What's actually in the BookTarot ethics code, and why

We have a reader ethics code. It lives at /ethics on this site, it has eight articles, and every reader on the platform has signed it. We enforce it. We've removed readers for breaking it. We will keep doing so.

We're writing this post because we think a lot of platforms have ethics statements that exist for marketing reasons, and we want to make a specific argument that ours is different. The articles in our code did not come out of a brand brainstorming meeting. Each one came out of a specific incident, either on our platform or in the industry around us, that taught us something we then wrote down. We're going to walk through each article and tell you the story behind it. The point of this post is not to congratulate ourselves. The point is to explain why the rule exists.

A note on what we're not going to do. We're not going to name names. The incidents that involve our own platform involve real readers and real clients, and we will protect both. The incidents that involve other platforms are easy to find in public reporting if you want to read them. We will gesture at them but we will not turn this post into a takedown.

Article I · No fear-selling, no extension-pricing, no curse removal upsells

This is the first article on the page, and it is first on purpose. It says, in plain language, that no reader on BookTarot may use fear to sell additional services, may not tell a client they have a curse that requires a paid removal, may not invent a deadline that creates urgency to book again, and may not charge by the minute in a way that incentivises drawing the session out.

This article exists because the per-minute reading industry has, for forty years, run a reasonably well-documented operation in which clients in vulnerable states are told they are cursed, blocked, or being targeted, and that the reader can fix it for a fee that escalates with each session. The pattern has been written about in the New York Times, in The Guardian, in numerous state attorney general reports. We did not invent the awareness of this problem. We are simply not willing to be a platform on which it can recur.

The reason this rule is article I, and not buried in article VI, is that we want every reader who reads the code to be told, before anything else, that this is the line. There is no version of this work that involves convincing a frightened person that you can lift a curse for nine hundred dollars. If you think that's an acceptable thing to do, BookTarot is not the platform for you, and we will be relieved when you go elsewhere.

We have removed two readers under this article in the platform's history. Both were within the first eighteen months. Neither appealed.

Article II · The reading ends with the client's agency intact

Article II says that a reading must leave the client with the ability to make their own decisions. Readers may offer interpretations, observations, and possibilities. They may not deliver verdicts that override the client's authorship of their own life.

This article was written after a session, early in our platform's history, in which a client came to us in a confused state about a marriage, and the reader, well-meaning but inexperienced, told her directly that the cards were saying she should leave. The client left her marriage within the week. The marriage may or may not have been the right one to leave, and we will not adjudicate that. The problem we wanted to address was that the client made the decision under the impression that an external authority had told her what to do, and we did not want to be the platform on which that authority was conferred.

The article exists to make clear that the reader's job is to clarify, not to decide. Practically, this means a few specific things: no language like "the cards say you should." No directives that involve significant life choices. No reading that ends without the client having stated, in their own words, what they think and what they're going to do. Readers are coached on this in onboarding. We monitor for it in session recordings where the client has consented to that monitoring.

We have not removed any readers under article II, but we have given coaching feedback under it about thirty times. The article works mostly as an upstream guardrail.

Article III · Identity verification is non-negotiable

This is the article that requires every reader to have passed our verification process before taking a single booking. We verify legal identity through a third-party service. We verify professional experience. We require a video introduction. We require references from prior clients or colleagues, with consent. We re-verify yearly.

This article exists because the online reading industry has a long and ugly history of fraud. People reading under fake names. People claiming credentials they don't have. People who have been removed from one platform appearing on another within days under a new identity. The clients have, historically, had no real way to tell the difference between a verified reader and someone who set up a profile last Tuesday.

We made identity verification non-negotiable because we believe the verification is the floor of any meaningful trust. A client who books a reading on our platform should know, at a minimum, that the person they are about to spend an hour with is who they say they are, has the experience they claim, and can be held accountable by name if something goes wrong.

We have rejected approximately 230 reader applications in the last year under article III, mostly for unverifiable credentials or unwillingness to complete the process. We do not regret any of those rejections.

Article IV · No reading on behalf of a third party without consent

This article is the one that took us longest to write, because it required nuance. It says a reader may not perform a reading whose subject is a specific identifiable third party who has not consented to be read about.

In plain English: if a client comes in and asks "what is my ex-boyfriend thinking right now," the reader is not allowed to read the cards as if they are reporting on the ex-boyfriend's interior life. The reader can read the client's situation. The reader can read what the client is feeling about the ex-boyfriend. The reader cannot deliver a reading whose claims are about the third party's thoughts, intentions, or actions.

This article was written after a string of sessions, across multiple readers, in which clients had been given specific claims about what former partners were thinking, doing, or about to do. Several of those claims were repeated by clients on social media in ways that named the third parties. In one case, the third party found the post and contacted us. The story they told us, about being publicly described based on the contents of a reading they had not consented to, was the moment we knew we had to write the article.

We do not believe the cards can report on someone else's interior life in the way pop-tarot culture sometimes suggests. We do believe that even if they could, doing so without the subject's consent is not something we are willing to host. The article protects the third party. It also, incidentally, protects the client, because readings about other people often substitute for the client's own work on themselves, and that substitution is rarely useful.

