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Privacy Policy

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How we collect, use, and protect your information

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Privacy Policy · Last updated August 2026

Center for Implant Dentistry (“we,” “us,” or “our”) respects your privacy. This policy explains what information we collect through this website and in the course of serving you, how we use it, who receives it — by name, not by euphemism — how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have, including your rights as a California resident. To act on any of those rights, start at Your Privacy Choices.

Your medical and dental records are additionally protected by federal and California law. For those protections, see our full Notice of Privacy Practices (HIPAA) and its plain-language summary, Your Health Information Privacy Rights.

Information We Collect, and Where It Comes From

We collect information from three sources: information you give us directly, information created while caring for you, and limited technical information collected automatically when you browse this site. Here is the complete list, by category:

  • Identifiers and contact details — your name and phone number when you send the consultation request form or create a Smile Preview; and your name, email address, phone number, and ZIP code when you complete the implant quiz.
  • Website chat — the contact details, messages, and any photos, voice notes, or other attachments you choose to send through the chatbot. Nothing is submitted to GoHighLevel until you use the chat and send it.
  • Submission and consent-record context — when you send a consultation request, create a Smile Preview, or submit the implant quiz with call/text consent, our server records the exact submitted consent sentence, a server-recorded receipt/submission time, and the IP address supplied by our nearest trusted hosting proxy. We use that record to route, secure, honor, and document your request and consent; it is not sent to analytics or used to infer precise location. The same submission also carries how you reached this site — the page you first landed on, the page you submitted from, the site that linked you here (its address only, never its search terms), and any campaign labels or advertising click identifiers (Google's or Meta's) in the link you followed — so we can tell which pages and channels actually help people find us. That is a fact about the visit, not about you, and it is never combined with your dental answers.
  • Treatment interest and quiz answers — which treatment you say you are exploring, plus the dental concerns and goals you select in the implant quiz. These are not a diagnosis, but we treat them with the sensitivity of health information because they say something about your dental health.
  • Financing-preparation answers in the implant quiz — a required self-reported credit range and, when the selected credit range makes it relevant, a household monthly-income band. These answers are not a credit check, do not affect your score, and are not passed to advertising or analytics systems.
  • Photographs — only if you use the Smile Preview feature, and only after you tick its consent box. Choosing and reviewing a photo happens entirely on your device; nothing is uploaded until you agree.
  • Health, dental, and insurance information you share so we can evaluate, treat, and bill for your care. This is protected health information governed by HIPAA and California law — see the sections below.
  • Device and analytics information — the pages you view, your browser and device type, and your approximate region derived from your IP address. We collect no GPS or device-location permission. Separately from the submission/consent record above, our analytics provider discards the IP it receives after deriving a coarse region.

How We Use Your Information

  • To respond to your inquiries and schedule and confirm appointments — including calls and, with the consent you give at the form, text messages about your consultation request, implant quiz, or Smile Preview.
  • To provide dental care, coordinate treatment, and handle billing and insurance claims.
  • To help you explore third-party financing, when you ask us to.
  • To generate your Smile Preview image, when you use that feature and consent.
  • To improve this website and understand, in aggregate, how visitors use it.
  • To comply with legal, regulatory, and professional obligations.

One Visit, Four Sets of Rules

Different laws protect different pieces of your information, and it is honest to tell you which is which rather than blur them together. The same person can hold information in all four buckets at once:

  • Protected health information (HIPAA). Once you are a patient — records, X-rays, treatment plans, billing — federal law governs how we use and disclose it. The controlling document is our Notice of Privacy Practices, not this policy.
  • Medical information (California’s CMIA). California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act separately prohibits us, as a dental provider, from disclosing your medical information without authorization. It overlaps HIPAA and, in places, is stricter.
  • Personal information (CCPA/CPRA). What you do on this website before you are a patient — a consultation request, a browsing session, a Smile Preview photo from someone we have never treated — is personal information under California’s consumer privacy law. The rights section below covers it.
  • Consumer health data (FTC). Even outside HIPAA, the Federal Trade Commission treats health-adjacent information — the fact that you read pages about failed implants, or uploaded a photo to preview your smile — as sensitive. We treat it that way too: it is never used for advertising, and the strictest of the applicable rules wins whenever the buckets overlap.

Who Receives Information — Named, With Their Role

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. The companies below process information for us, each for the stated purpose only. Where federal law calls for a business associate agreement (BAA) — a HIPAA contract binding a vendor to protect health information — we say plainly whether one exists.

