Privacy

Rather than describe this site’s data handling in the abstract, this page walks through it one surface at a time. There are four, and they behave differently. If you only care about one of them, read that section.

The short version: three of the four surfaces involve nothing that identifies you, and the fourth only involves what you deliberately typed into an email.

Surface 1: an article page

What is involved: the ordinary technical exchange required to send a page to a browser. Your IP address and browser type reach the content delivery network that serves the file, as they do for any website, and are used to deliver the page and to keep the service from being abused.

What is not involved: no account, no login, no sign up, no newsletter form, no comment box, no advertising network, no tracking pixel, no cross-site profile, no fingerprinting script, no third party embed loading from somewhere else and watching you arrive.

Analytics: where traffic is measured at all, it is with a privacy conscious tool configured to see as little as it can, with IP anonymisation, and it produces counts rather than people. The only question being asked of it is which pages are being read, so that the thin ones can be improved.

Cookies: kept to a minimum. Blocking or clearing them will not break anything you came here to read.

Surface 2: the green room

What is involved: less than you would expect, because the green room is not live software. It is a set of hand written discussions published as ordinary pages. There is no registration, no login, no reply box and no session state, so there is nothing for it to collect. Reading a thread is exactly the same transaction as reading an article, described above.

Why this matters here: on most forums, the health details people disclose are the biggest privacy problem the site has. Here they are not, because nothing you do while reading is recorded against you and there is no form through which you could disclose anything in the first place.

Surface 3: the inbox

What is involved: whatever you put in an email, plus your address and anything your own mail provider attaches. That is the only surface on this site where you can hand over personal information, and it is entirely under your control.

How it is handled: messages are read by one person, used to answer you or to correct a page, and then deleted once that is done. They are not added to a mailing list, not passed to anyone, and not kept as a record.

What should never be sent: the contact page carries the full list, and it is worth reading before you write. In summary: no artwork or recordings made in a therapy session, no photographs or video of a person with dementia, nothing identifying a child, and no diagnosis, care plan, medication list or clinical note. Material in those categories is deleted rather than filed, and email is not a secure or appropriate channel for any of it.

Corrections are different. If you write in about a factual error, the correction may end up visible on the page. The correction is published; you are not, unless you specifically ask to be credited.

Surface 4: an outbound link

What is involved: this site links out constantly, to registers, professional bodies, journals and health organisations, because a claim you cannot follow to its source is not worth much. The moment you follow one of those links you are on somebody else’s website under somebody else’s privacy policy.

What that means in practice: some of those destinations do things this site does not, including advertising cookies and analytics that are not anonymised. That is outside anyone’s control here and worth knowing, particularly with the searchable registers, where the search you run is a search on their system, not on this one.

No outbound link on this site is an affiliate link, and nobody is paid when you follow one.

Who else is involved

Only what is needed to publish a static website: a content delivery network to serve the pages, an email provider for the one address, and, if analytics are running, the privacy conscious tool named above. Nothing personal is sold, rented, shared or traded, and nothing is passed to anyone else except where the law requires it.

Your rights over what little there is

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask for a copy of anything held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, or to object to its use. In practice, on this site, the honest answer is usually that the only thing held is an email you sent, and it can be deleted on request within days. Ask through the contact page.

Children

This is written for an adult audience: carers, patients, and people working in health, care and the arts. It is not aimed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under the age at which they can consent to processing where they live. Please do not send anything about a child, and see the contact page for why.

Security, stated plainly

Reasonable technical and organisational care is taken over the small amount of data involved. No transmission over the internet can be guaranteed secure, which is the reason this page keeps repeating that sensitive clinical material should not be emailed anywhere, here included.

Changes

This page is revised as the site changes, and the date above shows the current version. If anything on it is unclear, ask.