed to answer only to the work and to the people who engage with it.

The trade-off is that the user experience will improve over time rather than arriving polished from the start. Pages will have typos that get fixed in the next edit. Features will arrive before every detail of them is optimised. As engagement grows, the experience will get smoother.

Sovereign Minds books and reference materials are delivered as digital files (ePub and PDF) sent by email after payment confirmation, usually within 24 hours.

Purchases of digital products are final. Because digital content is delivered immediately and cannot be returned, refunds are not offered once access has been provided or the file has been downloaded. Refunds may be granted only if:

• the file is defective or corrupted
• the wrong product was delivered
• access could not be provided due to a technical issue that cannot be resolved

By completing a purchase, you consent to the immediate delivery of digital content and acknowledge that the right of withdrawal is lost once delivery has begun.

For legal enquiries, contact a-sovereign-mind@protonmail.com. For questions arising from use of the material, reply to the email through which the books were sent after purchase.