Privacy Policy

Fertility is among the most personal subjects there is, so we built this site to know as little about you as possible. This policy explains what that means in practice.

Effective 2 November 2026

The short version

CairnFertility is an information and comparison site. You do not need an account to use it.

We set no cookies and run no analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind.
We have no user accounts, no passwords, and we take no payments.
We store your email if you join our list. If you apply to the community we store your first name, email, path, stage, and what you write, and a person reads it. Path, stage and what you write are health-related data. We delete them on the schedule below.
This website never asks for your phone number.
Your answers in our clinic matching tool, including anything about your health, are processed within your own browser. They are never sent to us or to anyone else.
If you tell the clinic finder where you are, or let it use your device's location, that stays in your browser too. It is used only to put the nearest clinics first, and is never sent to us or to anyone else.
We never sell personal data, and we never share it for advertising.

Who we are

CairnFertility is published by Alice Smith, trading as CairnFertility, in the United Kingdom. That person is the controller for the personal data described here.

For anything about this policy or your personal data, email privacy@cairnfertility.com. For anything else, hello@cairnfertility.com reaches us.

What we collect, and what we deliberately don't

Most of this site is plain reading material, and reading it sends us nothing beyond the standard technical information any website receives. Here is every way personal data can arise on this site today:

Email you send us

If you email us, we receive your address and whatever you write. We use it only to reply and to keep a record of the correspondence. Please do not include medical details; we are not a medical service and do not need them.

The share-your-story form

What you type stays in your browser until you send it from your own email app; an unsent story never reaches us. A story you send us usually includes details about your health and fertility treatment, and sometimes your sexual orientation, so we only accept it with your explicit consent: the form asks for it before it opens your email. Stories are published only after we have agreed the final text with you by email, and you can withdraw one at any time.

Applying to join the community

The community is for people living in the UK, and the form asks you to confirm that you do, along with being 18 or over. It asks for your first name, your email address, which path you are on, optionally what stage you are at and what you are hoping to find and whether you work in the fertility sector, and, in your own words, why you would like to join. It is stored in our Supabase database, read by a person, and not shared with anyone. The person reviewing it may add a short note about the decision; that note is part of your application, you can ask to see it, and it is deleted on the same schedule as what you wrote. Your path, stage and what you write are health-related data; the next section explains how we handle them. We never ask for your phone number, address, date of birth or medical records.

Your invite, if we approve you

Approving an application creates a single-use invite link. We store only a cryptographic hash of it, never the link itself, so a working invite cannot be reconstructed from the database. The link expires after seven days, works once, and only opens for someone who can also enter the email address it was issued to.

Clinic matcher answers

Our matching tool asks about your family type, age range, whether you might need donor eggs, how you plan to pay, how far you would travel and your budget. These answers stay in your browser's memory while you use the tool and disappear when you leave the page. They are never transmitted to our servers or to any third party.

Your location in the clinic finder

The clinic finder lets you type a town, city or UK postcode, or ask your browser for your device's position, so that the nearest clinics come first. Typed places are matched against a list built into the page, and the position comes from your browser's own location prompt, which you can decline. Either way the location is used in your browser to order and filter the list, is never sent to us or to any mapping or geocoding service, is not stored, and is not included in the address of the page, so a comparison link you share does not carry it. It is forgotten when you leave the page.

Which home page you see

When you open the home page, Vercel tells our site which country your IP address is in, and we use that only to send you to the home page for your country. The country is not stored, not written to a cookie, and not used for anything else. Every other page shows what its address says, wherever you are.

Hosting logs

The site is served by Vercel, our hosting provider. Vercel's servers process your IP address and standard request information (browser type, pages requested, timestamps) in short-lived operational logs used for security and to keep the site running. See Vercel's own privacy policy for details.

The bot check on our forms

The community application form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from automated spam. When you open the form, your browser loads a small script from Cloudflare, which sees your IP address and reads technical signals about your browser and device. Most people see nothing; sometimes a tick-box appears. Cloudflare passes us a one-time pass, and we check it with Cloudflare when you submit. We send Cloudflare that pass only: not your email, your answers or anything else you typed. Turnstile runs on that form and nowhere else on the site. See Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum for what it does with the signals.

There is no forum, comment box, profile or mailing list anywhere on this site. The community is a separate private group on WhatsApp, and nothing said in it is published here.

Health information gets special treatment

Data about your health, fertility or sex life is "special category data" under UK data protection law, which sets a higher bar for handling it. Almost everywhere on this site we meet that bar by making sure the data never reaches us.

The clinic matcher, the cost plan and the clinic finder ask health-related questions, and the finder can also take your location, but the filtering happens in your browser and the answers are not sent anywhere. We hold no record that you used them, what you answered, or where you were.

The community application is different. Your path, your stage if you choose to give it, and what you write about why you would like to join are special category data: "two mums" says something about your sexual orientation, and "in treatment now" is information about your health. We store them only because you tick a separate, unticked consent box on the form saying we may (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)), and a person reads them to decide on your application. We record when you ticked it and which wording you saw. The stage question is optional, and the form asks you not to include medical details such as a diagnosis or treatment history: we do not need them to decide. Nothing else on this site is gated behind that consent. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing privacy@cairnfertility.com and we will delete your application. Your path and stage are kept while you are a member and deleted when you leave or ask; what you wrote is deleted on the schedule in 'How long we keep things' below.

If we ever build a feature that needs health information to leave your browser, we will ask for your explicit consent first and update this policy before it goes live.