We have given coaching feedback under article IV more than under any other article. Old habits in this industry die hard. The line is now well-understood by our reader community, and we are seeing fewer issues each quarter.

Article V · Crisis escalation is mandatory, not optional

Article V says that if a client expresses, during a session, that they are in immediate crisis (acute suicidal ideation, ongoing domestic violence, severe self-harm, a child in immediate danger), the reader must stop the tarot work and provide them with appropriate crisis resources for their jurisdiction. The reader must, after the session, log the escalation with our trust and safety team within four hours.

This article was written in the months after a session that I want to describe with care. A client, in a regular reading, disclosed a level of distress that the reader had not been prepared for. The reader, by their own later account, handled it about as well as a private individual could be expected to handle it. They listened. They were kind. They got the client through the next forty minutes. They did not, however, know what specific resources to direct the client toward, and they did not have a process for telling us afterward, and the client's situation was something we'd have wanted to check on and didn't know how to.

The client is fine now. We have been in touch. They consented to us using the broad shape of the story in this post.

We rebuilt our crisis protocol after that session. Every reader on the platform is now trained on the signs of acute crisis, has a one-page reference of jurisdiction-appropriate hotlines and resources for the countries where they read, and has a clear obligation to log escalations within four hours so that we can offer additional support to the client. We pay readers for the time spent on these escalations. We are not asking them to do additional unpaid work for our peace of mind.

We have processed approximately forty article V escalations in the last year. We do not know what would have happened to those forty people without the article. We are glad we don't have to find out.

Article VI · Confidentiality, with named exceptions

This article says readers may not discuss the contents of a session with anyone outside the reader-client relationship, with named exceptions: the reader may consult with our trust and safety team if they have a concern, may discuss the session in anonymised form for the purpose of professional supervision or training, and must comply with any legal obligation to disclose.

The article exists because readings cover, routinely, some of the most private material in a person's life. Affairs. Estrangements. Medical fears. Financial collapse. The client needs to be able to bring those things to the cards without fearing that the contents will end up in a podcast, a substack, or a casual conversation.

We were not motivated to write this article by a specific bad incident on our own platform. We were motivated by being a participant in a broader online reading culture where readings have, on multiple occasions, ended up as content. We did not want to be the platform on which that became routine. The article also has a practical effect for readers, which is that it gives them a clear answer when a friend or family member asks them about a session: I can't talk about it.

The named exceptions are important. We do want readers to be able to consult with our team when they have a concern. We do want readers to participate in supervision and training, which require talking about cases. The article protects the client by drawing a clear line around when, and how, those conversations can happen.

Article VII · Pricing is transparent, fixed, and disclosed

Article VII requires that every reader publish their full pricing on their profile, that no session may be extended into additional billed time without explicit client consent, and that no service may be sold during a session whose price was not disclosed before the session began.

This is, in many ways, the structural article. It defines the business model. The reason it's an ethics article and not a terms of service article is that we believe pricing transparency is an ethics question, not a logistics one. A client should know exactly what they are paying for, exactly how long it will last, and exactly what additional services are or are not available, before they sit down with a reader.

The article was written in response to industry practice that we think is indefensible. Specifically, we think the per-minute model creates structural pressure to extend sessions in ways the client did not anticipate, and the "additional services" upsell during emotionally vulnerable moments is, frankly, predatory. We have built our entire pricing structure to make those things impossible on our platform. The article codifies that the structure is not just a business choice but a value.

We have not had to remove any readers under article VII because the structure makes it nearly impossible to violate without a deliberate workaround. The article is mostly a statement of why the structure exists.

Article VIII · The code is public, enforced, and revised in public

The final article says the ethics code will be published in full, will be enforced visibly, and will be revised in public when revision becomes necessary. Revision means: when we change an article, we say what changed, when, and why. We do not quietly edit the page.

This article exists because we believe a private ethics code is not really an ethics code. It is a marketing asset. A code that can be changed without notice, enforced selectively, or pointed at in defence without being applied in practice is worse than no code at all, because it offers the appearance of trust without the substance.

We publish removals in aggregate. We publish coaching actions in aggregate. We publish the revisions when they happen. We will keep doing so.

The argument we want to leave you with

A lot of platforms have ethics pages. Most of them, if you read them carefully, are vague enough to commit to nothing. They use phrases like "we strive to maintain the highest standards" without specifying what those standards are, what happens when they're violated, or who decides.

We wrote ours the other way around. Every article is specific. Every article came from a real situation. Every article has consequences we will execute. We did not put this together because it was good for our brand. We put it together because we are reading for people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, and a platform that does not have a serious enforced code is, in our view, not really a serious platform.

If you read tarot, and you're looking for a platform to read on, we'd ask you to look at the ethics page of any platform you consider, including ours. If you book tarot, and you're looking for somewhere to book, we'd ask the same. The shape of the code tells you most of what you need to know about what the platform is for.

Ours is for you. The whole code is at /ethics. Read it. Tell us if we missed anything.