Privacy Policy

1. About This Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Stuart Sleep (“Stuart Sleep,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) handles information collected through stuartsleep.com (the “Site”). It applies to this website only.

It does not describe how we handle protected health information created or received in the course of providing care. That information is governed by the federal HIPAA privacy and security rules, by Florida law, and by our Notice of Privacy Practices, which is available at our office and on request. If any part of this policy appears to conflict with our Notice of Privacy Practices as it applies to protected health information, the Notice of Privacy Practices controls.

Visiting this website does not make you a patient of Stuart Sleep, and nothing on it creates a doctor–patient relationship. See our Terms of Use.

2. Information You Send Us Through This Site

The Site has two kinds of form. The first is a contact form, which appears on our Contact page and also on individual information pages such as our snoring page, where it is used to request an appointment. It comes in two shapes. On the Contact page it asks for a name and an email address, with an optional phone number and an optional menu choice about what you need — appointment or scheduling, insurance or billing, financing, or something else. On a campaign page such as our snoring page, where we call you back, it asks for a name and a phone number, with an email address optional and no menu. Neither shape asks for anything beyond those contact details. The second is a physician referral form on our Physician Referrals page, which asks a referring physician for their own name, practice name, phone number, email address, fax number, and a menu choice about how soon the patient should be seen.

Neither form asks for health information, and neither is built to receive it. We do not ask for symptoms, conditions, diagnoses, test results, medications, treatments, dates of birth, insurance identifiers, or any patient’s name. The menus offer administrative choices only, and a submission that does not match them is rejected.

A submission is processed by a Cloudflare Worker and emailed to the practice through Postmark, our email delivery provider. The details you enter — your name, your contact details, and your menu choice — are not stored on this website’s infrastructure. We do keep a brief record that a submission was made: which form, the date and time, and the originating IP address, so we can confirm the forms are working. That record does not include anything you typed. Postmark retains a copy of the delivered message in its own systems for a limited period as part of ordinary email delivery.

There is no patient portal and no login on the Site.

3. Information Collected Automatically

Like most websites, the Site records limited technical information automatically when you visit.

• Hosting and delivery logs. Our hosting and content delivery provider, Cloudflare, Inc., records information such as your IP address, browser type and version, operating system, the pages you request, the date and time of each request, and the page that referred you. These records exist to deliver the Site, keep it available and secure, diagnose errors, and defend against automated abuse.
• Analytics. Described in the next section.

We do not use this information to try to identify you personally, we do not attempt to match it to any patient record, and we do not combine it with information from your medical chart.

4. Analytics and Cookies

We use Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service provided by Google LLC, to understand how visitors find and use the Site — which pages get read, how people arrive, and what kinds of devices they use. This helps us decide what information to publish and how to organize it. It is not used to identify individual visitors.

Google Analytics places cookies on your device:

• _ga — distinguishes one browser from another so that repeat visits are not counted as new visitors. Expires approximately two years after it is set.
• _ga_<identifier> — maintains the state of an individual visit, or “session.” Expires approximately two years after it is set.

Because this is a medical practice website, we have configured Google Analytics more restrictively than its defaults. Specifically:

• Google Analytics receives your IP address in order to estimate the general geographic area a visit came from, typically at the city or region level. The IP address is not retained in, or available to, our reports.
• Google Signals is turned off. Your activity on the Site is not associated with a signed-in Google account and is not linked across your devices.
• Advertising personalization and remarketing are turned off. We do not build advertising audiences from analytics data, and we do not run retargeting advertising based on which pages of this Site you read.
• Data redaction is enabled, so that email addresses and telephone numbers are stripped out before data is sent to Google in the event they ever appear in a web address.
• Analytics data is retained for 14 months and then deleted automatically.
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Google processes this information on our behalf under the Google Analytics terms of service and Google’s own privacy policy. Google Analytics is not used on any page where individual health information is entered or displayed, and no such page exists on this Site.

Google Analytics, described above, is the only third-party tracking technology on the Site. Apart from it, the Site loads no marketing or advertising technology of any kind — no advertising or conversion tags, no retargeting, and no social-media or advertising pixels — and this remains true on our advertising landing pages. Other than the analytics cookies described above, the Site sets only the cookies strictly necessary to deliver and secure the pages. See Your Choices for how to opt out.

5. Other Third Parties Involved in This Site

Some parts of the Site are delivered by other companies. When your browser loads content from them, it necessarily reveals your IP address to them.

• Cloudflare — hosts and delivers the Site, as described above.
• Postmark — delivers the email that a form submission generates. Postmark receives the contact details you entered so that it can send that message to us, and retains a copy for a limited period.
• Google Fonts — the Site loads its typefaces from Google’s font servers, so your browser’s request discloses your IP address to Google.
• Google Maps — our Contact page embeds a Google map showing the office location. Loading that map discloses your IP address to Google and may set Google cookies.
• Cherry — our Financing page links to Cherry Technologies, Inc., an independent patient financing company. If you follow that link and apply, you leave this Site and your information is handled by Cherry under Cherry’s own privacy policy and terms. Stuart Sleep does not receive or store your credit application data.

Each of these companies acts under its own privacy policy. We do not control what they collect once you interact with them.

6. How We Use Information

We use the limited information described above only to:

• operate, maintain, and secure the Site;
• understand which content is useful so we can improve it;
• respond to you if you choose to call, text, or email us, or submit one of the Site’s forms; and
• comply with law, or respond to a valid legal request.

We do not sell personal information. We do not trade or transfer it to advertisers, data brokers, or list vendors.

7. If You Contact Us

If you call, text, email us, or send us a form from this Site, we will have whatever information you choose to give us. We use it to respond to your question and to arrange care if you ask us to.

If you become a patient, information you gave us may become part of your medical record. From that point it is protected health information governed by our Notice of Privacy Practices and by HIPAA — not by this website policy.

8. Your Choices

• Browser controls. Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies. Blocking cookies from this Site will not prevent you from reading any page on it.
• Google Analytics opt-out. Google publishes a browser add-on that prevents Google Analytics from collecting data about your visits to any site. It is available at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
• Access, correction, and deletion. If you would like to know what information we hold about you from your use of this Site, or would like it deleted, contact us using the details at the end of this policy. Requests concerning your medical record follow the process in our Notice of Privacy Practices instead.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. No common industry standard has been adopted for how a website should respond to a “Do Not Track” browser signal, so the Site does not respond to one. Because we do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, a Global Privacy Control signal does not change how this Site behaves. The controls listed above remain available to you either way.

9. Children’s Privacy

The Site is intended for a general adult audience and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 through this website.

Sleep medicine care may involve patients who are minors. Information about a minor patient’s care is handled under our Notice of Privacy Practices and applicable law, never through this website. If you believe a child has provided personal information through the Site, contact us and we will delete it.

10. Data Security and Retention

The Site is served entirely over an encrypted HTTPS connection and is hosted on a managed platform that applies its own security controls. We keep the technical information described in this policy only as long as it is useful for the purposes listed, and analytics data is deleted automatically after 14 months.

No method of transmitting or storing information over the Internet is completely secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, and we encourage you to use the phone for anything sensitive.

11. Links to Other Websites

The Site links to websites we do not operate, including our financing partner and mapping and directory services. We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, or security of any website we link to. Reading their privacy policies before providing information to them is worthwhile.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy as the Site changes or as the law requires. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we handle information collected through the Site, we will make that clear on this page rather than relying on the date alone.

Your continued use of the Site after a change takes effect means you accept the revised policy.