Privacy Policy

Who we are

ClinicCompass is an aesthetic medicine directory operating in the United States of America and Canada, founded and run by John Blackwood. We help people find med spas, dermatologists, and plastic surgeons, compare treatments and local costs, and request consultations. You can read more about who we are and how we work on our about page and in our Editorial and Data Policy.

We are not a healthcare provider. We do not diagnose, treat, or give medical advice, and using this site does not create a doctor-patient relationship.

For any question, correction, deletion request, or complaint about your information, email hello@thecliniccompass.com. It reaches the person responsible for privacy here directly.

What we do with a consultation request

This is the part that matters most, so it goes first. ClinicCompass is a routing service. When you submit the consultation form, we take what you gave us and pass it to the clinic or clinics matched to your city and treatment, so they can contact you. We are not a middleman that studies your request. We move it along and record that it happened.

What you give us in that form:

• your name, phone number, and email address
• the city you selected
• the treatment or procedure you are interested in
• your preferred contact time
• anything you choose to write in the message field

The treatment you select says something about your health interests, so we treat it as sensitive and handle it accordingly. You choose what to put in the message field, so please do not include medical history, diagnoses, images, or anything else you would not want passed along. Whatever you write there goes to the clinic exactly as you wrote it.

Other information we collect

If you list or claim a clinic: your clinic's name, your name, work email, phone number, city, website, and chosen plan. If you subscribe to a paid listing, our payment processor collects your card details directly. We never see or store your full card number.

If you create a clinic account: your email address and a password, held by our authentication provider in encrypted form.

Automatically, when you browse: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, how you arrived, and how you interact with the site. This comes from standard web server logs and from analytics cookies.

We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

Why we use it

• To connect you with a clinic. The reason we ask at all. Your details go to the matched clinic so they can contact you about a consultation.
• To understand what the directory is doing. We count how many requests each city and treatment produces. Those counts are what tell us which pages to build next, and they are what we show clinics when they ask whether a listing is worth paying for. The counts do not contain your name or contact details.
• To run the business side: clinic billing, support, and reporting.
• To meet legal and tax obligations.

Where the law requires consent for sensitive information, we rely on the consent you give when you submit the form. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing us, though we cannot recall information already passed to a clinic.

Who we share it with

The clinic we match you to. This is the point of the service. Once your details reach a clinic, that clinic handles them under its own privacy practices, which we do not control. If you want to know how a specific clinic handles your information, ask them directly.

The service providers who run the site for us:

• Netlify, website hosting and form submissions
• Supabase, our clinic database, images, and account sign-in
• Stripe, payment processing for paid clinic listings
• Google Analytics 4, website analytics

What we send to Google Analytics, precisely. When you submit the form we record that a request happened, along with the treatment you selected, the city, and the page you were on. We do not send your name, email address, or phone number to Google Analytics. Google Signals is turned off on our property and it is not connected to any advertising account, so this is not used to build advertising audiences or to track you across devices.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertising networks or data brokers. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone's safety.

Where your information is processed

Our service providers operate in the United States and elsewhere, so your information may be processed outside your home country, including outside Canada. Where that happens it is protected by our contracts with those providers and by the laws of the country it is processed in, which may differ from your own.

How long we keep it

• Consultation requests: 12 months, then deleted. We keep them that long so we can answer any question about a referral we made. You can ask us to delete yours sooner.
• Request counts by city and treatment: kept indefinitely. These are totals with no personal information in them.
• Clinic account and billing records: while the account is active, and afterwards as long as tax and accounting rules require.
• Analytics data: 14 months.

Your choices

Wherever you live, email hello@thecliniccompass.com to ask what we hold about you and get a copy, correct anything inaccurate, ask us to delete it, withdraw consent for future contact, or complain about how we handled your information. We respond within 30 days, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

In Canada, these rights are yours under PIPEDA and, in Quebec, under Law 25. If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

In California, you have rights under the CCPA and CPRA, including to know, delete, correct, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined there.

In Washington State, the treatment you tell us about may be consumer health data under the My Health My Data Act. The rights above apply to it.

Cookies

We use cookies necessary for the site to work, and Google Analytics cookies that help us understand how the site is used. You can block or delete cookies in your browser. Blocking analytics cookies does not affect your ability to use the site or request a consultation.

Security

We use encrypted connections, established providers, and access controls. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot promise absolute security. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify the people affected and the appropriate regulator as the law requires.

Changes

We will post any changes on this page and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will flag it on the site rather than quietly editing this page.