Privacy policy
What personal data we collect, who gets it and why.Who we are
MyLocalDentists is a trading name of Property Architecture Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17536132, registered office 90 Hendon Lane, London N3 3SL. Property Architecture Ltd runs mylocaldentists.co.uk and is the controller of the personal data described here. Contact us at [email protected].
Enquiries to a practice
When you send an enquiry from a practice profile we collect what you type into the form:
- your name, email address and message;
- your phone number and the service you are asking about, if you give them.
We store the enquiry in our database and email it to that one practice, at the email address on its listing. It is never sent to any other practice, sold or shared for marketing. We email you a copy. We also send a copy to the site operator at [email protected], which we use to check that enquiries are delivered and to deal with abuse or complaints. Once the practice has your enquiry, it holds that data under its own privacy policy.
Requests from our articles
The form on our articles and guides collects the treatment you choose, your postcode or town, your name, email address, phone number if you give one, and your message. We store it in our database and email it to the site operator at [email protected] so that we can reply to you. It is not sent to any practice, and we will not pass it on without asking you first. We normally email you a short confirmation. A salted hash of your IP address is kept with it to limit repeated or automated requests.
Reviews
When you write a review we store its text, rating, the month of your visit if you give it, and your email address. We do not ask what treatment you had. We use your email address to send you a link to confirm the review is yours, and to tell you whether it was published or why not; it is never shown publicly or given to the practice. If the practice has claimed its listing we ask it to confirm you were a patient, showing it only its own name, the month of your visit and the date you wrote, never what you wrote; otherwise a moderator checks. We have never stored treatment details with any review. We delete your email address 90 days after your review is published, rejected or removed, and we delete a review you never confirmed 30 days after we sent you the confirmation link. Published reviews are public. When your review is published we email you a link to change or withdraw it; it works for 30 days, or until we delete your email address if that is sooner, and you can ask for a new one from the link page while we still hold your address. A moderator checks a change before it replaces your published review. We keep your email address longer only while a change you sent is waiting for a moderator, or while your link still works. The text of an earlier, refused or withdrawn change is deleted 90 days after it was replaced, refused or withdrawn; its rating and dates stay. If you withdraw your review we delete it and any changes to it; we keep a record that a review was withdrawn, with its rating and dates, but not its text.
Accounts and sign-in
If you sign in we store your email address and name, your role on the site, and your shortlist, enquiries and reviews so that you can see them. Sign-in uses a one-time link sent by email. We set a sign-in session cookie so you stay signed in. We do not use advertising cookies, and analytics cookies only if you accept them (see Cookies).
Practices that claim a listing
To claim a listing we collect the CQC location ID you enter, your account details and the verification code we email (to the email address the listing shows, or the one you log in with), and the result of our instant check that your login email matches the practice's website or published email. If you pay for a listing, payment is taken by Stripe. We keep the payment reference, amount and invoice number; we do not receive your card number.
A practice on a paid listing may add a WhatsApp number to its profile. We store the number, whether the practice wants the button shown and when it confirmed the number is its business number and may be shown publicly. We show it only while the practice wants it shown and the listing is a paid listing that a moderator has not hidden; the practice can remove it at any time, and then we delete the number. Until the practice removes it we keep it, also while the button is not shown (for example after the listing stops being a paid listing).
Reporting a listing
If you use “Report this listing”, we store the reason and details you give, your email address if you give one, and a scrambled form of your internet address so we can limit how many reports one connection sends. We keep these in our records of actions on the site and email the report to our team, who use the email address only to reply to you about the report.
Messaging a practice on WhatsApp
If a practice adds a WhatsApp number, we show it on their profile because the practice asked us to. Tapping Message on WhatsApp takes you to WhatsApp, a service owned by Meta: what you send there goes from you to the practice through WhatsApp, under WhatsApp’s own terms and privacy policy, and we do not see it. We keep a count of taps per practice per day for 13 months and then delete it; the count does not record who tapped. To count each connection once a day, our server keeps a scrambled form of your internet address in memory for the rest of that day; it is never written down.
Where unclaimed listings come from
Practices that have not claimed a listing are listed from the Care Quality Commission’s published register of dental services (Open Government Licence v3.0): the practice name, address, postcode, phone number, website and CQC location ID. These are business details; we do not store the names of individual dentists or staff. A practice can ask us to remove its listing from its profile page, and we keep a record so it is not listed again.
Abuse prevention
To limit spam we keep a salted one-way hash of the IP address of each enquiry, together with the time it was sent. We cannot turn the hash back into an IP address.
Who processes data for us
- Resend sends our email (sign-in links, enquiries and copies, review and claim messages).
- Stripe processes payments for paid listings.
- Our servers are hosted with Hetzner, and Cloudflare sits in front of the site.
Why we use your data, and how long we keep it
We use it to run the service you asked for (delivering enquiries, publishing reviews, signing you in), to keep the site secure, and to meet legal duties. The legal bases are providing the service you asked for, our legitimate interests in running a trustworthy directory and preventing abuse, and our legal obligations. We keep enquiries that do not lead to work for up to 24 months, then delete them. We review enquiries and delete them by hand; deletion is not automated. Listing and review data are kept while the listing is live, plus any further period we need to meet legal or accounting obligations.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask to see, correct or delete your data, object to its use, and ask for a copy. Email [email protected]. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).