Privacy

What we collect, and when

Nothing at all unless you fill something in. There are four forms on this site.

• Asking a dentist for an appointment. Your name, phone number, email address, what you need, when suits you and anything you add in the notes box. We pass it to the practice you chose so they can reply to you, and we keep a copy so we can tell you what happened to it.
• Leaving a review of a practice. The name you give, your email address and what you wrote. The name and the review are published if we approve it. Your email address is not published: it is there so we can check the review is from a person.
• Reporting a problem with a listing. What you tell us and, if you leave one, your email address, so we can come back to you about it.
• Asking for a marketing leak check, or claiming a listing. The name, practice, email address, phone number, area and message you enter, plus anything you add to your listing, so we can prepare the report or publish the listing.

Searching by address

If you type a street address into the search box, it is sent to the US Census geocoder, a free federal service, to turn it into a point on the map, so the practices come back in order of how far they really are from that address rather than from the middle of a ZIP code. We keep the address you typed and the point it resolved to, so the same lookup is not made twice and so we can see which places people are searching around. It is not attached to a name, an email address or anything else you have sent us, and it is not passed to anybody. Typing a town or a ZIP code instead sends nothing anywhere: those are looked up on this server. If you would rather an address you typed was not kept, ask through the contact form and it will be deleted.

What we do with it

An appointment request goes to the practice it was addressed to and to nobody else. Everything else is used to answer you. We do not sell it, rent it, pass it to advertisers, or add you to a mailing list you did not ask for.

What is on the listing pages

Practice names, addresses, phone numbers and specialties come from the National Provider Identifier registry, a public record kept by the US government, not from anything a visitor does here. If you are a dentist and you want your listing removed, tell us through the report link on the page and we will remove it on your word alone.

How long we keep it

Until you ask us to delete it. Write to us through the contact form and we will remove your details and confirm it.

Cookies and tracking

This site does not set advertising cookies and does not run third party tracking scripts.

Visits, counted

We count page views so we can see which parts of the directory are used. There is no cookie and no identifier that follows you: your address and browser are turned into a one way daily code so two views in the same visit can be counted as one visit, and that code cannot be turned back into either.

We also work out which US state a visit came from, so we can tell whether the people reading about a town live anywhere near it. That is done on our own server, against a list of address ranges published by DB-IP that ships with this site, so your address is never sent anywhere. What we keep is the two letter state and nothing else: the address itself is not written down, here or anywhere.

Your patients' data

When we work with a practice we avoid handling patient records. Where a campaign needs patient contact details, they stay in your systems and we work to your instructions and your local privacy rules.