Small print¶

Purple Lantern Practice Ltd does not exist. It has never been entered in a chamber of commerce register or assigned a VAT number, and a letter addressed to it would come back. If it is registered anywhere, it is under the Miscellaneous Guilds Act in Ankh-Morpork, alongside the Morporkian Civil Liberties Union. The privacy notice, the licences and the terms for participants are real, because the sites and the games are.

Privacy¶

The sites set no cookies and run no analytics or tracking of any kind. The only personal data handled is what arrives through the contact form, an email address and a message, and it is used to reply, kept for as long as the conversation lasts, and deleted afterwards or sooner on request.

A message through the form is stored by Formward in Sweden, with the sender’s IP address hashed before it touches disk. Formward’s notification goes through Mailjet in France to a mailbox at Proton in Switzerland, and replies leave from there. The sites are served by statichost in Sweden from Hetzner datacentres in Finland and Germany; statichost uses the visitor’s IP address to deliver the page and, by its own policy, does not store it. DNS is at Infomaniak in Switzerland. The source is at CodeFloe, which runs on Hetzner and destroys its server logs within seven days, and the games and labs are at Codeberg in Berlin, which truncates IP addresses in its logs and keeps them for no longer than seven days. Fonts, scripts and images all load from the site itself, and search runs in the browser.

Two links in that chain sit outside Europe: the certificates, which come from Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit in San Francisco, over standard ACME, so the issuer can be swapped without touching anything else; and the mandate for the hosting subscription, paid by SEPA transfer from a European bank to a Swedish host, which is held by an Irish subsidiary of Stripe, and nothing on the host’s public pages said so before the first invoice. Both are recorded, and neither is a problem on its own.

Participants¶

A rehearsal produces observations about how people decide under pressure. The record is written by role rather than by name, and what an individual did is neither reported to management nor kept once the record has been delivered. People play honestly on that condition, and an engagement run without it shows the room something about the security function that nobody intended.

Recording¶

Engagements are not recorded, in audio, video or screen capture, unless agreed in writing beforehand. Where a recording is agreed, the client holds it, the agreement says how long it is kept and who may view it, and participants are told before the engagement starts.

Games and labs¶

The games and labs are open source, and each repository states its licence. Most are MIT, so they can be used, changed and shared with the notice kept. Some are Polyform Noncommercial, free for personal, educational, research, charitable and public-sector use, and use where money changes hands takes a commercial licence, which costs a donation to an Alzheimer’s fund in memory of Terry Pratchett.

Findings¶

What an engagement finds about an organisation belongs to that organisation. Findings do not go into talks, writing or marketing, anonymised or otherwise, without written consent.

Liability¶

The company cannot be sued, on account of not existing. The woman can, and carries professional indemnity insurance.

Money¶

The company sells no subscriptions and takes no donations, which leaves two boxes on the financial drawing empty. Suppliers that accept a transfer are paid by transfer, in euros, and the invoices are PDFs in a folder with sensible names.

Granny Weatherwax has never signed anything. A name written down, she says, is a name somebody else can pick up, and she has seen it done.