Personal information deserves a clear explanation.

If you email hello@northstartheory.com or privacy@northstartheory.com, NST receives your email address, message and any other information you choose to include. Cloudflare Email Routing forwards the message to NST's Microsoft 365 business mailbox in Exchange Online. The mailbox's internal delivery address is not disclosed publicly.

Messages are used to answer the enquiry, correct the website, handle a privacy request, keep necessary business records, or protect NST's legal rights. The usual lawful basis is legitimate interests in communicating about and operating the website. A legal obligation may apply to some privacy or business records.

Routine correspondence will be deleted within 12 months after the enquiry is resolved. Editorial-correction correspondence will normally be deleted within 24 months after the correction is resolved or rejected. Privacy-rights correspondence will normally be deleted within 24 months after the request and any related complaint is closed.

Cloudflare says its email-routing event analytics, which can include sender, recipient, subject, message identifier and routing decisions, are retained for up to 31 days. In Exchange Online, items removed from Deleted Items are recoverable for 14 days by default; an administrator can configure this period up to 30 days, and a retention policy or legal hold can keep information for longer. The 14-day figure is Microsoft's documented default, not a separately verified setting for NST's mailbox. These provider settings are separate from NST's working-mailbox schedule above.

Microsoft may store and process Exchange Online mailbox and service-generated data in the Microsoft 365 geography configured for NST's organisation. Limited service-generated, support, security, and account data may be processed internationally. Microsoft states that restricted transfers are protected by contractual safeguards, including applicable standard contractual clauses. You can ask NST for further information about those safeguards.

A record may be kept longer where a legal obligation, active dispute, security investigation or continuing correction requires it. Records needed to support a Self Assessment return are kept for at least five years after the relevant 31 January submission deadline, or longer where HMRC requires. Do not send health records, passwords, payment information or other sensitive information by email.

North Star Theory has built, but not switched on, the ability to sell a fixed digital guide through Stripe's hosted checkout. “Prepared, not yet active” means the checkout code exists and fails closed without approved payment and delivery configuration. This section describes what will happen once live sales are authorised, ahead of that happening, consistent with how this page is updated before any new processor goes live.

When active: choosing to buy a guide takes you to Stripe's own checkout page on Stripe's domain, not a form on this website. Card details are entered directly into Stripe and are never seen, transmitted, or stored by North Star Theory. Stripe tells NST, through a verified, signed notification, whether a payment succeeded. For each purchase NST then stores: which guide was bought, Stripe's checkout session identifier, Stripe's payment identifier, the exact guide edition bought, the buyer's email address if Stripe supplies one, the purchase status (including the reason if access has ended), and the dates of the purchase and of any end of access. No guide answers, quiz responses, or health-related information are included in that record, and none are collected as part of buying a guide.

Before you receive a checkout link, NST also records the order's original terms: Stripe's checkout session identifier, the guide and exact edition, the original price identifier, quantity, amount, currency, whether this is a test or live checkout, and the order creation date. This record lets NST check the payment against what you were offered, even if the current guide or price changes. It is not proof of payment. No email address, guide answers or health information are included in this separate order record.

How access works: once a payment is confirmed, the order page that Stripe returns you to prepares fresh links to read and download your guide every time it is opened, for as long as the purchase is active. The address of that page therefore works as a long-lived private link. Anyone who has the address can open it and reach the guide, so keep it private and do not share it. Each read or download request is checked against the stored purchase record, so access ends straight away when the purchase stops being active. Access is withdrawn after a full refund, or if the payment is disputed (a chargeback). A partial refund does not withdraw access. Nothing on the website combines the purchase record with browsing activity or uses it for advertising.

Not yet decided: why the buyer's email address is stored, and how long it and the rest of the purchase record are kept. Those decisions, and the lawful basis for them, will be set out here before checkout is switched on. Any financial record that UK tax rules oblige NST to keep is kept for the Self Assessment period explained above. The retention period and deletion process for original order records, including abandoned checkouts, also remain undecided and must be confirmed before live sales open.

Stripe is a payment processor operating under its own privacy terms and is a separate data controller for the payment details it handles directly. It publishes its own privacy and cookie information for the checkout page it hosts.