Privacy Policy

1. What We Collect, and When

Nothing in this section is collected simply because you read the site. Each item has a moment attached to it, and if you never reach that moment, we never hold it.

When you contact us or a provider

Our contact form and the inquiry form on each listing collect the name, email address and any phone number you enter, the subject you select, and the message you write. An inquiry is sent to the organization you chose so they can reply to you, and a copy reaches us. We ask you not to include medical details, and the forms say so.

When you subscribe to the newsletter

We store your email address, the topics you ticked, the fact that you consented, and the page you subscribed from. No topic is pre-ticked and we do not subscribe anyone automatically, including people who contact us for something else.

When you create an account

Accounts are handled by our authentication provider, which stores your email address and a cryptographic hash of your password. We never see your password. In our own records, an account may carry a display name and a phone number if you enter them, the listings you have saved and the names you gave your lists, and, if you manage a listing, the email address that grants you that access.

When you submit or claim a listing

We store what you enter about the organization, along with your name, email address, your stated role and, where a nonprofit discount is claimed, an EIN. The EIN is kept private and is used to check the discount. Business details are meant to be published; your personal contact details are not published unless you opt in to showing them.

When you send back a listing checklist

The questions on each listing can be answered and returned to us. We store your answers, the relationship you selected, and an email address if you give one. Nothing you send is published automatically, and answers are readable only by our reviewers.

Please do not name individual members of staff or describe another person's medical circumstances. Answers can contain information about people who are not you, and we would rather not hold it. We remove that material when we see it.

When you pay

Payments are taken by Stripe. Card numbers, security codes and billing addresses are entered on Stripe's own checkout and never reach our servers. What we store is an identifier for the customer and subscription, the plan, the billing interval and whether it is paid, so that we can tell what a listing is entitled to.

2. How We Count Activity, and What We Refuse to Store

Providers who pay for a listing can see how it is performing: how many visits it received, how many people tapped the phone number or clicked through to the website, how many inquiries and saves it got, and roughly where on the site those visitors came from.

That record deliberately cannot identify anybody. Our activity table has no IP address, no browser or device string, no session identifier, no visitor identifier and no account identifier. There is no column to join it to a person, so a request to hand over who looked at a particular nursing home is one we could not satisfy if we wanted to. Repeat visits are collapsed inside your own browser so our server never needs to recognise you coming back.

Providers can also see the words people searched before arriving at their listing, with one guard: a search term is only ever shown once at least three separate visits have used it, and anything resembling an email address or a phone number is stripped before the term is stored at all. A single person searching something specific and personal is not something we hand to the organization they were looking at.

This is the reason the site does not use a third-party product for per-listing statistics. Every one we looked at is built on identifying the visitor.

3. Cookies and Third-Party Analytics

The only cookie this site sets itself is the one that keeps you signed in, and it is only set if you have an account and sign in. Everything else the site remembers about your visit, such as which listings you have lined up to compare, is stored by your own browser and never sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears it.

We also offer Google Analytics, to understand overall traffic. Google Analytics sets its own cookies, and those are not necessary for the site to work, so we ask first. Until you choose to allow it, nothing from Google is loaded on this site and nothing is sent there. Ignoring the question counts as no.

If you do allow it, we have configured it to anonymize IP addresses, and we strip query strings before sending a page view, so search terms and anything else you type are not passed to Google.

You can change your mind at any time using the "Cookie choices" link at the bottom of any page. Turning it off stops analytics immediately and deletes the cookies Google set, without waiting for you to load another page. Your choice is remembered in your browser's own storage rather than in a cookie, because recording a refusal of non-essential cookies in a non-essential cookie would be absurd.

Whichever you choose, we still count anonymous visits to each listing so that a provider can see whether anyone found them. Those counts are described in the section above and have no way to identify you. We would rather say that here than let you believe declining makes you invisible to us.

You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the necessary cookie will stop parts of the site working, such as staying signed in.

We do not use advertising trackers, we do not run retargeting pixels, and we do not allow third parties to build a profile of you across other websites from your use of this site.

4. Sensitive Information

The subject of this site is who a person is. Some laws, including California's, treat sexual orientation and gender identity as sensitive personal information, and using a directory of LGBTQIA+-affirming care can imply something about a person whether or not they ever tell us anything.

So we take a position on it rather than a disclaimer:

• We never ask your sexual orientation or gender identity, and you do not need to tell us either to use anything on the site.
• We do not infer it, record an inference, or use one to target anything at you.
• We do not put personal or sensitive information in URLs or query strings, where it would end up in browser history, server logs and referrer headers.
• We do not sell or share sensitive personal information, and we do not use it for the purposes that would trigger a right to limit its use under California law.
• Saved lists and account details are private to your account and are never shown publicly or given to a provider.

If you are researching on behalf of someone who is not out, or from a device other people use, the most protective thing you can do is to use the site without an account. Everything except saved lists works without one.

