Privacy

People arrive at this subject having already been embarrassed once. So rather than a policy written to satisfy a lawyer, here are the questions a reader would actually ask, answered specifically. The short version is that this site collects nothing about you, and the rest of the page explains what “nothing” does and does not cover.

Does this site know I read the prolapse page?

No. There is no analytics on Credence Therapy Notebook. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no Hotjar, no heatmaps, no session recording, no advertising tags, no third party scripts of any kind. Nobody here can see which pages you opened, in what order, or for how long. There is no dashboard anywhere showing that.

Then how do you know anyone reads it at all?

Mostly we do not, and we have decided that is an acceptable trade for a site about bladders and bowels. If a privacy respecting analytics tool is ever added, it will be one that stores no cookies and builds no cross site profile, this page will say so before it goes live, and the site will still never link a page view to a person.

What does the hosting see?

Something, and it is worth being precise rather than reassuring. The pages are delivered by a content delivery network, Bunny, which operates edge servers around the world. Like every web server in existence, those edges record ordinary request data in their logs: your IP address, the URL requested, the time, and your browser’s user agent string. That is how a web request works, not a choice this site made, and it is the one place a record of a page request exists at all. Those logs are Bunny’s, they are held for a short retention period and then discarded, and nobody here queries them.

Are there cookies?

No. The site sets none. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. Nothing is stored in your browser’s local storage either.

Is anything embedded from another company?

No. No fonts loaded from a font service, no embedded videos, no maps, no social buttons, no comment widget, no chat widget. Every asset comes from this domain. That matters more than it sounds: an embedded font or a share button is enough to tell a third party which page you were on.

What happens to an email I send?

It arrives in a mailbox and is read by one person. It is used to reply to you and for nothing else. It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list. It is deleted once the exchange is finished.

Please read the contact page before writing, because there is a list of things that should never be emailed. Continence, bowel function, sexual function, obstetric injury and pregnancy loss are special category health data under UK and EU data protection law, and this site has no secure system for holding any of it. If you send it anyway, it will be used only to answer you and then removed.

Is the forum private?

The opposite. Between appointments is a public, permanent, indexable part of this website. Anything in a post can be read by anyone, including people who know you, and can be found by search engines years later.

There is a less obvious risk worth naming. A post describing a birth injury in enough detail identifies a hospital, a date and sometimes a clinician, even when it names nobody. That is why the forum rules prohibit naming individual clinicians, practices or hospitals: it protects third parties who cannot answer back, and it protects you from having written something you cannot take out of the search index.

What are my rights over my data?

Where you live determines the exact wording, but broadly you can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, and object to a use of it. In practice the honest answer here is that the only personal data this site holds is an email you chose to send, so a request usually amounts to asking for that email to be deleted, which is done on request and without argument. Write to the address on the contact page.

Is this site for children?

No. It is written for adults and covers material that would be inappropriate for children. Nothing is knowingly collected from anyone below the age at which they can consent to processing where they live, which is easier to promise on a site that collects nothing.

Will this page change?

If the site’s technical setup changes, yes, and the revised date above will move when it does. Any change that adds a new form of measurement or a new third party will be described here before it is switched on, not afterwards. If something on this page is unclear or looks wrong, please say so.