Privacy
What we keep, and what we don’t.
You shouldn’t have to read a page like this to find out whether it’s safe to tell a website your baby won’t latch. So here’s the short answer first, and the detail underneath it.
- We count how many people pick each of the eight headings on the “what’s going on” screen. We never record which ones you picked together, and the finer answers underneath them stay on your phone.
- We ask for the first three characters of your postal code, never the whole thing. Three characters covers thousands of homes. Six covers yours.
- There’s no Google tracking on the booking page. Not any.
- We count how many people reach each screen. We can’t tell which people, and we haven’t kept anything that would let us work it out.
- If you write to us, what you write goes to a person at the clinic. It doesn’t go on a mailing list.
Using the booking page
The booking page asks you a few questions so it can work out who can see you and where. Your answers stay in your own browser, so you can close the tab and pick up where you left off. Clearing your browser data clears them. Tapping “Start fresh” clears them straight away.
The rest of the site remembers where you had read to, for the same reason: a long page is easy to lose when a baby needs you. It keeps the section you reached, in your own browser, for two weeks. When you come back the page offers to take you there and does nothing until you say yes. None of it is sent to us, and clearing your browser data clears it.
A few numbers come back to us, and they’re counts rather than records. How many people reached each screen. How many were told a home visit is available, or that virtual is the best we can do. Which postal areas are asking, using those first three characters. And how many tapped through to book.
We also count the postal area and the answer together. That’s how we work out where to open next, and it’s the whole reason we count anything.
We also count how many people pick each of the eight headings on the “what’s going on” screen, so we know what families are actually coming to us for. Each heading goes up on its own. We never record which headings one person picked together, and we never put a heading next to a postal area. The one exception underneath is tongue tie, where we count the five finer answers too, because that’s the pathway with a doctor and an OHIP-covered release at the end of it.
What we don’t send anywhere: anything you typed, the finer answers under the other seven headings, and any way of telling one visit from another. There’s no visitor number, no advertising tag, and nothing recording the time you were here. The counts are filed by month, and a postal area that comes up fewer than five times in a month is left out of our reports altogether.
If you fill in a form
Some of the forms ask what’s going on, and some ask for your email so we can tell you when something opens near you. Those two things are kept apart on purpose. What you say about you and your baby goes to a person at the clinic and stays in her inbox. Your name, email and area go to the service we use to send email, which is Flodesk.
The forms that reach a person also ask for a phone number, and that one’s optional. If you give it, it goes to her inbox with the rest of your message so she can ring you back instead of writing. It never goes to Flodesk, it’s never added to a list, and we don’t count it.
You only go on a mailing list if you tick the box that says so, and every email we send has an unsubscribe link that works. Asking us a question isn’t signing up for anything.
If you’re just reading the site
The rest of the site uses Google Analytics to count page views, so we can see which pages people actually use. It records the page, roughly where in the world you are, and what kind of device you’re on. We’ve turned off the settings that would let that data be used to advertise to you or follow you between devices. Google processes it in the United States.
It isn’t on the booking page. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, it doesn’t load at all. It isn’t on a search result or an error page either, so anything you type into a search box stays with us. You can also turn it off everywhere with Google’s own browser add-on.
We also count the cookie notice itself: how many people were asked, how many said yes, and how many said no. Three numbers a day, with nothing in them about who anybody is. It’s the only way we can tell what share of visitors Google is counting, and without it every number we have is a fraction of something we can’t see.
And we count how many people read each page ourselves, on our own server, whether or not you accepted anything. What’s kept is the day, the name of the page, whether the visit came from a search engine or a link or neither, and whether it was a phone or a computer. Not the search you typed, not the page you came from, and no way of telling one visit from another. There are no journeys in it: it says how many, never who did what next.
There are four things on the home page that do something when you press them, and we count how many times each one is pressed. It tells us which of them anybody ever finds. All that’s kept is which of the four and the day, and there’s nothing in it about who pressed it.
We keep the day for those, because they’re about the website. Anything about you is only ever kept by the month: what you said was going on, whether your baby has arrived, and the first three characters of your postal code. One day can be a thin day, and on a thin day a handful of separate numbers start to describe one family. A month is wide enough that they don’t. And after two months we throw the days away and keep only the monthly totals.
Some links we send you carry a short tag, so we can see whether people read the welcome email or the welcome text. You can see it in the address: it says something like “welcome-text” and nothing about you. All we keep is a count of how many arrived from each one, by day.
We also count how many of those arrivals went on to book, so we can tell whether the email or the text is more use to you. That’s the only place we join two things about one visit, apart from the postal area and the answer, and we hold both to the same rule: if fewer than five people did a thing in a month, the number isn’t shown to anybody, including us.
Your appointments aren’t on this website
When you book, you leave this site for Jane, which is where the clinic keeps bookings and clinical records. That’s a separate system with its own security and its own rules, and it’s covered by Ontario’s health privacy law. Nothing about your appointment, your health or your baby comes back to this website.
Asking us what we’ve got
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to Amanda Antal at admin@ontariobreastfeedingclinic.ca and we’ll answer within thirty days.
Amanda is the person accountable for privacy at the Ontario Breastfeeding Clinic. If anything here isn’t right, she’s the one to write to.
One honest limitation. The counts from the booking page have nothing in them that identifies anybody, so there’s no way for us to find “yours” and take it out. That’s the same thing that makes them safe to keep.
If you think we’ve got this wrong, tell us first and we’ll fix it. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, at priv.gc.ca.
Last updated 25 August 2026. If we change what we collect, we’ll change this page on the same day.