5. How We Use Information

We use what we collect to:

• Answer you, and pass an inquiry to the organization you chose
• Run your account, your saved lists and your preferences
• Send the newsletter you asked for, and messages about something you did, such as confirming a claim
• Review submissions, claims and checklist answers, and keep listings accurate
• Show a provider how their own listing is performing, in the aggregate form described above
• Take payment and manage subscriptions
• Detect and prevent spam, fraud, abuse and security problems
• Meet legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Use

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not use it to train machine-learning models, and we do not give it to anyone who does.

6. Who Else Sees It

The provider you contacted

An inquiry goes to the organization you selected, with the contact details you entered, because that is the point of sending it. It goes to no other provider, and we do not offer providers a list of people who were looking at their category or their area.

The companies that run the site for us

We use a small number of vendors, each handling data on our instructions: Vercel for hosting and content delivery, Supabase for the database, sign-in and uploaded photos, Stripe for payments, Resend for sending email, and Google Analytics as described above. When you use the distance search, the location text you type is sent to a public postcode lookup service to turn it into a coordinate; the request is made by our server, so your own device is not exposed to it.

Legal and safety

We may disclose information where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to comply with the law or valid legal process, to enforce our Terms of Use, to investigate fraud, abuse or a security incident, or to protect the rights or safety of a person or of the public. If we receive a legal demand for information about a user, we will give you notice unless we are prohibited from doing so.

If the business changes hands

If the site is sold, merged or reorganised, information may transfer as part of that transaction, and the recipient would remain bound by this policy for information collected under it. We would post notice of the change before it took effect.

7. Information About Organizations, and About the People Who Run Them

Most listings were built from public sources rather than submitted to us: an organization's own website, published credential registers, government licensing records and federal inspection data. For a large residence that is information about a business. For a sole practitioner, such as an elder-law attorney or an estate agent listed under their own name, business information and personal information are the same thing, and we treat it accordingly.

If you are listed and you want your listing corrected, restricted or removed, write to us and we will act on it. We do not require you to prove a legal ground first, and we do not make removal conditional on buying anything.

Some listings show records published by government regulators, including inspection findings and penalties. Those come from the public record and we link to the source. We can correct how we present a record, and we can update a stale one, but we cannot change what a regulator published.

8. How Long We Keep It

We keep information for as long as it is doing the job it was collected for, and no longer. In practice that means:

• Inquiries and contact messages: about two years, so a question about what was said can still be answered.
• Submissions and claims: for as long as the listing exists. They are the record of who asked for what, and on what basis a listing says what it says.
• Newsletter subscriptions: until you unsubscribe. We then keep your email address on a suppression list only, so that we do not mail you again by mistake.
• Accounts, profiles and saved lists: until you ask us to close the account, which we then do promptly.
• Checklist answers: until reviewed and either acted on or rejected. We do not keep an answer we have decided not to use.
• Listing activity records: these are aggregate counts that identify nobody, and older records are cleared once they stop being useful for the rolling comparison a provider sees.
• Payment records: as long as tax and accounting law requires, currently seven years.
• Administrative audit records: these log which reviewer changed which listing, not anything a visitor did, and are kept as the accountability record for the directory.

Ask us to delete something sooner and we will, unless we are required to keep it.

9. Security

Data is held in the United States. Connections to the site are encrypted, passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and never stored by us, card details never reach our systems, and the most sensitive tables, including checklist answers, are readable only by our own reviewing process and not by any signed-in user.

No system is perfectly secure and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach affects your personal information we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

10. Your Rights and How to Use Them

You can ask us to give you a copy of the personal information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or stop using it for a particular purpose. Email hello@chosenyears.com and say what you want. There is no form and no charge.

We will confirm receipt within 10 days and answer within 45 days, and we will tell you if we need longer. We may need to check that a request is really coming from you, and we will only ask for what is needed to do that. You can use an authorised agent. We will never treat you differently, charge you more, or give you a worse service because you exercised a right.

Depending on where you live these rights may come from a specific law, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, and some of them may be qualified. We would rather honour a request than argue about whether a statute compels us to, so we apply the same process to everyone who asks.

If you have an account you can edit your profile and remove saved listings yourself at any time. You can also close the account yourself, from the bottom of your account page: it deletes the account, your profile and your saved lists straight away. If you manage a listing, the listing stays published and goes back to being unclaimed, because it is a directory entry about an organization rather than personal information about you. You can still email hello@chosenyears.com from the address on the account if you would rather we did it. Every newsletter we send carries an unsubscribe link, one click and no sign-in, and you can also unsubscribe by replying to any of them or by writing to the same address.

11. Children

This site is for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, email hello@chosenyears.com and we will delete it.

12. Other Websites

We link to provider websites, government registers and other resources. Once you follow a link you are on somebody else's site, under their privacy practices, and we have no control over what they collect.

13. Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially reduces the protection described here, we will say so prominently on the site rather than relying on you to notice a new date.

14. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: hello@chosenyears.com. Chosen Years is operated by Signal Grove Digital.