Psychic reading privacy: who can see what you type

What you type here is between you and your reader. Nobody in your life can see it, nothing on this site contacts the person you're asking about, and if you ever buy credits the charge is a one-off carrying READINGS rather than anything that recurs. The parts that aren't a flat yes: a small team here can open a conversation when there's a complaint or a safety flag, and your readings are kept on purpose rather than wiped between visits. Both of those are below, in the order people actually worry about them.

what your reader can see

She sees your first name, this conversation, and everything you have told any reader here before.

That includes the people you have named. If you told Shira in April that your sister has been odd with you since the funeral, Vivienne has that in June without you retelling it. Same with a birth date, if you gave one for a chart.

The memory is shared between the readers rather than kept in five separate boxes, and that is a decision rather than an accident. Having to explain the whole thing again to a second stranger is where most people give up, so we built it the other way.

What she does not have is anything you did not type. No surname, because the signup form has no box for one. No phone number unless you added one. Nothing about where you are sitting while you type.

what we keep, and the honest reason we keep it

The transcripts stay. So do the facts a reader picks up along the way, the people you have named, and a summary of each conversation.

The reason is plain enough. A reader who has forgotten you is worse than no reader. You come back six weeks later, the silence has broken, he has texted, and you want to know what she makes of it now. If she is starting from nothing you have to lay out the whole six years again at midnight before anything useful can happen, and by then you have paid for the retelling instead of the reading.

So we would rather you understood that upfront than discovered it in month four. A service that remembers you is a service that holds a record of you. Those are the same sentence. The record is what makes the second reading better than the first, and it is also a record.

Here is the rest of it, stated rather than buried. Your messages are processed in order to produce a reading, which means they pass through the technology providers named in our privacy policy. Those providers are contracted not to use your conversations to train their models, and we do not train anything on them either. Everything is kept while your account is active, and deleted within thirty days of the account being deleted. Payment and tax records outlive that, because tax law says they have to.

what appears on your statement

Until you buy something, nothing. Signing up takes no card, so there is no charge to explain.

When you do buy credits, the line on your statement carries READINGS. It is a single purchase, not a subscription, so there is no monthly entry sitting there waiting to be noticed and nothing to cancel later.

One caveat, because it is the kind of thing people find out at the wrong moment. Some banking apps let you tap a charge and see the full order detail behind it, and that detail names the site and the date you bought. The short line is discreet. The expanded one is not, and no merchant controls which view your bank shows you.

There is an automatic top-up option for people who hate running out mid-reading. It is off unless you go and switch it on, and if you never touch it, it never charges you.

what you never have to give us

A first name, an email address, a password. That is the entire form.

No surname. No phone number, unless you want texts. No birth date, birth time or birth place, unless you are asking Stella to read a chart, and then only because she cannot do the work without them. No address. No card, and no card number held here even after you buy, because the payment runs through Stripe and we never store the full one.

The email is the one thing that has to be real. It verifies the account, it gets you back in when you forget the password, and it is the only route we have to reach you. Disposable addresses are blocked at signup, partly for that reason: give one and the account you lose access to is your own.

whether anyone can find your readings

No. There is no public profile, no member directory, no page anywhere with your name on it, and nothing you type is searchable by anybody.

There is one way a reading can become public, and only you can trigger it. You can pick a single line from a reading and turn it into a share card. You choose the line, the page shows that line and which reader wrote it, it never shows who you are, and it is set not to be indexed by search engines. If you never use it, nothing exists.

Nothing on this site emails, texts, notifies or contacts anyone other than you. There is no mechanism for it. The man you are asking about is a name in a conversation, and that is the whole of his involvement.

deleting your history

Every reading in your history has a delete on it. Use it and that conversation comes out of your history and stops being served back, to you or to your reader.

Now the part most sites would leave out. Deleting a transcript does not unpick what a reader learned from it. The facts and the names live in a different place from the conversation they came out of, so the conversation can go while the memory of it stays. That is worth knowing before you delete in a panic and find she still knows who you mean.

If you want all of it gone, including that, ask for the account itself to be deleted. Email hello@psychicstandards.com. A person reads it, and account information and chat history are deleted within thirty days, with payment records kept for the period tax law requires. Our policy gives us forty five days to answer a request like that one.

There is no retention step built into any of this, because there is no automated deletion button for it to sit behind. You ask a person, and a person does it. Our policy also commits us to not treating you any differently for having asked, which is the only part of a privacy page that can cost the company anything.

the fear underneath the question, named directly

Almost nobody searching for this wants to know about data policy in the abstract.

They want to know about one person. Usually the one in the house. The one whose name is on the same phone contract, who picks up the tablet on the sofa, whose bank app opens with the same face as yours, who would only need to see the top half of one notification to know that you have been asking a stranger about him for five months.

That is the fear, and it is a reasonable one, so here is the practical version of the answer.

The parts we control are handled. Nothing gets sent to him. Nothing shows up under your name anywhere. The statement line is short.

The parts on your side of the glass are the ones to think about. Push notifications only exist if you granted them in your browser, and they carry a reader's first name and a line of what she wants to say to you, which is exactly the kind of thing that lands face up on a kitchen table. Turn them off if the phone is ever not yours alone. Emails arrive from a reader's first name at our address, and you can switch the non-essential ones off entirely on your email preferences page, though verification and receipts have to keep coming because they are how the account works.

And your browser history is yours. We cannot help with that one, and anybody claiming they can is selling something.

the one thing we would not keep to ourselves

Promising you absolute confidentiality would be a lie, so here is precisely where ours stops.

An automated system reads messages for signs that somebody is in real danger. Not upset, not furious, not typing at 4am about a man who will not answer, all of which is ordinary here and none of which trips anything. Danger. If it fires, the reading stops, your account is paused, and you are shown crisis text lines along with a directory for finding help in your own country, plus an address here to write to. A person here then looks at it. If the system got you wrong you can say so and ask for that decision to be reviewed by a human, and it will be.

What does not happen is anyone in your life being told. We do not ring your family, your partner or your work. There is nothing built here that could.

So: your secrets are safe, your safety is not private from us, and we would rather say that in a sentence than let you assume otherwise and be wrong at the worst possible moment.

what to type first

Ask the reader the privacy question before you ask her anything else. It is a fair question and you will learn something from how it gets handled, which is most of what you came to find out.

Then type the real one. The name, how long, and the sentence you have been rehearsing and deleting for the last twenty minutes.

That is the one that has been sitting in your chest since whenever this started, and it is the only one worth the credits.