Privacy

The short version

We are Chris and Becky Fry, two autism parents running this site ourselves. We do not sell data, we do not have anything to sell it to, and we do not run advertising. There are exactly three ways we ever end up with your information: you fill in the contact form, you submit a provider listing, or you are counted anonymously in our visitor statistics.

Everything you type into a checklist, the milestone checker, or the location picker stays in your own browser and is never sent to us. We cannot see it. More on that below, because it is the part that matters most and the part people least expect.

What stays on your device

Several tools on this site remember what you have done so you do not have to start over. All of them use your browser’s local storage, which means the information is written to your own device and never transmitted anywhere. There is no account, no login, and no copy on our servers.

• The milestone checker — which milestones you ticked for your child. This is developmental information about a child and we deliberately built it so that it never reaches us.
• Guide checklists — the boxes you tick on any guide page.
• Your location — the state and county you picked, so local resources show up.
• Your journey stage — whether you told us you are newly diagnosed, dealing with school, and so on.
• Recently visited guides — so we can offer to pick up where you left off.

Because this lives on your device, clearing your browser data erases it, and it does not follow you to another device. That is a trade-off we chose on purpose: it means a printed milestone list you take to your pediatrician is yours alone.

What we do collect

If you use the contact form

We receive your name, email address, subject and message, and whether you identified as a parent or a provider. That goes two places: an email to us, and secure storage so a message is never lost if the email fails. We keep it so we can reply and so we have a record of corrections reported to us. If you would like a message deleted, ask and we will delete it.

If you submit a provider listing

We receive your name and email as the submitter, plus the practice details you provide — name, phone, website, email, address, category and description. The practice details are intended to be published — that is the point of submitting them — and they appear on the relevant county page once we have reviewed them. Your name and email as the submitter are not published; we use them only to contact you about the listing.

If you sign up for county alerts

We store two things: your email address and the county you asked about. No name, and nothing about your family or your child. We use it for exactly one thing — emailing you when a new provider is verified in that county — and for nothing else. There is no newsletter attached to it and no other list it feeds into. Every alert carries a one-click unsubscribe link that removes the record immediately and without asking you why. You can also ask us to remove it and we will.

Visitor statistics

We use Google Analytics to see which pages people read and which searches bring them here. It tells us that a page was viewed, roughly where in the world from, and on what kind of device. It does not tell us who you are. Google sets its own cookies to do this and processes the data under its own terms. If you would rather not be counted, browser privacy settings, an ad blocker, or Google’s own opt-out add-on will all prevent it, and nothing on the site stops working.

Ordinary server logs

The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps standard technical logs including IP addresses, needed to serve pages and protect against abuse.

What we never do

• We do not sell or share your data with anyone for marketing, and we never will. If that ever changed, it would be announced on this page before it happened, not after.
• We do not run advertising or advertising trackers.
• We do not have a mailing list. We removed the newsletter sign-up rather than collect addresses we were not yet using.
• We never ask for medical records, diagnoses, or details about your child, and you should not send them. If you do include something sensitive in a message, we will not publish it.
• We do not require an account to use anything on this site.

Who else is involved

Being specific is more useful than a vague reference to “service providers”. Four companies touch this site:

• Vercel — hosting and storage for contact messages and provider submissions.
• Google Analytics — anonymous visitor statistics.
• Resend — sends the notification emails that reach our inbox.
• Spotify — only on the podcast page, and only if you click to load the player. We deliberately put the player behind a click so Spotify is not loaded, and cannot track you, unless you ask for it.

Children

This site is written for parents, carers and autistic adults, not for children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. The milestone checker is about a child, but it is filled in by an adult and, as above, what you enter never leaves your device.

Your choices

Email us and we will do these without argument or delay: tell you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Wherever you live, and regardless of whether a particular law requires it of us.

You can also clear everything stored on your device at any time through your browser settings, without contacting us at all.

Changes to this page

If we start collecting something new, this page will say so and the date at the top will change. We are not going to bury a change in a revised version nobody reads.

Questions, or a request to delete something? Contact us.