Privacy Policy

Section 1Who we are and what this policy covers

This Privacy Policy explains how Clerk Chat Inc. ("Hearing Aid Finder," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, shares, and protects information about visitors to hearingaidfinder.org and any other website, landing page, or phone line we operate that links to this policy (together, the "Site").

This policy applies only to information that we control. It does not apply to the hearing care providers, clinics, call centers, or other businesses we connect you with. Once we pass your information to a provider, that provider handles it under its own privacy policy, and we do not control what it does with it. It also does not apply to other websites we link to. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of any provider that contacts you before sharing more information with them.

By using the Site, you agree to this Privacy Policy and to our Terms of Use, which are incorporated here by reference. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site or submit your information.

Section 2Summary of key points

This summary is provided for convenience only. It is not a substitute for the full policy below, which controls.

• What we collect: your ZIP code, name, and phone number, your answers to our questions about hearing difficulty and insurance coverage, and technical information about your visit such as IP address and pages viewed.
• Why we collect it: to match you with hearing care providers near you who can quote you a price, and to measure and improve our advertising.
• Who we give it to: participating hearing care providers, our service providers, and advertising platforms including Google and Meta.
• Health-related information: your answers about hearing difficulty are treated as sensitive personal information under several state laws. We collect and share them only with your consent, which you give by checking the consent box on our form.
• Marketing calls and texts: by checking the consent box, you agree to receive calls and texts, including automated ones, from us and matched providers. Consent is never required to buy anything, and you can revoke it at any time.
• Your choices: you can request access, correction, or deletion of your information, opt out of sale, sharing, and targeted advertising, and limit our use of sensitive information. See Your privacy rights.

Section 3Information we collect

3.1 Information you give us directly

Our price comparison form asks for the following. Every field is optional in the sense that you may stop at any point, but we cannot match you with a provider without the contact details in the last step.

If you email us, write to us, or call the number on the Site, we also collect the contents of that communication and any information you choose to include in it, such as an email address.

3.2 Information we collect automatically

When you visit the Site, we and our advertising and analytics partners automatically collect:

• Device and connection information, such as IP address, browser type and version, operating system, device type, screen size, and language settings.
• Usage information, such as the pages and screens you view, the date and time of your visit, how long you stay, how far you scroll, what you click, which form steps you complete or abandon, and the site or advertisement that referred you.
• Campaign and click identifiers, such as UTM parameters and the click identifiers that advertising platforms append to our ad links (for example Google's GCLID and Meta's FBCLID), which let us attribute your visit to a specific advertisement.
• Cookie and pixel identifiers, as described in Cookies, pixels, and advertising.

3.3 Information we receive from third parties

• Advertising platforms, such as Google and Meta, which tell us how our ads performed and may provide aggregated or inferred audience information.
• Data and verification vendors, which help us confirm that a phone number is valid and reachable, identify its line type, detect duplicate or fraudulent submissions, and check numbers against do-not-call and litigator lists.
• Matched providers, which may tell us whether they reached you, whether you booked an appointment, and whether a sale resulted, so that we can be paid and can measure which advertising works.
• Publicly available sources and marketing partners, including lead sources and co-registration partners that operate their own websites and pass along requests from people who asked to be contacted about hearing aids.

Section 4Sensitive personal information

Several state privacy laws treat some of the information we collect as "sensitive personal information" or "sensitive data," which triggers extra obligations. The table below is our disclosure for each category those laws define.

In the states that require consent before sensitive data is processed, we rely on the consent you give by checking the box on our form. In California, you may ask us to limit our use and disclosure of sensitive personal information to what is necessary to provide the service you asked for. See Your privacy rights.

Section 5Health information and HIPAA

You are telling us things about your hearing, so it is worth being clear about what protects that information and what does not.

We are not a HIPAA covered entity or a business associate. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act applies to health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers that bill electronically, along with their business associates. We are an advertising and referral business, so the information you give us is not protected health information under HIPAA and the HIPAA privacy and security rules do not govern how we handle it. It is instead protected by this policy, by your consent, and by state consumer privacy and health privacy laws.

The audiologist or clinic you are matched with is likely to be a HIPAA covered entity. Once you become that provider's patient, the information you give the provider directly is generally covered by HIPAA and by the provider's own notice of privacy practices, not by this policy.

Please do not send us detailed medical records, audiograms, diagnoses, prescriptions, or other clinical documentation. We do not need them and we do not want to store them. Share those directly with a licensed provider.

