The full policy below sets out the detail. It is available in English only, and the English version is the authoritative one.

Last updated: 15 October 2026

Who we are

Richard Jefferies, Valencia, Spain, is responsible for the information described here (the "data controller").

For anything to do with this policy or your information, including the requests described under Your rights below, contact administration@orphalese.net, or use the contact form.

What stays on your computer and is never sent to us

The program stores the following locally, and none of it reaches us:

• Your readings, including the cards drawn, their positions, the date, and any notes, titles or interpretations you write.
• The name and email address of the person a reading is for, if you fill those in when starting one. The program also remembers the last ones you entered, so it can offer them again next time. If you read for other people, please bear in mind that this is their information you are keeping — it never leaves your computer, and what you do with it is your responsibility rather than ours.
• Your decks, spreads, subsets and collections, including any you create or edit yourself, and any images you import.
• Your card meanings and journal text, including anything you type into the Little White Book.
• Your program settings — colours, fonts, chosen language, window positions, folder locations and similar preferences.
• A local error log, which records faults so that you can send it to us if you ask for help. It is written on your machine and is only ever seen by us if you choose to send it.

By default these live in [Documents]\Orphalese and in the Windows registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Orphalese. You can change the folder in the program's Options. Because they are ordinary files on your own computer, deleting them is up to you, and we cannot recover them for you.

What the program sends to us

Checking for updates. When the program starts, it asks our server what the current version is, so it can tell you if an update is available.

That request carries a single identifier: a random number generated on your own machine the first time the program runs, and stored thereafter. It is not derived from your name, your email address or your hardware, and it tells us nothing about who you are. The program also tells us which version of itself it is running, so that we know which releases are still being used and which we can stop supporting.

All our server keeps is that identifier, the version, and the date it last asked. It does not record what you were doing, anything about your computer, or anything that identifies you. As with any request to any website, our server also sees your IP address — see Website server logs below.

Registering and unlocking a licence. When you register the program, or when it re-confirms an existing registration, it sends the user name and unlock code you enter, a name for the machine which you choose yourself, the version of the program you are running, and identifiers read from your computer's hardware.

About those hardware identifiers: a licence allows the program to run on a set number of machines, so the program has to be able to recognise a machine it has already unlocked. To do that it reads identifiers from the computer — the motherboard and the serial number of the disk volume — which together identify the machine. It also sends details of the disk drive and the processor, which we keep only to help us diagnose registration problems, for example when a licence will not unlock after a hardware change.

These identifiers are used for licensing and support only. We do not use them to track what you do, we do not combine them with anything else, and they are not shared with anyone.

If you ask us to recover a lost unlock code, the program sends the details needed to find your licence and we email the code to the address registered to it.

Your account and your public profile. A licence has an account associated with it. It holds your email address, so we can send your unlock code and reply to support requests; a record of the machines you have registered, as described above; and your licence type and purchase history.

If you choose to take part in the sharing and community features, you can also add a nickname, a short biography, a link to your own website and a profile picture. Those four are published on our website and visible to other users where you share something, and only if you turn your profile on. Your email address is not shown publicly. There is a setting controlling whether other users may contact you by email, and one controlling whether your profile is displayed at all; both are yours to change.

Please treat anything you put in a nickname, biography or profile picture as public.

Sharing decks, spreads and card meanings. The program lets you publish material to our website for other users to download — the Deck Exchange, and the shared spread and card-meaning libraries. This only ever happens when you choose to upload something.

When you upload, we receive and publish the file itself, a thumbnail image, the name of the item, the name you give as its creator, the name you share it under, any description or comment you write, and whether you have flagged it as having adult content. Your account is recorded as the uploader.

What a shared deck contains is deliberately limited. The program does not simply package up your deck folder. It selects only the card images, the deck's own settings file, and — only if you tick the box offering it — the Little White Book notes for that deck. Your personal card notes are held in a separate file and are never included in an upload, nor are your personal deck settings. Nothing else in the folder is sent, and the selection works by naming exactly what may be included rather than by excluding what may not.

So the only writing of yours that becomes public is what you choose to publish: the Little White Book notes, if you offer them, and the description, creator and sharing names you type into the upload form.