Our legal grounds

UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018) requires a lawful basis for each use of personal data. Ours are:

Explicit consent (for stories you send us)

A story is health data, and sometimes reveals sexual orientation, so we rely on your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a) of the UK GDPR, given on the share-your-story form before your email opens. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing us, and we will delete your story and our correspondence about it, and take it down if it has been published.

Explicit consent (for the community application)

Special category data needs explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a) of the UK GDPR. The application form has a separate tick-box, worded to cover your path, stage, interests and what you write, both for reading your application and, if you join, for keeping your path, stage and interests while you are a member, and recorded with a timestamp and the version of the wording you saw. It is not bundled with agreeing to the group rules, and the form is not accepted without it. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing us and we will delete your application, whether or not you have joined the group. Leaving the group is always yours to do without giving a reason.

Legitimate interests

Replying to emails you send us; the security and operational logging our hosting provider performs to keep the site available and safe; the bot check on our application form, which keeps automated spam out of the application queue; and keeping the email address of anyone removed from the group so that the same address cannot re-apply, which protects the people in the group. You can object to any of these by emailing us.

How long we keep things

Email correspondence is kept for as long as it is needed to deal with your enquiry and for a reasonable period afterwards, then deleted. Emails about a community application, including our decision and invite, are deleted 30 days after the decision. A story we have not published is deleted within 12 months of your last email about it. Hosting logs are kept by Vercel on infrastructure timescales (typically days, not months) under its own retention policies.

Community applications and invites are kept as follows:

Declined: the whole record is deleted 30 days after the decision.
Pending and never reviewed: deleted 90 days after applying.
Approved but the invite was never used: deleted 30 days after approval.
Joined: the free text, sector declaration and reviewer's note are cleared 90 days after applying. Your first name, email, path, stage and the interests you ticked are kept while you are a member.
Removed: everything you told us is cleared 30 days after removal. We keep your email address and your status, so that a removed address cannot re-apply, and the dates the site recorded (when you applied, when you accepted the rules, when you gave consent, and when the removal happened).
Invites: deleted 30 days after being used, revoked or expiring.

The purge runs automatically every night in our database. If you leave the group, or ask us to delete your application, we delete the record ourselves rather than waiting for the schedule.

Who we share data with

We use these service providers:

Vercel Inc. hosts and serves the website. Vercel is a US company; where visitor data such as IP addresses is processed outside the UK, that transfer is covered by recognised safeguards including the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.
Supabase Pte. Ltd (Singapore) stores community applications. Our project is hosted in Ireland, in the EU; any transfer outside the UK or EU is covered by standard contractual clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.
Cloudflare, Inc. receives email sent to our addresses and forwards it to our inbox. Cloudflare is a US company; that transfer is covered by the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.
Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France) sends our replies and the decision and invite emails for community applications. Brevo stores data in the EU, which the UK recognises as giving data an adequate level of protection.
Google LLC (United States) provides the Gmail inbox where the messages you send us, and our replies, are kept. Google is a US company; that transfer is covered by the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Our inbox is an individual Gmail account, so Google handles the messages in it under its own terms, set out in Google's privacy policy, rather than under a contract with us. If you would rather not send us health details by email, apply through the community form instead, which never touches email.
Cloudflare, Inc. runs the bot check on our application form, described above. Cloudflare is a US company; that transfer is covered by the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.

We do not sell personal data, share it for advertising or marketing, or pass it to data brokers, and we share none with sponsors. Links to social platforms in our footer are ordinary links; nothing is sent to those platforms unless you click through.

Note: The community group runs on WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is not on that list because we send it nothing. We do not upload your email, your application, or any contact list to Meta. You join with your own WhatsApp account, under your own agreement with Meta, and from that moment Meta handles your data as your provider rather than ours. In a WhatsApp group, other members can see your phone number. As group admin, we can see members' phone numbers in WhatsApp when we approve join requests and match them to applications. We do not copy them anywhere else. This website never asks for one.

Requests from police, courts and other authorities

We'd disclose data only where legally required, and would tell you unless the law forbids it.

Your rights

You have rights over the personal data we hold about you: email correspondence, any story you have sent us, and your community application if you have made one.

Access: ask for a copy of what we hold about you.
Rectification: have inaccurate information corrected.
Erasure: ask us to delete your data. The quickest way is to email privacy@cairnfertility.com with the subject "Delete my data" from the address you used. We delete within one month (usually within a few days) and reply to confirm. There is deliberately no web form for this: a form that deletes by email address would let anyone delete, or find out about, someone else.
Restriction and objection: limit or object to how we use it.
Portability: receive your data in a reusable format.
Withdraw consent: email privacy@cairnfertility.com to withdraw consent for a story or to delete your community application.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@cairnfertility.com. We will respond within one month, as the law requires, and we will not charge for a reasonable request.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, email privacy@cairnfertility.com first. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and tell you what we are doing about it.

You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. If you are in the EU, you may also complain to your national data protection authority.

Visitors outside the UK

If you visit from outside the UK: we don't sell personal information or use it for advertising, and we set no tracking cookies. The community is for people living in the UK: the form asks you to confirm that you do, and we do not accept applications otherwise. If you have already given us information from abroad, it is handled exactly as described above, and you can ask us to delete it.

Children

This site is about fertility treatment and is intended for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

When the site gains a feature that changes how personal data is handled, this policy will be updated before the feature goes live, with a new effective date at the top of the page. Material changes will be flagged on the site rather than changed quietly.