Effective 18 September 2026, updated 5 October 2026. Applies to villageapothecarytraining.com and the letters we send from it. Village Apothecary is the operator.
That is the whole list. We do not collect your name unless you put it in a display name or on your record of hours. If you subscribe, payment is taken by Stripe: we keep the customer number Stripe gives us and whether your subscription is live, and we never see or store your card. We have no advertising, no analytics service and no tracking pixels.
We use this information to run the game and to write to you about it. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it for anyone else's marketing.
We set one cookie, called va_session. It says who you are to the site, is signed so it cannot be forged, and lasts thirty days for an account or one hundred and eighty days for a sample. It is essential to the site working and carries nothing else. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is no banner to click.
Clearing cookies signs you out. Nothing is lost; sign in again.
We send four kinds of email, and nothing else.
Letters other than sign-in codes come from hello@villageapothecarytraining.com.
What you post there is visible to every signed-in student and to sample visitors. Choose a display name you are comfortable with; it does not need to be your real name. You can remove your own posts. We may remove posts that name the people students consult, or that are not study talk. Removed posts are hidden, not erased at once, so we can review a dispute; they are erased with your account if you ask us to delete it.
If you make a record of your clinical hours, you type the name that should appear on it, and we give the record a code. Anyone who has that code can see the name you typed and your tally: total hours, clients per shelf, and the dates. They cannot see your email address, your answers, or anything else. The code is only on your record, so it reaches only the people you show the record to. You can change the name at any time, and if you ask us to delete your account the record goes with it.
We are a small operation and rely on a few services to run the site. Each one handles only what its job needs.
These providers are based in the United States and store data there. We do not hand your information to anyone else, except if the law requires it.
Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or ask us to stop writing to you. Write from the email on your account so we know it is you. We answer within thirty days, and usually much sooner.
Deleting your account removes your casebook, your progress, your common room posts, your letter records and your address from our database, and cannot be undone. Our providers clear their backups on their own schedules, within a few weeks.
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our basis for holding your information is that it is necessary to provide the game you asked for, and, for the Monday letter, your consent, which you may withdraw at any time. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
If you are in California, we do not sell or share personal information as those words are defined there, and the rights above are yours to use.
The site is served only over an encrypted connection. Session cookies are signed so they cannot be forged. The database is reachable only from our own server code, never from a browser. Sign-in is by one-time code, so there is no password for anyone to steal. Codes and sample requests are rate-limited. No system is perfectly secure, and if we ever learn of a breach that affects you we will tell you.
The site is for adults studying herbal medicine and is not directed at children under sixteen. We do not knowingly keep an account for anyone under sixteen. If you believe a child has made one, write to us and we will remove it.
If we change this policy we will change the date at the top and, for anything that matters, mention it in the Monday letter. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.
Village Apothecary, hello@villageapothecarytraining.com.