Uploaded material is public. Other users can download it, and what you write in a description can be read by anyone. You can delete something you have uploaded, but copies already downloaded by other people are on their computers and beyond our reach.

Comments and the forum. If you post a comment on a shared deck, or a message on the forum, the comment text and your nickname are stored and shown publicly alongside it.

Contacting us for support. If you email us or use the contact form, we keep the message and your email address so that we can answer and so we have a record of the problem. If you send us a log file or a settings file to help diagnose a fault, we keep it only as long as it takes to deal with the issue.

The website

orphalese.net sets the following cookies, and nothing else:

Both are strictly necessary for the site to do what you are asking it to do, and neither is used to track you, to build a profile, or for advertising.

There are no analytics, advertising or social-media trackers on this website. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, no third-party scripts of any kind. The video player used in the tutorials is hosted on our own server and does not report back to anyone.

Website server logs. Like any web server, ours keeps standard access logs recording the IP address that made each request, the time, the page requested, and the browser's self-reported type and version. These are produced by our hosting provider, HostingUK.net, and are used for security and for diagnosing faults. They are kept for seven days and then discarded. We do not use them to identify individual visitors.

Payments

Licences are paid for through PayPal. Your payment is made on PayPal's systems, not ours. We never see or hold your card details. What reaches us is confirmation that a payment succeeded, the transaction reference, and the email address associated with it, which is what we use to issue your unlock code. PayPal handles your payment information under its own privacy policy.

Why we are allowed to hold this information

• Performance of a contract — holding your email address, licence details and registered machines, because without them we cannot give you a working licence or support it.
• Legitimate interests — checking for updates and counting versions in use, so we know which releases to support and can tell you when a fix is available; keeping server logs for security; enforcing the licence terms you agreed to when you bought it.
• Consent — publishing your profile, sharing material, posting comments, and sending you any optional email. Each of these happens only because you chose it, and you can withdraw by turning the setting off, deleting the material, or asking us.
• Legal obligation — keeping records of sales for as long as tax law requires.

How long we keep it

An Orphalese Tarot licence is perpetual. Once you have bought one you are entitled to unlock the program on a new machine years later, so we keep your account and licence record for as long as you hold the licence — without it we could not honour the licence you paid for.

Beyond that we keep as little as we can, and a job runs every day that removes what is no longer needed. If you would like your information removed sooner, ask us and we will remove it, apart from records we are legally obliged to keep.

Who else sees it

• HostingUK.net, which hosts the website, the database and our email, and therefore stores this information on our behalf. They act only on our instructions, under the terms of their Data Processing Addendum. To provide those services they in turn use their own suppliers — for the data centre, the hosting control panel, email delivery, domain registration and security certificates — which they list in that document.
• PayPal, for payments.
• Other users of the program, but only for the profile and shared material you chose to publish.

We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not pass it to anyone else except where we are legally required to.

Where it is stored

We are based in Spain. Our website, database and email are hosted by HostingUK.net in the United Kingdom, so information you give us is stored there, and the backups of it are held in the United Kingdom too.

This is a transfer out of the European Economic Area, so it needs a legal basis. Ours is the European Commission's adequacy decision for the United Kingdom, renewed on 19 December 2025, which recognises UK data protection law as offering protection equivalent to the EU's. That decision runs until 27 December 2031.

Security

Access to the database is restricted and passwords are not stored in readable form. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information in transit over the internet, but we take reasonable care of what we hold and we hold as little as we can.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• ask what we hold about you, and get a copy;
• have mistakes corrected;
• have your information deleted — note that deleting your account means your licence can no longer be unlocked on a new machine, and that material you have published and other people have downloaded cannot be recalled from their computers;
• object to, or ask us to restrict, what we do with it;
• receive it in a portable form;
• withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on consent;
• complain to a regulator. We are established in Spain, so our supervisory authority is the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (aepd.es). You may also complain to the data protection authority in your own country — in the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Write to administration@orphalese.net and we will respond within one month.

Children

Orphalese Tarot is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 16. If you believe we have, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top and publish the new version here. If a change materially affects what we do with your information, we will say so more prominently than that.