Privacy policy

The short version

• We set no cookies, and we run no advertising or analytics trackers.
• You can search the entire directory without giving us your name, an email address, or an account. Your search terms and filters are handled inside your browser and are not sent to us.
• We do record anonymous click events when someone taps a call button or opens a facility profile. Those records contain no name, no email, and no IP address.
• The contact form is the one place you hand us personal information, and only because you typed it in and pressed send.

We are not your care provider

Treatment Locators publishes a directory; it does not deliver medical or therapeutic care. Nobody here treats you, and nothing we store about your visit is a medical record. If you are in crisis, dial 911 or 988 — do not wait on a message to us.

What we record

There are exactly three ways information reaches us, and nothing else on this site gathers anything about you.

• Anonymous CTA clicks. When you tap a phone button or open a facility profile, we log that the click happened: the type of click, the number shown, which facility and city it belonged to, the page you were on, the site that referred you, and your browser's user-agent string. There is no name, no email address, no IP address, and no identifier that would let us recognise you on a later visit. We use these counts to tell which listings and pages are useful.
• Messages you choose to send. The name, email address, topic, and message text you type into our contact form. We also store the IP address and user-agent of that submission, solely to block spam and to limit how many messages one sender can post in an hour.
• Hosting logs. The companies that host and protect this site keep the ordinary web-server records any site produces — requested page, timestamp, IP address, user-agent — for security and reliability. These are generated by our hosting and database providers rather than by anything we wrote, and we do not mine them to build profiles of visitors.

We never request diagnoses, treatment history, or other sensitive health details, and we would rather you did not send them to us at all. Please leave clinical details out of the contact form.

What we do not do

We do not set cookies. We do not load Google Analytics, advertising pixels, social media trackers, session recorders, or heat-mapping tools. We do not fingerprint your device, build an advertising profile, or track you across other websites. We do not sell, rent, or share personal information, and we do not pass your contact details to treatment programs or lead buyers. Because we set no cookies and run no cross-site tracking, there is no ad-tracking opt-out to offer you.

The "use my location" button

This runs only if you press the button and then approve your browser's permission prompt. Your coordinates are sent to BigDataCloud, an outside reverse-geocoding service, which turns them into a city name so we can fill in the search box. The coordinates are never written to our servers, and we keep nothing but the city name you then search for — which stays in your browser. If you would rather not share coordinates with that service, skip the button and type a ZIP code instead; the results are the same.

Why we use it

Click counts tell us which listings and pages people find useful so we can fix and expand the directory. Contact submissions let us write back and correct listings. IP addresses on the contact form and in hosting logs exist to stop abuse and keep the site online. That is the complete list of purposes; we do not repurpose any of it for marketing.

When you call a facility

Tapping a number hands the call to your phone carrier, which connects you straight to that program or helpline. We record only that the button was tapped — never the call itself. We are not on the line: no monitoring, no recording, no transcript, and no caller ID reaches us. Anything you discuss falls under the privacy practices of the organization that answers, not ours. Be aware that the party answering a call may monitor, record, or store it under their own policy — ask them if that matters to you.

Our general helpline number is answered by Balance Recovery rather than by Treatment Locators. Our ownership group holds a minority interest in that provider, though we are not paid per call, and whatever you share on that call is held by them under their own policy. Our advertising disclosures explain that relationship, and you can always call a facility directly or reach the free SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 instead.

Who else is involved

The only outside parties that touch any of this are the vendors that run the site for us: our hosting platform, our database provider, and the reverse-geocoding service described above. They process information on our instructions so the site can function — they are not permitted to use it for their own marketing. We would also disclose information where the law genuinely compels it. Nobody else receives it.

How long we keep it

Contact messages are kept while we handle your request and for a reasonable period afterwards as a record of the correspondence, then deleted. Anonymous click records are retained as directory usage history; since they identify nobody, there is nothing in them to attach to you. Hosting logs roll off on our providers' own schedules. We apply sensible safeguards, but no website can honestly guarantee perfect security.

Your rights, and younger visitors

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see what we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, or object to how it is used. Write to us and we will honour those requests, and we will not treat you differently for making one. In practice the only thing we are likely to hold is a contact message you sent us, because everything else is anonymous. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is no sale-opt-out to exercise. This site is built for adults; it is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly gather information from them. If you believe a minor has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and we will delete it.

Links to other sites

Facility listings, helplines, and cited sources link out to websites we do not run. This policy stops at our edge — once you follow a link or place a call, the privacy practices of that organization apply, and we have no control over what they collect or how they use it.

Reaching us

Send any privacy question or request through the contact page. Whenever this policy is revised, the date at the top changes with it. If a future change means we start collecting something new, we will describe it here before it takes effect rather than quietly broadening this page.