Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

When you create an account we collect your name, email address and password (stored only as a bcrypt hash — we never hold the password itself), and we record which version of the Terms of Service and of this policy you accepted, and when.

When you write a review we store its text, the rating, any photos you attach, and which veterinarian and practice it is about. We also log searches and page views to improve results, and we record security-relevant events such as failed logins.

Listings of veterinarians and practices come from public records and published sources, not from you. Those are described in the Data Retention Policy.

2. What we use it for

• Running the platform and showing your reviews to other people
• Sending account mail: verification, password resets, replies to your reviews
• Improving search results and the site itself
• Detecting fraudulent reviews and enforcing the Terms of Service

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your reviews to train anything we sell.

3. Who else sees it

Your reviews, your display name and anything in your public profile are visible to everyone, including search engines. Your email address is not published.

We share data with the service providers that run the platform — hosting, email delivery, error tracking — and only as far as they need it to do that. We disclose data to anyone else only where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to respond to a takedown or a legal claim.

Automated checks on reviews. Most reviews are checked by software running here, which never sends them anywhere. Where those checks cannot settle whether a review breaks the Review Content Guidelines, the text of that review — and nothing else about you — may be sent to Anthropic's Claude API to be judged against those rules. Anthropic does not use it to train their models. The result is a rule identifier and a confidence, recorded with the decision; where the decision is to remove something, a person checks it first. You can always ask why, and be told which rule.

4. How long we keep it

Each kind of record has its own retention window, listed in full on the Data Retention Policy page. Two of them are worth stating here: search logs are deleted after 90 days, and the audit trail of administrative actions — including the record that your data was erased when you asked — is kept for seven years, because it is the evidence that we did what we said.

5. How it is protected

Connections are encrypted (HTTPS), passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, access to the production database is restricted, and administrative actions are logged. No system is perfectly secure; if you find a weakness in ours, the Security Policy explains how to report it and what we commit to doing about it.

6. Your rights

You can see and change your account information in your settings at any time. You can delete your account yourself: request it in settings, confirm from the link we email you, and your personal data is erased — account, reviews, photos, votes and claims — without anyone at RMV having to approve it.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to a copy of your data, to correction, to restriction of processing, and to complain to a supervisory authority. To exercise any of these, write to privacy@ratemyveterinarian.com.

7. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about data we hold on you: privacy@ratemyveterinarian.com.