raffkarva.com belongs to me, Raff Karva, a freelance individual from Edinburgh, Scotland.
raffkarva.com is a self-contained website hosted in Stockholm, Sweden. I am the only person with access to the backend of this website. No other individuals or organisations have access to the website's files or folders.
This website does not automatically collect personal information. Any personal information you share with me is provided voluntarily, either through the contact form or when placing an order through the print store. I do not use cookies to track your activity, and all analytics features that could be disabled have been switched off from day one.
This website is built from the ground up not to make any calls to external sources. If you visit my website, your browser should only connect to raffkarva.com — with the exception of the Print Store, where clicking the checkout button will take you to Stripe's payment page, as described below.
Server Analytics
For safety and security reasons, the server where this website is hosted automatically logs the following technical information:
- Visitors' public IP address
- Visitors' country of origin based on IP address (not physical location)
- Visitors' operating system
- Visitors' browser
- Date and time of request
- Pages visited
This data is only available to me in aggregate form. In practice, assuming a single visitor at a time, I can see your public IP address, the country it is registered to (although I cannot see your city — this can be verified independently using a tool such as whatismyipaddress.com), your operating system, browser, the time of your visit, and which pages you viewed.
This is the minimum amount of information needed to differentiate genuine visitors from malicious bots and actors, and is standard practice across all websites and servers. While this information alone cannot identify an individual, a static IP address makes most internet users identifiable — which is why adopting basic online privacy measures is important and recommended to everyone.
If you don't already do so, I highly recommend using a reliable, secure, zero-knowledge open-source VPN such as IVPN (https://ivpn.net) or Mullvad VPN (https://mullvad.net), which replaces your actual IP address with one shared among many users, protecting your online activity from being traced back to you.
Cloudflare Bot Protection
This website is protected by Cloudflare bot protection. Prior to enabling it, the site was being crawled by hundreds of thousands of automated requests per day, consuming the majority of available bandwidth. Cloudflare is widely regarded as the industry standard for this kind of protection — it operates at a scale and reliability that no self-hosted solution can realistically match, and once configured it requires no ongoing maintenance.
When you visit raffkarva.com, your browser performs a DNS lookup to find the site's IP address. This returns a Cloudflare IP, as Cloudflare acts as a proxy firewall in front of the site — inspecting incoming requests and blocking malicious bot traffic before anything reaches the origin server. The origin server, where raffkarva.com is actually hosted, is located in the EU. Cloudflare's involvement is limited to traffic filtering; the website's content is served from EU infrastructure.
Cloudflare aims to route your connection through the nearest available server for optimal speed and reliability — for example, if your connection originated in Europe, you will most likely be routed through a European server. However, this depends on traffic volume, and a different route may be taken to ensure speed and reliability. For details about how Cloudflare's bot protection works, please refer to Cloudflare's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
Print Store
The prints section of this website offers fine art photographic prints for purchase. Purchasing a print involves Stripe, a third-party payment processor. When you click the checkout button, you will be directed to Stripe's secure payment page, which operates under its own privacy policy. Once an order is placed, fulfilment is handled by AM Imaging, an Edinburgh-based fine art print studio, on my behalf — customers do not interact with AM Imaging directly.
Stripe (https://stripe.com) handles all payment processing. I do not see, store, or have access to your payment card details at any point — these are handled entirely by Stripe. Stripe may collect your name, email address, billing address, and payment information in order to process your transaction. Please refer to Stripe's Privacy Policy at https://stripe.com/gb/privacy for full details.
AM Imaging (https://amimage.co.uk) is the Edinburgh print studio that produces all orders. Orders are placed by me directly — your personal details are never passed to or seen by AM Imaging.
I will retain your order details (name, delivery address, and order information) for as long as required by UK tax and accounting law, after which they will be deleted.
Client Image Downloads
Some clients are provided with a login to access a private area of this website for downloading images in bulk. These accounts are created by me — there is no self-registration. Usernames contain no personal information and are used solely for identification in my admin dashboard. No email addresses, full names, or other personal details are collected or stored as part of this process.
Information You Share
Apart from all the above, the only other information I collect is what you decide to share with me. If you fill out the contact form, you may choose to provide your name (though a nickname is absolutely fine). If you would like me to contact you back, you may provide your email address. Alternatively, you are welcome to send me a SimpleX link for fully anonymous, end-to-end encrypted communication if you prefer E2EE means.
SimpleX (https://simplex.chat) is a European, free, open-source, decentralised, end-to-end encrypted messenger that requires no sign-ups, phone numbers, email addresses, or even random user codes. It can be self-hosted and runs on a decentralised network of European servers.
Data Usage and Retention
Once you share your information with me, I will use it only to provide the service you enquired about: reply to your query, send you a quote, or process your order. I will not sell your details to third parties, and I will not share your details with anyone beyond what is necessary to fulfil your order (see Print Store above). Once our contract ends, I will delete your details from the server.
I may store your contact details locally on my devices in an encrypted contacts app on an encrypted drive. These devices do not sync or backup to any servers. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to know which of your information I hold or to request that it be deleted.
Policy Updates
This Privacy Policy is subject to change as this website evolves.
Contact
If you have any questions or would like to raise any concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me via the contact form.