Privacy Policy

This site runs no analytics, no advertising trackers and no third-party scripts of any kind. Nobody is watching you read. We are not able to build a profile of you, and the site is configured at the browser level to refuse code from anywhere but itself.

We collect information in three situations only: when you buy something, when you send us a message, and when you ask to join the mailing list. Each is described below.

Questions about any of it go to Info@ruthannthompson.com.

This site sets two cookies, both strictly necessary and neither used to track you.

The first is a security token that proves a form submission came from this site rather than being forged by another one. The second only exists if you sign in to the private studio area, which is for Ruth‑Ann and her team; if you never sign in, it is never set.

There is no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie and no cookie shared with any other company. That is why this site has no cookie banner — there is nothing to ask permission for.

Payments are handled by Stripe on their own secure pages. Your card number never reaches this site and we never see it, store it or have any way to retrieve it.

We keep a record of your order: your name, your email address, what you bought, what you paid, and — for physical books — the shipping address you gave Stripe. We need that record to send your books, to answer questions about your order, and to keep proper business accounts.

Stripe handles your payment information under their own privacy policy. Where we post physical books, the carrier necessarily sees the delivery address.

A digital purchase creates a private download link for you. That link is valid for 30 days and allows up to five downloads, so a failed download or a new phone is never a problem.

We record how many times the link has been used, so that we can tell a genuine problem from a link that has been passed around. We do not record what you read or when you read it.

The link itself is stored only as a one-way fingerprint. Even we cannot read your download link back out of our records.

Contact and speaking-enquiry forms collect what you type into them: your name, your email address, and, if you choose to give them, a phone number, an organization and your message.

The mailing list is opt-in only. We never add you because you bought something. When you do subscribe, we record the exact wording you agreed to and the date, so that both of us can tell later what was actually consented to.

Every mailing carries a one-click unsubscribe link that works immediately and needs no password, no login and no reply. You can also just ask us and we will do it.

To stop automated abuse of the public forms, the site needs to tell one sender from another. It does this without storing your IP address: the address is converted into an irreversible fingerprint the moment it arrives, and only the fingerprint is kept.

That means we can recognise a flood of submissions from one source, and we cannot work out where you live or turn the fingerprint back into an address.

Cloudflare, who host this site and protect it from attack, process traffic under their own privacy policy.

Ruth‑Ann writes books for children, but this site is designed for the adults who buy them. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

If you believe a child has given us information, please write to Info@ruthannthompson.com and we will delete it.

You may ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to us and we will respond as promptly as we can.

Order records are the one thing we may need to keep even after a deletion request, because businesses are required to retain their sales records. We will tell you if that applies.

We do not sell your information. We do not rent it, trade it, or hand it to anyone for their own marketing.

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Where a change is significant and we hold your email address, we will tell you rather than relying on you to notice.