Privacy

This page describes what this website does with information about you. It is written to be checked against the site itself, not to be taken on trust.

What we collect right now

Outside the chat assistant described below, the analytics described in the next section, which runs only if you accept it, and the hosting logs described at the end of this paragraph, nothing that identifies you. There is no account, no sign-up, no contact form in operation, and no newsletter. Outside that chat, we do not ask for your name, your email address or your phone number, and nowhere else on this site could send them to us. One thing happens on every visit all the same: the hosting service that delivers this site, Vercel, processes your IP address and the technical details of each request in order to deliver pages and prevent abuse, and may keep them in its access logs for a time; we build no profile of you from those logs, and we have added no log collection of our own.

There is a feature in our code that would let you collect questions while reading and keep them in your own browser's session storage. It is not rendered on any published page, so today nothing is written there at all. If it is ever switched on, it would hold a short list of question identifiers, never free text; it would not leave your device and it would disappear when you closed the tab. We describe it here because it exists in the repository you can read, not because it is running.

Analytics

With your explicit consent, we use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages are read. It runs only if you choose “Accept” in the cookie banner at the foot of the page; until you choose, and if you choose “Reject”, the analytics code is not loaded and your browser sends nothing to Google. The provider is Google Ireland Limited, with its affiliate Google LLC in the United States; data may be transferred to the United States under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension.

If you accept, Google Analytics records the address and title of each page you read, the page that referred you, a random client identifier stored in the _ga cookie, the length of your session and of your engagement with a page, and, through its enhanced measurement, scrolling, clicks on links to other sites, file downloads, form interactions, video interactions and site search terms; this site's search does not put your search terms in the page address, so they are not sent. It also records your approximate location (country and region, derived from your IP address), your device type (desktop, mobile or tablet), your operating system, your browser (main version only) and your language. Google states that Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses: it uses them to work out the approximate location and then discards them. Your city, your device model and brand, your screen resolution and the minor versions of your browser and operating system are not collected. We send it no name, email address or phone number. Google signals and ad personalisation are switched off, and we use no advertising features.

Google Analytics sets two first-party cookies on this site, _ga and _ga_ followed by a short code that identifies our Analytics property, which last 13 months. It keeps the event data, under the random identifier rather than your name, for 14 months.

Because the pages you read may reveal an interest in a health matter, we rely on your explicit consent: Articles 6(1)(a) and 9(2)(a) of the GDPR and the UK GDPR, regulation 6 of PECR and Article 82 of the Loi Informatique et Libertés. Your choice is kept in your browser's local storage, is not sent to our server, and is asked for again every six months. You can withdraw it at any time with “Cookie settings” at the foot of every page: from then on no new measurement is recorded, and the _ga cookies on this device are deleted. Data already sent stays in Google Analytics, under the random identifier, for at most 14 months.

Because this data is stored under a random identifier and not under your name, we can find your record only if you send us the value of your _ga cookie before you withdraw your consent, through the routes named under “Your rights” below.

Analytics code is allowed in one consent-gated loader file only. Our build runs an automated check that looks for analytics code outside that one file and for custom analytics events, and stops the build if it finds any. That check is part of the repository, not a promise in a paragraph.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies unless you accept Google Analytics, which then sets the two cookies described above. See the cookies page for the detail.

The question form that has not been built

Separately from the chat assistant described in the next section, a question form for a conversation with a dentist has been designed in our code but not built. There is no address to send anything to, and no way to reach the form that would use one. The interface is not imported by any published page, so its code is not even sent to your browser; the flag that would enable it is off, and while it is off the function that would transmit anything makes no network call at all. If that flag were switched on, the same function would still fail, because no endpoint exists. Three separate things would therefore have to change before anything could be collected. If that ever happens, it would collect a phone number and the questions you selected, for the purpose of opening a WhatsApp conversation, and nothing else. Free text would not be stored. This page would be rewritten to describe it precisely before the change, and the change would appear in the corrections log.

The chat assistant and WhatsApp

Pages on this site can show two options for a conversation: an instant chat in a window on this site, and a chat on WhatsApp. These options appear only when the service behind them is switched on; when it is off, they are not shown and nothing in this section takes place. Both lead to the same service, which is ours and not a clinic's: Melisa, SmileHandbook's AI assistant. Melisa is an AI system, not a person and not a dentist; it gives general information drawn from articles published on this site, and it does not diagnose or give personal treatment advice. The chat window is part of this site, and its code is loaded only when you open it. The WhatsApp option is a plain link that opens WhatsApp, a service of Meta, in a new tab.

When a conversation starts, with your first WhatsApp message or when you open the window, and before you agree to anything, the service opens a record of it: on WhatsApp this holds your WhatsApp number, or the user ID that WhatsApp gives it if you use a username, and the language you write in; in the window, the random session ID described on the cookies page and the language. The text of your first WhatsApp message is not stored and is not sent to the AI model; it is used only to recognise your language and to check for signs of an emergency. The assistant then sends a short notice and asks for your agreement with a button. After you agree, the messages you send and the assistant's replies are stored so that it can answer in context, and the latest of them, up to 20, are sent with each new message to Anthropic, whose AI model writes the replies; your number and your session ID are not attached to them. Phone numbers we recognise in your messages are replaced with “[phone number]” before a message is stored or sent to the AI model; even so, please do not write your phone number in the conversation itself: it is asked for only in the steps for a video call with a volunteer dentist. Only written messages are accepted: photos, X-rays, voice messages, videos and documents are not accepted and are not downloaded.