  • Weave — our phone and text-messaging system. Handles appointment calls, reminders, and the texts you consent to through the consultation, implant-quiz, or Smile Preview forms. A BAA is signed with Weave.
  • GoHighLevel — the customer-relationship system where consultation, implant-quiz, and Smile Preview contact requests are stored so the front desk can call you back. If you use the chatbot, GoHighLevel also receives the messages and any photos, voice notes, or other attachments you choose to send in that chat. A BAA is signed with GoHighLevel. Requests and chat conversations that do not become appointments are deleted from it after 24 months (see the retention section).
  • Google — two separate roles. Google Analytics counts visits and shows us which pages people find useful; it receives page addresses and coarse region, never your name, form answers, or health details, and all advertising features are switched off. Separately, if you use Smile Preview and consent, Google’s Gemini service processes your photo to generate the preview; Google may retain it for up to about 55 days for abuse monitoring and does not use it to train its models. Google does not sign a BAA for either service as we use them — which is exactly why the photo goes nowhere until you have read the disclosure and ticked the consent box.
  • OpenAI — the second image engine behind Smile Preview, under the same pre-upload consent. OpenAI may retain the photo for about 30 days for abuse monitoring and does not use it to train its models. No BAA exists with OpenAI; consent, not fine print, is the basis for this processing.
  • Microsoft Clarity — session analytics (heatmaps and session replays) that run only if you accept the consent notice on your first visit. Forms, photos, the quiz, and the cost estimator are masked in the site’s code, so their contents are withheld from the recording at your device. Microsoft does not offer a BAA for Clarity, which is why it is consent-gated, masked, and kept entirely off the patient-forms pages.
  • Ahrefs — privacy-first web analytics that counts page views and the sites people arrive from. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and receives a page address and a referring address — never a name, an answer, or anything about you. A Global Privacy Control signal stops it loading, and it is kept entirely off the patient-forms pages.
  • Your dental insurer, when you ask us to bill or verify benefits on your behalf.
  • Third-party lenders, when you choose to apply for financing; applications go to the lender under the lender's own privacy policy.
  • Authorities, when the law genuinely requires it.

Cookies, Analytics & Third-Party Tracking

This site may use cookies and similar technologies to keep the site working properly and to understand, in aggregate, how it is used. You can control or delete cookies through your browser settings; the site remains usable with cookies disabled, though some features may work less smoothly.

Search personalization, and where it happens: when you use the search box, it puts results that match what you have already been reading on this site nearer the top. To do that, your browser keeps a short, query-free list of the pages you opened here and the results you chose in your own device's local storage for up to 30 days. The exact recent search phrases shown in the dialog stay only in that browser tab's session storage and disappear when the tab closes; the Clear control removes them sooner. Neither list is sent to us or visible to us. Consent forms and these policy pages are left out of the ranking profile entirely. You can switch personalization off, or erase its list, from inside the search box itself, and a Global Privacy Control signal switches it off before it starts. Clearing your browser's site data also erases both lists.

Third-party tracking, in full: Google Analytics counts visits and shows us which pages people find useful; it loads with all advertising signals denied. Ahrefs Web Analytics counts page views and the sites visitors arrive from; it sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. Vercel Speed Insights and Vercel Web Analytics, both run by the company that hosts this site, time how quickly each page loads and becomes usable and count page views; it sets no cookie, reports to this site’s own address rather than an outside one, and receives a page address and a set of timings — never a name, an answer, or anything about you. Microsoft Clarity produces heatmaps and session replays — a reconstruction of how a page was scrolled and clicked through — and it loads only after you affirmatively accept the consent notice; decline it, dismiss it, or ignore it and the recorder never runs. Between them these tools receive the page address you visited and the fact that a button was clicked; they do not receive your name, phone number, email address, form answers, or any conclusion about your dental health.

What is deliberately kept out of those recordings: the Smile Preview, the candidacy quiz, the cost estimator, and the consultation request form are all masked in the site's code, so the photograph you upload, the answers you give, and the details you type are never sent to either analytics company — masked content is withheld at your device rather than hidden afterwards. (Separately, if you choose to use Smile Preview and consent, your photograph is processed by Google and OpenAI to generate the preview, as disclosed in that feature before you upload.) On the patient-forms pages, no analytics or recording script loads at all. We do not run advertising pixels or social-media trackers, and advertising features are switched off in our analytics settings.

How we respond to Do Not Track and browser privacy signals: if your browser or extension sends a Global Privacy Control signal, this site loads none of Google Analytics, Ahrefs Web Analytics or Microsoft Clarity at all for your visit, and neither Vercel Speed Insights nor Vercel Web Analytics sends anything — nothing is measured and nothing is recorded, and a GPC signal overrides even a previously accepted analytics notice. We treat that signal as a binding opt-out rather than a preference. Older “Do Not Track” headers are not a standardized signal that we can reliably act on, so we do not rely on them; the Global Privacy Control signal is the one we honor, and you can also block analytics entirely with your browser settings or an extension.

How Long We Keep Information

Keeping data forever is a risk to you, not a service. Our retention rules, by category:

  • Consultation requests, Smile Preview contact submissions, and implant-quiz submissions that do not become appointments are kept in our customer-relationship system for 24 months from your last contact with us, then deleted. If you become a patient, the information moves under your patient record and health-records law governs instead.
  • Smile Preview photographs are not stored by us at all — our server passes the photo to the AI provider and keeps no copy. The providers retain uploads temporarily for abuse monitoring (Google up to about 55 days, OpenAI about 30 days), then delete them; neither uses them for training.
  • Dental and medical records are kept for as long as California health-records law and our professional obligations require — those periods are set by law, not by this policy, and deletion rights under consumer privacy law do not override them.
  • Analytics data is aggregated and retained under the analytics providers' standard retention settings; it identifies pages and sessions, not named people.
  • Records of your consents (such as text-message consent), including the submitted sentence, server receipt/submission time, and proxy-derived IP, are kept as long as needed to honor and document the choice you made. The live retention and deletion behavior still depends on the configured contact system and must match this policy.

