Privacy

If You're Looking For a Therapist

There's no sign-up here, and that's deliberate. No account means no password to steal, no profile to break into, and no list of everything you've ever searched for sitting under your name in our database. It doesn't exist to be leaked, subpoenaed, or sold, because we never made it.

What that means in practice:

• Your searches aren't saved. We use what you type to understand what you're looking for and show you results. Then it's gone. We don't keep it, tie it to you, or sell it.
• Your questionnaire answers aren't saved against you. We count how often each answer gets picked, so we can tell which questions are working. We never store a row that says a particular person chose a particular set of answers.
• Your ZIP code isn't stored. If you give us one, we use it to work out roughly where you are for the length of that one search, and then we drop it.
• Saving your results means saving a link. The URL holds your answers, so it works without us knowing who you are. Anyone you send it to will see the same results, which is worth remembering before you share it.

The One Place Your Words Leave Our Site

When you describe what you're looking for in your own words, we send those words to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, to work out what you meant. We do that because "I can't stop snapping at my kids" is a better description of a person than any list of checkboxes, and something has to translate it into the things we can actually match on.

Nothing about you goes with it. Not your name, not an account, not an ID that follows you between searches, because we don't have any of those. It's the words and nothing else, used to answer that one request. We don't keep the text afterward and we don't log it.

If you'd rather not have your words leave this site at all, the filters on the search page do the same job without any typing.

What Gets Stored On Your Device

Two small things, both kept in your own browser, neither one sent to us:

• Your appearance choice (the contrast and colour settings in the footer), so the site looks the way you set it next time.
• A note of whose contact details you looked at, so we can ask you a few days later whether they got back to you. That list stays on your device. We only ever receive the answer, "yes" or "no" about one therapist, with no record of who was asked.

Clearing your browser data clears both. If you're logged in as a therapist, there's also a session cookie that keeps you logged in, which is exactly what it sounds like and nothing more.

That's the whole list, and it's why there's no "accept cookies" box on this site. Those boxes exist because of advertising trackers. We don't have any, so there's nothing to ask you about, and a popup pretending otherwise would just be theatre.

When You Contact a Therapist

The contact button opens your own email app with a message started for you. You send it from your address to theirs. It never passes through us, so we don't have it, can't read it, and couldn't hand it over if someone asked.

We do count that a contact button was pressed on a profile, because a therapist deserves to know their listing is doing something. That count isn't attached to you.

If You're a Therapist Listed Here

You have an account, so this part is different. We hold your name, your email address, your license details, and whatever you choose to put on your profile. Most of that is meant to be public, which is the point of a directory.

• Your license information is already public. We record what your state board's public directory says and when we looked, and we link to it so anyone can check the live record themselves. More on that in How We Verify.
• Your email and phone number sit behind a click. They aren't in the page a scraper downloads. Someone has to ask for them, and there's a limit on how often that can happen, so your details are harder to harvest in bulk.
• We email you about once a year to ask whether your profile is still accurate, and we keep a record of what we sent and whether it arrived. That's how the dates on your listing stay honest.
• We don't take copies of your license documents. We never ask for a scan, so there's no file of your credentials here to lose.

Who Else Touches Any Of This

We run on other companies' infrastructure, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Here's all of them:

• Vercel serves the site.
• Neon hosts the database.
• Anthropic reads search text to understand it, as described above.
• Resend delivers our emails.
• Cloudinary stores and serves therapist photos.

None of them is an advertising company, and none of them gets anything to build a profile on you with. Our fonts are served from our own site rather than Google's, so loading a page here doesn't quietly announce your visit to anyone.

There is no Google Analytics here, no Meta pixel, and no advertising tag of any kind. That isn't an oversight we'll get around to fixing. The Federal Trade Commission has taken action against therapy and pharmacy companies for handing exactly this kind of browsing data to ad platforms, and a page about anxiety in your city, joined to an advertiser's record of who you are, is that same disclosure.

How Long We Keep Things

• Searches and questionnaire answers: not kept.
• Anonymous usage counts (page views, button presses, with no ID attached): about 90 days, then deleted. The daily totals we work out from them are kept, because there's nobody in them.
• Therapist profiles and accounts: for as long as the listing exists.
• A record of emails we sent you: kept, so we can tell what we've already sent.

This Isn't a Medical Record

No therapy happens on this site. We're a directory: we help you find someone, and then you and that therapist go and have your own relationship, which we're not part of. That means we're not a healthcare provider, we're not covered by HIPAA, and nothing you do here goes into a medical record anywhere.

Anything you tell a therapist after you leave here is between the two of you, protected by their professional obligations, not by us.

Children

This site is meant for adults, including parents and carers looking for help for someone younger. It isn't built for children to use on their own, and we don't knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13.

Asking Us Things

Some states give people the right to ask what a company holds about them, to get it corrected, or to have it deleted. You're welcome to ask us regardless of where you live, and we'd rather answer than argue about which law applies. Email hello@meetmytherapist.com.

Fair warning about what we can actually do: if you searched here without an account, we have nothing to look up. That's not us being unhelpful, it's the point of building it this way.

We don't sell your information, and we never will. There's no opt-out link because there's nothing to opt out of.

If Someone Might Be Watching

Privacy from companies is one thing. Privacy from a person in the room with you is a different problem, and for some people it's the more urgent one. Browsing Safely explains what the Quick Exit button does, and, just as importantly, what it doesn't.

Changes

If we change any of this, we'll change the date at the top. If we ever change something that matters, like starting to keep a thing we said we wouldn't, we'll say so plainly on this page rather than editing a sentence and hoping nobody notices.