If you ask, the assistant can book a free WhatsApp video call with one of our volunteer dentists, at one of the free times our team has entered. It first asks for your agreement: if you book, your WhatsApp number, the time you choose and your language are passed to our team and to the volunteer dentist, who calls you at that time. Our team passes the booking on to the volunteer dentist by hand: there is no outside calendar and no automatic assignment to a dentist. On WhatsApp, the assistant uses the number you are writing from; in the window on this site, or on WhatsApp if WhatsApp does not give us your number, you write your WhatsApp number yourself, in international format, and confirm that it is your own. In that case the time you chose is held for 15 minutes while you write your WhatsApp number; once you have written it, you have another 15 minutes to confirm that it is your own (30 minutes at most). The booking is confirmed as soon as the number is settled, and you can cancel it with the button under the confirmation or by sending CANCEL. Our team receives each booking in its Telegram group: a booking code, the time, your language, the channel you used and your number. What you wrote in the chat is not sent there. If our team has to cancel a booking and the service cannot tell you, your number stays in that message so that someone can reach you by hand. The volunteer dentist is not named in this service. A video call cannot replace an in-person dental examination, and this site does not sell, arrange or book treatment.

If no free time is available, the assistant says so and offers instead to pass your WhatsApp number to our team, so that one of our volunteer dentists can get back to you with a WhatsApp video call. For that it asks you, step by step, for the number and your confirmation that it is your own, the language for the call, a part of the week from a fixed list, your country and a topic from a fixed list, and it asks for your agreement again before anything is passed on. Our team receives these details in the same Telegram group, without what you wrote in the chat. A request is closed after 7 days.

So that free times can also be shown in your own local time, the chat window sends your browser's time zone with each message; the service does not store it. To limit abuse, the service counts the window's requests from each internet address: it keeps a one-way fingerprint of the address, made with a secret key, together with that count, and deletes both within two days. The service itself does not store your IP address; the access logs of its host, Vercel, described above, apply here too. The service also keeps, for 7 days, a one-way fingerprint of each message's ID, so that the same message is not answered twice; it is not the message itself. The service's logs record no message text, phone number, session ID or IP address.

The service is processed for us by Vercel, which hosts it; Neon, which hosts its database; Anthropic, whose AI model writes the replies; and Telegram, where our team receives bookings and requests. On WhatsApp, Meta also carries the messages between you and the service, through the WhatsApp Cloud API; the window does not pass through Meta. Some of these providers may process data outside the European Union.

Everything the service holds about you, bookings and requests included, is deleted in a daily clean-up once 30 days have passed since your last message, and an unfinished booking or request step lapses after 24 hours. You can delete it at any time before that: send STOP, DELETE, SUPPRIMER or حذف as a message on its own, or use “Delete this chat” in the window. When a booking or a request is deleted, its message in our team's Telegram group is deleted as well or, where it is older than 48 hours and Telegram no longer lets us delete it, overwritten with a note that it was deleted; a copy that a team member made outside this system is not covered. Closing the tab ends the window's session in your browser but does not delete our record of the conversation.

We rely on your consent: you give it with the button before the conversation, and again before a booking or a request passes your number on. You can withdraw it at any time with the deletion described above.

Your rights

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and portability. Apart from the hosting service's access logs described above, the analytics data described above if you accepted it, and unless you have used the chat assistant described above, we hold no personal data about you, so there is in practice nothing to access or erase; if you have used the chat assistant, the deletion described there works at any time, and analytics data can be found only as described in the analytics section above. If this changes, this page changes with it. Who is responsible for this site is named at the foot of this page, in the publisher block. It carries the registered company name, the registered address and the tax registration of the operator, and that operator is the controller for the purposes of this notice. The rights listed above are exercised against that named operator, and the same block is the route to it: the registered address printed there is a postal address, and it is where a letter about those rights arrives; every other contact route this site publishes stands beside it in that block. Writing to us is your own act: nothing on this site sends anything to us on your behalf, and the chat window sends only what you write or choose in it, together with the session ID, a random request number used to avoid duplicates, your language and your browser's time zone described above. This site publishes no telephone number of its own, apart from the WhatsApp number of the chat assistant when that option is shown: that number reaches the AI assistant described above, not a clinic. The telephone numbers on clinic profiles are the clinics' own, taken from their Google Maps listings; calling one is your own act, from your own device, and nothing passes through this site.

Status of this page

This text was reviewed by a lawyer and published on 1 September 2026, the day the review was signed off. Until that date it was kept in draft: its address returned a not-found response and nothing on the site linked to it. What that review covered is the text as it stood on that day, and not a promise about anything we publish later. It no longer covers the whole of this page: the passage above naming who is responsible for this site was rewritten on 5 September 2026, when the publisher block at the foot of the page began to carry that name, and neither that passage nor this one has been read by a lawyer since. Both changes are recorded in the corrections log the same way any other change is. On 26 September 2026 the sentence on telephone numbers in that same passage changed again, when clinic profiles began to carry the clinics' own numbers; that change has not been read by a lawyer either, and it is recorded in the corrections log too. On 17 October 2026 the section on the chat assistant and WhatsApp was added, the passages on what we collect and on your rights were rewritten to account for it, and the section on the question form that has not been built was renamed and told apart from that assistant; none of these changes has been read by a lawyer, and they are recorded in the corrections log. On the same day a sentence on the hosting service's access logs was added to the passage on what we collect, and the passage on your rights was adjusted to match; this has not been read by a lawyer either, and it is recorded in the corrections log. On 29 October 2026 the section on analytics was rewritten when Google Analytics was added behind a consent banner, and the passages on what we collect, on cookies and on your rights were adjusted to match; these changes were reviewed and approved by our legal team on 29 October 2026, and they are recorded in the corrections log.