Notice at Collection

California law asks businesses to tell you, at or before the moment of collection, what is collected and why. Short notices at our consultation form and Smile Preview point here; this is the complete version.

  • Categories collected: identifiers and contact details (name and phone on the consultation form and in Smile Preview; name, email, phone, and ZIP in the implant quiz); treatment interest and quiz answers about dental concerns and goals; a self-reported credit range and, when asked, a household-income band; the exact submitted call/text-consent sentence with a server receipt/submission time and proxy-derived IP; a photograph, only in Smile Preview and only with your consent; device and analytics information including coarse, IP-derived region (no GPS or device-location permission); and, for patients, health and insurance information governed by HIPAA rather than this notice.
  • Purposes: contacting you about your consultation and arranging care; preparing treatment and financing options in response to your quiz answers; providing treatment and billing; generating your Smile Preview; improving the website; and meeting legal obligations.
  • Sale and sharing: we do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Because we honor Global Privacy Control, an opt-out signal from your browser is respected automatically.
  • Sensitive personal information: we do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes beyond providing the services you ask for.
  • Retention: consultation, Smile Preview contact, and quiz records that do not become appointments — stated as 24 months, including the associated consent sentence, server receipt/submission time, and proxy-derived IP; Smile Preview photos — not stored by application code, with provider behavior requiring current verification; patient records — as health-records law requires. Details and evidence qualifications appear in the retention section above.
  • Your rights and how to use them: Your Privacy Choices.

Your California Privacy Rights (CCPA/CPRA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act applies to businesses above certain size thresholds, and a two-office dental practice may or may not cross them in a given year. We do not make you care: whether or not the CCPA technically applies to us, we honor these requests. (Medical information governed by HIPAA and the CMIA follows those laws' own access and amendment procedures instead — the rights below cover your other personal information.)

  • Right to know and access — request the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, where it came from, why we collected it, and who received it.
  • Right to delete — request deletion of personal information we hold, subject to legal exceptions such as health-record retention requirements.
  • Right to correct — request that inaccurate personal information be corrected.
  • Right to portability — receive the information you gave us in a usable, portable format.
  • Right to opt out of sale or sharing — we do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising today. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and post a conspicuous opt-out link before any such sale or sharing begins, and Global Privacy Control signals will function as the opt-out.
  • Right to limit use of sensitive personal information — we already do not use or disclose sensitive personal information beyond providing the services you request, so there is nothing further to limit; if that ever changes, a dedicated limit link will appear alongside the opt-out link.
  • Right to non-discrimination — exercising any of these rights will never affect the care, pricing, or service you receive.

How To Exercise Your Rights

Email us at info@bayareaimplantdentistry.com or call (510) 574-0496 — both routes reach our Privacy Officer. We will verify your identity before disclosing, deleting, or correcting information — a protection for you, not an obstacle — and respond within the timeframes California law sets (45 days, extendable once with notice). You may designate an authorized agent to submit a request on your behalf. Opt-out requests are honored without any verification hurdle. The step-by-step version of all of this lives at Your Privacy Choices.

Your Health Information

Records created in the course of your dental care are protected health information under HIPAA and medical information under California’s CMIA. Our full Notice of Privacy Practices is posted on this site and available at both offices, and its plain-language summary lives at Your Health Information Privacy Rights. Where this policy and those laws could ever point in different directions, the health-privacy laws control for your health information.

Children's Privacy

This website is about adult implant dentistry and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information online from anyone under 16, and we do not sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16. Care for minor patients is arranged through a parent or legal guardian.

How We Protect Information

We maintain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your information — from access controls and staff training to the physical security of our offices. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, but protecting your information is treated here with the same seriousness as protecting your health.

Links To Other Sites

This site links to third parties — such as review platforms, social media, verification registries, and financing partners. Our locations page also EMBEDS a Google map of each office: the map loads only when you scroll to it, and when it does, Google receives your IP address in the same way it would if you opened the map yourself. Their privacy practices are their own; we encourage you to review their policies before providing information.

Changes To This Policy

When we update this policy, we will post the revised version here with an updated date. Meaningful changes will be reflected in the date above — we won't quietly move the ground under you. If we ever intended to begin selling personal information or sharing it for cross-context behavioral advertising, this policy and a conspicuous opt-out link would be updated before that began, not after.

Contact Us

Privacy requests and questions go to our Privacy Officer: Center for Implant Dentistry, 3381 Walnut Ave, Fremont, CA 94538 · (510) 574-0496 · info@bayareaimplantdentistry.com

This policy describes website and general business privacy practices. It is provided for transparency and does not create contractual rights. Where this policy and applicable law differ, the law controls.