Last updated: August 2026
What we collect, why, and what you can do about it. Kept short and plain on purpose.
Your date of birth, your email address, and your first name if you give one. Nothing else is asked for.
One exception, and it matters: if what you send suggests you are in crisis, the request is refunded and your question is not kept — either never written down at all, or removed the moment we route it to care. What remains is a record that it happened, not what you wrote. Nobody should have their worst sentence stored on a server because they reached out on a bad day.
You give a second person's birth date, and optionally their time and city. You confirm at the time that these belong to an adult you know. We use them to write the reading; they stay attached to that one request unless you tick the box asking us to remember that person for next time. We never contact them, and we hold no name and no email address for them — a birth date is not a way to reach anyone.
We collect the recipient's name, birth details and email address. The email is used once, on December 24, to send them the book in your name. They are not added to any mailing list, they receive no marketing from us, and we delete nothing less than we would for anyone else if they ask.
Card payments are handled entirely by Stripe. We never see, receive or store your card number. What we keep is the amount, the currency, the date, and Stripe's own reference numbers — enough to recognise your order and to refund it.
No advertising or tracking cookies. No analytics profile that follows you around the web. No data broker enrichment. We do not buy information about you from anyone.
Your birth date is the reading — without it there is nothing to write. Your email is how the reading reaches you and how we recognise you when you come back, since there is no password. Your question is what the reading answers. That is the whole of it: we do not use any of this for anything you did not ask for.
To run the service we rely on a few providers, each doing one job:
We do not sell your information, and we share it with no one beyond what these four need to do their part.
One email does all of these: hello@hermitcompass.life. You do not need to give a reason, and we will not ask you to stay.
If you are in the UK or the EU, these are your rights under the UK GDPR and the GDPR, and you also have the right to complain to your local supervisory authority. Our lawful basis is your consent for the free reading and the emails, and the performance of our contract with you for anything you have paid for.
Our providers operate globally, so your information may be processed outside the country you live in, including in the United States. Each of them offers standard contractual protections for those transfers.
Hermit Compass is for readers aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18, as a reader or as the subject of a reading. If you believe we have, write to us and we will delete it at once.
Questions about any of this go to hello@hermitcompass.life, and a person answers them.