Founded Health is built to know as little about you as possible. No advertising, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing sold to anyone. This page explains what we do keep, what we deliberately throw away, and why.
Last updated 13 August 2026
These are design decisions rather than promises — they are built into how the site works.
Founded Health is operated as a sole proprietorship from British Columbia, Canada. The person accountable for how information is handled here can be reached at hello@askfoundedhealth.com.
We are governed by Canadian privacy law, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act, and by applicable United States federal and state privacy law.
The site is offered in Canada and the United States only. We do not offer it in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, and we block access from those places.
From everyone: the question you type, and the date and time you asked it. Nothing else, and if you use the site without an account we hold nothing that identifies you at all.
There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no session recording, no fingerprinting and no third-party cookies. We never ask for your name, and we never ask who you are.
Three small things are also involved, and none of them says anything about who you are:
One more never leaves your device: if you switch between day and night colours, that choice is saved in your own browser. It is not a cookie, it is never sent to us, and clearing your browser data removes it.
Two kinds of question are answered but never written to our database.
Questions that trip the safety screen. Every question is screened before anything else happens. Where it suggests someone may be at risk of harm you are shown support information rather than a search result, and where it asks for help harming a person it is declined. In both cases the question is discarded. There is no stored record of what you typed, and nothing enters the queue a physician later reviews.
Questions containing personal identifiers. Every question is scanned automatically for things that could identify a real person — names used alongside a personal relationship, employers, clinics, street addresses, postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and health, insurance or record numbers. If the scan finds any, your question is answered exactly as normal and then discarded.
You are not told when this happens, because there is nothing you need to do about it. The answer you receive is unaffected.
Being straightforward about the limits: this is an automated check, not a promise. It is deliberately tuned to catch too much rather than too little, because the only cost of a false alarm is that a question gets researched again if someone asks it later. But it will not catch everything, particularly a detail written in an unusual way. It sits underneath the request on our terms page, and does not replace it. Please still leave identifying details out.
Your question is still sent to the services listed below in order to be answered. What changes is that we do not keep it.
Questions about your health are sensitive, and are treated as sensitive personal information under Canadian and United States law.
We do not want this information at the level of an identified child, and we have deliberately not built the features that would collect it. There are no child profiles, no birthdates, no growth records and no health histories. Nothing in our system connects a question to a named child.
Where you do tell us something about health, we rely on your consent, given by choosing to type it. You can withdraw that by asking us to delete a stored question.
Questions and their answers are stored so that when someone asks the same thing again, the answer appears immediately instead of being researched from scratch. This keeps the site fast and keeps its running costs sustainable.
Stored questions are also how answers get checked. A physician reviews stored answers against the sources they cite, working through the questions people ask most often, and marks the ones that have been checked. That process is described in our editorial policy.
An account exists to raise how many new questions you can research each month, and to let you subscribe. If you create one we store your email address, and nothing else about you. There is no password, because signing in means clicking a link we email you.
We do not ask for your name, your location, or anything about your health, and we would rather you did not tell us. Storing health information about a named child is a serious responsibility and we have chosen not to take it on.
We keep a count of how many new questions you have asked this month. That is a number, not a record of what you asked. Signing in sets one cookie, which keeps you signed in and does nothing else: it does not follow you to other sites, and no advertising or analytics is attached to it.
Email us and we will delete your account, your email address and your question count.
Payments are handled entirely by Stripe. Your card details are entered on Stripe's own pages and never reach our server, so we could not see or store them even if we wanted to.
What we keep is a customer reference from Stripe, whether your subscription is active, and the date the current period ends. Stripe holds the payment information under its own privacy policy and is based in the United States. You can cancel at any time through the billing page, which is Stripe's, not ours. If you close your account, cancel there first, and ask Stripe directly about the payment records they hold.
To answer you, your question is sent to services that process it on our behalf:
These providers are outside Canada, principally in the United States, so your question is processed outside Canada and may be reachable by authorities there under the laws of that country. We tell you this so your consent to it is informed, as Canadian privacy law requires.
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, where a court or public authority lawfully requests it, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety.
We do not sell, rent, license, trade or share your personal information with anyone, for any purpose — including advertising, analytics, “anonymised data” licensing, or model training. No advertiser or sponsor has access to anything you type.
Some common questions are published on this site as their own page, so that other people can find them. This is always a deliberate decision, never automatic.
What gets published is the standardised form of the question, not the words you typed. If you asked in your own phrasing, that phrasing is not what appears. Nothing that identifies you is published, and a question containing identifiers is never stored in the first place, so it can never reach publication.
You can see everything published at answered questions. If a published page came from something you asked and you would rather it were not there, email us and it will be taken down.
Stored answers are kept for 30 days, or 90 days where a physician has reviewed the answer. After that they are deleted and the question is researched again next time someone asks it.
Depending on where you live, you can ask to know what we hold about you, to get a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, and to withdraw your consent. Email hello@askfoundedhealth.com. We reply within 30 days and will tell you if we need longer. There is no charge, and we will not treat you differently for asking.
To delete a stored question, email us the question as closely as you can recall it, and we will find it and remove it. We will confirm when it is done.
To be straightforward about the limits of that: we can delete what is stored on our own database. We cannot reach into the records Anthropic, Val Town or Stripe hold under their own retention policies, and because we do not know who asked what, we can only delete on the basis of the question itself, not on the basis of who you are. Everything is deleted automatically within 90 days at the latest in any event.
For the same reason, we usually cannot verify who is asking, so we cannot safely act on a request that would reveal someone else's information. Account holders can be verified through their registered email address.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled something, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, or your state attorney general if you are in the United States.
Information travels over encrypted connections and sits with providers that maintain recognised security practices. Access to the database is limited to the operator. We hold no card details, no passwords, and nothing identifying about you.
No system is completely secure, and we cannot promise otherwise. If a breach happens that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and tell the people affected, as PIPEDA requires, and comply with the breach notification laws of any US state that applies.
Founded Health is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, consistent with the United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. If you believe a child under 13 has given us something, email us and we will delete it. Accounts and subscriptions require you to be 18 or older, or the age of majority where you live.
Nothing here is unsuitable for a child to read, but questions may be stored, and we would rather children were not entering information into it.
If you have an account we send sign-in links and messages about your account, your subscription, and changes to these policies. Those are part of the service. We will not send you marketing or newsletters unless you have asked for them, as Canada's anti-spam law requires, and anything of that kind will identify us and carry a working unsubscribe link.
We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not use it for targeted advertising or profiling, and we do not knowingly collect or sell the personal information of anyone under 16. If you are a California resident you have rights of access, deletion, correction and portability under the CCPA and CPRA; similar rights exist in Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas and elsewhere. Email us to use them, and we will not treat you differently for asking.
Answers are generated by an automated system. Questions are screened automatically for signs of risk, and scanned automatically for personal identifiers. Neither makes a decision about you with legal or similarly significant effects, and neither profiles you: both look only at the words of the question in front of them, nothing is inferred about you as a person, and nothing is retained about you between questions.
This policy may be updated. The date at the top shows when it last changed. Where a change matters, we will announce it here and on the site — and email account holders — before it takes effect, rather than quietly folding it into an update.
We have deliberately not built saved child profiles, birthdates or health histories. If that ever changed, it would be announced in advance and would need your fresh consent.
Educational information only. Not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and no doctor-patient relationship is created by using this. Founded Health has not examined you and does not know their history, so its answers may not apply to you. Never delay or disregard advice from a qualified health professional because of something you read here. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.