Privacy
Reading a page about herpes should not create a record that you read a page about herpes. That principle decides most of what follows.
(For clinical questions this site is the wrong place — nothing here is medical advice, and we are not clinicians. The CDC and the American Sexual Health Association are.)
What we do not collect
- No account is required to read anything on this site, including the support group directory.
- We do not ask for your HSV status. Not in a form, not in a quiz, not as an optional field. We have no reason to hold it, so we do not ask.
- We do not run third-party advertising or tracking pixels. No ad network, no social media pixel, no session-recording tool. On a site like this, an ad network knowing which page you read is the whole problem.
- We do not sell, rent, or share visitor data. There is no arrangement under which a third party receives data about you from us.
What we do collect
Aggregate page analytics. We count how many times a page was viewed so we know which guides are useful. This is not tied to an identity and cannot be used to reconstruct one person's reading history.
Anything you type into a form, only if you submit it. Two forms exist on this site: reporting a broken or closed support group, and telling us we got something wrong. Both are optional, and neither asks for health information. If you volunteer health details in a free-text box, we would rather you did not — but we will not use them for anything except answering you.
Standard server logs, including IP address, held briefly for security and abuse prevention.
Why we are strict about this
Information about a person's sex life and health status is treated as a special category under the EU GDPR and as sensitive personal information under the CCPA. Beyond the legal position, the practical risk is more direct: for many people the consequence of this data leaking is not spam, it is being outed.
So the design rule is that we do not hold what we do not need. There is no database of users with HSV, because there are no user accounts.
Cookies
We use no advertising or tracking cookies. Any cookie set is functional — remembering that you dismissed a notice, for example.
Your choices
Because we do not hold accounts or health data, most data requests have a short answer: we do not have it. If you have submitted a form and want that message deleted, tell us and we will delete it.
Reading privately
Two practical notes, since we would rather say this than not:
- A private or incognito browser window keeps this site out of your local browsing history. It does not hide anything from your network provider.
- If you share a device, the browser history is usually the exposure that matters most, and clearing it is the thing that helps.
Changes
If this policy changes we will note the date here. Material changes get a note on the page rather than a silent edit.