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. They are listed in Stripe's own privacy policy.

Data is processed only when you purchase a product, request support, or contact me.

• 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; only the result of the transaction (success or failure, and an order reference) is communicated back to me.
• For Peerage and other annual arrangements paid by bank transfer, my bank holds the record of your payment to me. No card data is involved.

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. Stripe sees the transaction, applies the correct EU VAT rate for your country, issues the receipt, and remits the net amount to my account. Card networks (Visa, Mastercard) and your issuing bank also see the transaction, as they would for any card purchase.

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. You transfer the amount; I begin the work or the delivery once the payment has landed. SEPA transfers within the eurozone usually arrive in one to three working days, or within seconds where SEPA Instant is available between your bank and mine. International wires take three to seven days.

The choice of two routes is deliberate, and worth naming. A card processor is the right tool for an instant low-friction transaction at small ticket size, particularly where the regulatory burden of collecting EU VAT across twenty-seven member states would otherwise fall fully on a sole proprietor. Bank transfer is the right tool for an annual commitment where the relationship is direct and the cadence is slow enough that a few working days of settlement does not matter. Forcing every transaction into one channel would be choosing one set of trade-offs over the other for reasons that are mine to manage rather than yours.

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. The business email account used by the shop is organisationally separate from any personal email I hold.

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. There are no engineers, no designers, no community managers, no operations staff.

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. There is no institutional backer whose interests would need to be considered.

This is deliberate and structural, not incidental. A project with outside capital has to serve its capital providers. A project with a team has to sustain payroll. 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. That requires the commercial and operational independence that self-financing provides.

The trade-off, which should be stated honestly, is that the user experience will improve over time rather than arriving polished from the start. The shop and the coordination surfaces will have rough edges in their early form. Pages will have typos that get fixed in the next edit. Features will arrive before every detail of them is optimised. Response times to enquiries will reflect what one person can sustainably do. As engagement grows, the experience will get smoother, because the work of smoothing it is work the author does in response to real use.

If the project reaches a point where it can justify additional hands, those hands will be hired carefully, on the same principles that govern the rest of the work. Until then, what you encounter is what one person can build.

Sovereign Minds books and reference materials are delivered as digital files (PDF and ePub) 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 support or legal enquiries, contact legal@sovereignminds.io.