Privacy policy

What we collect when you contact a practice

The request form on our treatment, practice and city pages collects exactly these things, and nothing else:

• Your name, phone number and email address
• Your preferred contact time
• Any message you choose to write
• Which city, treatment and practice page you submitted from
• Campaign parameters from the link you arrived through, if any (attribution only)
• A salted hash of your IP address and browser user agent
• The exact consent wording shown to you, and the moment you agreed to it

What we deliberately do not collect

We do not ask for health or dental history, symptoms, insurance ID numbers, or your date of birth, and the form has no field for any of them. Please do not put medical or insurance details in the free-text message — that conversation belongs directly with the practice.

We never store your IP address or user agent. Both are combined with a secret salt and hashed with SHA-256 before anything is written down. The result cannot be turned back into your IP address, and we use it only to stop the form being abused and to apply submission limits.

Who we share it with

When you submit the form we pass your name, contact details, preferred time and message toone dental practice — the one matched to your request, named in the confirmation email we send you. That is the purpose you gave us the information for.

If we cannot match you immediately, your request waits in our internal queue until a member of our team assigns it, and we will tell you who it went to.

We do not sell personal data. We do not share it with anyone other than the matched practice and the service providers who operate this site on our behalf — currently our hosting provider, our database provider, and our email provider. Once a practice has your details, their own privacy policy governs what they do with them.

Your consent

You consent explicitly, by ticking an unticked box, before anything is sent. We store the wording you agreed to word for word alongside the timestamp — so there is a record of exactly what was agreed, rather than our assertion that something was. You can see that record by asking us for it.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email hello@thetoothdirectory.com and we will action it. Deleting a request removes it from our systems; if it has already reached a practice, you would need to contact them separately about their copy.

Cookies

The public pages of this site set no cookies at all — no advertising, no analytics, no tracking. The only cookie we set is a sign-in session for practice and staff accounts, and only once someone signs in.

How long we keep it

Contact requests are kept for [RETENTION PERIOD], after which they are deleted. Abuse-prevention hashes are kept for a short rolling window and pruned automatically.

[RETENTION PERIOD] to be set before launch, alongside legal review.

Getting in touch

For anything on this page, including deletion requests, write tohello@thetoothdirectory.com.