Last updated: 15 October 2026.
This site holds some of the most private things a person can write down: the names you go by in the craft, your oaths, your workings and the people you trust. This policy says plainly what we keep, why, who can see it, and what you can do about it.
What we keep
- Your account: your name, username, email address and password (stored only as a one-way scrambled form, which no one can read back).
- Your profile: the names you choose to give (craft name, and if you wish a public, legal or secret name, with their history), your path and tradition in your own words, your biography, your mark (a symbol or a picture shown beside your name), your hemisphere and time zone, and if you give them a place and dates of dedication or initiation and practice notes. Only your craft name is needed.
- Your settings: how the site looks for you (light or dark, text size, soft shadows and your own colours), discreet mode, which keeps the browser tab and history to plain words, and whether counts are shown to you.
- What you make: your pages and their parts, books, gatherings, your wheel of the year, notes, ties to celebrations, the pictures you upload or paste, your lists of trusted sources, your marks (like, love or trust) and reviews, and the entries you add to Trusted sources.
- What you share and say: who you share things with, your Web and groups, your words in discussions, comments and private conversations, reactions, reports you make, and answers to gatherings.
- The running of the site: notices waiting for you, how you like to be told, a record of moderation actions about you, and the usual records a web server keeps (such as the address a request came from), kept only for keeping the site safe and working.
Pictures are made clean on the way in: the place a photo was taken and anything else hidden in the file is removed before it is stored.
Why we keep it
Only to run the Book of Shadows for you: to keep what you make, show it to the people you choose, tell you when something waits for you, keep the community safe through moderation, and keep the site secure. We never sell your information, never use it for advertising, and never share it with anyone except as this policy says.
Who can see it
You decide. Everything you make starts private to you, and each piece of your profile has its own audience. When you share, you choose with whom: named people, your Web at a trust level, a group at a rank, members of a tier, all members, or someone holding a link. Beyond its front page the site is open only to members: someone without an account sees only what a view-only link opens for them. Material marked oathbound is shown only at the oath level, and something sealed until a date stays closed until then, even to those it is shared with.
Trusted sources, the catalogue of books, decks, sites, music and teachers, is shared by all members. An entry you add is seen by you and by those who approve entries until it is approved, and then by every member. Your marks, reviews and lists start private to you and each has its own audience, as your pages do; counts and Most trusted include only the marks the reader may see.
- Your email address is never shown to other members. A legal name is never shown to the public. A secret name is shown only at the oath level.
- Group leaders cannot read your private conversations.
- Moderators see only what has been reported to them and what is needed to understand it; a reported conversation opens only to the moderator handling it.
- The site's administrators do not read members' private material through the site. Like any website's operators, they can reach the database and files for maintenance, backups and security, and do so only for that.
We email you only about the site: notices you have chosen to receive by email, and messages about your account. A notice email says only that something is waiting and links to your inbox; it never carries your words or anyone else's. You choose, for each kind of notice, whether it comes by email, in a daily summary, or only in your inbox.
Cookies
The site uses only the cookies it needs to work: one to keep you signed in during a visit, and one to remember you on this device if you tick "Remember me". We use no advertising or tracking cookies.
Who else handles it
The company that hosts the site stores it, and an email service delivers the site's emails. They handle it only to provide those services to us. Copies are kept in secured backups so the site can be restored if something goes wrong.
How long we keep it
For as long as you have an account. When your account is closed, what you kept to yourself is removed and what you shared and others depend on stays under "a former member"; when you ask for erasure, everything you own is removed, shared or not (the Terms and Conditions say more). Either way your lists, marks and reviews are removed, and so are entries you added to Trusted sources that were never approved; an approved entry stays for those who use it, shown as added by "a former member". Backups are replaced over time, so removed material leaves them too within the normal backup cycle.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can:
- see and change your information at any time on your profile;
- download everything you keep, with "Download everything I keep" on your profile;
- delete everything you wrote in your private conversations;
- ask, through the site's contact page, for your account to be closed;
- ask for a copy of your information, or for it to be erased, through the site's privacy request form; an erasure request removes everything you own, shared or not;
- ask us to correct anything that is wrong, and complain to your privacy regulator if you think we have mishandled your information.
These cover the rights given by Canada's privacy law and by the European Union's and United Kingdom's data protection law.
Children
The site is for people 18 and older. We do not knowingly keep information about anyone younger; if we learn of it, we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date above, and for any important change we will tell members on the site before it takes effect.
Questions and requests
Use the site's privacy request form for a copy or erasure of your information, and the site's contact page for anything else about this policy.