Privacy
What this site keeps, and what it doesn’t
Last updated 16 October 2026
This is Scarlett Vale’s website. It has no ads, no tracking cookies and no scripts from other companies. Here is everything it does with information about you.
If you join The Velvet Letter
When you sign up, the site stores your email address, the exact words of the consent box you ticked, the time you ticked it, the part of the site you signed up from, and the country your connection came from. Your country comes from the network, not your device, and it is never more precise than a country.
That information is used for one thing: sending you The Velvet Letter. It is stored in a database on Cloudflare, which hosts this site, and passed to EmailOctopus, the service that sends the letters. EmailOctopus first sends you one email asking you to confirm, and nothing else arrives unless you do. It keeps your address only to deliver the letters and to handle unsubscribing. EmailOctopus also records whether each letter is opened and which of its links are clicked, using a tiny image in the email and links that pass through its servers, so Scarlett can see which letters readers enjoy.
It is kept until you unsubscribe or ask for it to be deleted. Every letter has an unsubscribe link, and when you use it your address is deleted from this site’s database as well. You can also write to hello@iamscarlettvale.com to see, correct or delete what is held about you.
When you click a book
Book links pass through this site on their way to Amazon so they can open your own country’s store. Each click adds one to a running count for that book, that day and that country. Nothing else is recorded: no address, no identifier, no cookie. What happens on Amazon is covered by Amazon’s own privacy notice.
If you leave a tip
The tip jar sends you to a checkout page run by Stripe, which takes the payment. Your card details and email address go to Stripe, never to this site, and Stripe handles them under its own privacy policy. This site keeps no record of who tipped or how much.
The age question
Your answer to “Are you 18 or older?” is saved in your browser’s local storage so you aren’t asked every visit. It never leaves your device. Clearing your browser data removes it.
Everything else
Cloudflare processes the technical details every website receives, such as your IP address, to deliver pages and keep out abuse. Sign ups and trips to the tip jar are rate limited using a scrambled, irreversible hash of your IP address that is discarded within a day.
Questions about any of this go to hello@iamscarlettvale.com.