Section 6How we use information

We use the information described above to:

• Match you with participating hearing care providers in or near your ZIP code and transmit your request to them.
• Contact you, and let matched providers contact you, about hearing aids, pricing, appointments, and related products and services, by phone call, text message, email, or mail, in accordance with the consent you gave.
• Verify and improve the quality of the information we collect, including confirming that a phone number is valid and detecting duplicate, incomplete, or fraudulent submissions.
• Measure and attribute our advertising, including determining which ad, keyword, campaign, or landing page produced your visit and whether it led to a completed form or a sale, and report that back to advertising platforms such as Google and Meta.
• Build and refine advertising audiences, including retargeting people who visited the Site without completing the form, and creating similar or "lookalike" audiences.
• Operate, maintain, secure, test, and improve the Site, and analyze how people use it.
• Bill our provider clients and report performance to them, and to our own marketing partners.
• Comply with law, respond to legal process and government requests, and document your consent, including retaining records that show what disclosure you were shown and when you agreed to it.
• Establish, exercise, or defend legal claims, prevent fraud and abuse, and enforce our Terms of Use.
• Evaluate or complete a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, or bankruptcy, in which information may be among the assets transferred.

Section 7Cookies, pixels, and advertising

A cookie is a small file stored on your device. A pixel, also called a tag, web beacon, or clear GIF, is a small piece of code or a tiny invisible image that reports back when a page loads or an action happens. We use both, and we let certain advertising partners place their own on the Site. Together these technologies let us recognize a browser across pages and visits, tell whether an advertisement worked, and show you advertising elsewhere.

The Site uses the following categories:

We instruct our advertising partners not to receive your name, phone number, or the substance of your answers about your hearing through these pixels, and both Google and Meta prohibit advertisers from sending them health information. Even so, these partners do receive information indicating that you visited a website about hearing aids and whether you submitted a form, and they may combine that with information they already hold about you.

Ways to limit tracking and interest-based advertising:

• Your browser or device. Most browsers let you block or delete cookies and block third-party cookies. Mobile operating systems offer settings such as "Limit Ad Tracking" or app tracking permissions. See allaboutcookies.org for instructions.
• Global Privacy Control. We honor the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser or extension sends GPC, we treat it as a request to opt out of sale, sharing, and targeted advertising for that browser. Learn more at globalprivacycontrol.org.
• Industry opt-out pages. The Network Advertising Initiative at optout.networkadvertising.org and the Digital Advertising Alliance at optout.aboutads.info.
• Our opt-out. See Do not sell or share my information.

Opting out of interest-based advertising does not stop advertising, and it does not delete information already collected. Because these opt-outs are usually stored in a cookie, clearing your cookies or switching browsers or devices may undo them.

We do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals, which have no agreed meaning across the industry. We do respond to Global Privacy Control, as described above.

Section 8Calls, texts, and call recording

What you are agreeing to. When you check the consent box and submit our form, you give your signed, prior express written consent for Clerk Chat Inc., doing business as Hearing Aid Finder, and matched hearing care providers, along with the call centers and agents acting for them, to contact you at the phone number you entered. You may ask us which providers are in our network, and which ones received your information, at any time. That contact may be made using an automatic telephone dialing system or other automated dialing technology, an artificial, synthetic, or prerecorded voice, and SMS or MMS text messages, about hearing aids and related products and services. Your act of checking the box and submitting the form is your electronic signature under the federal E-SIGN Act. This consent applies even if the number is listed on the National Do Not Call Registry or a state or wireless do-not-call list, and even if it is a mobile number for which calls or texts cost you money. Section 6 of our Terms of Use sets out the full consent terms.

Consent is not a condition of any purchase. You are never required to agree to marketing calls or texts in order to buy anything or to get pricing. Our consent box is never pre-checked, and we do not treat a submission as consent unless you check it yourself. If you would rather not consent, call us at (844) 980-4200 instead of submitting the form.

The record we keep. When you consent we retain the exact disclosure text you were shown, the page address, the date and time, your IP address, the phone number you entered, and your form answers, for at least five years. Ask us at support@hearingaidfinder.org and we will send you a copy of your own consent record.

Frequency and cost. Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. We do not control, and are not responsible for, charges from your wireless carrier, and carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

How to stop contact. You may revoke consent at any time, by any reasonable method, using any words that reasonably signal you want contact to stop. You do not have to use a specific channel or phrase. Any of these work:

• Texts: reply STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE. Reply HELP for help.
• Calls: tell the caller to stop calling or to take you off the list.
• Any channel: call (844) 980-4200, email support@hearingaidfinder.org, or write to Clerk Chat Inc., Attn: Do Not Contact, 575 Market St., Suite 2080, San Francisco, CA 94105.

We will honor your revocation no later than ten business days after we receive it, and we treat it as applying to all of our automated marketing calls and texts across every channel and campaign, not only the one that prompted your request. We then add your number to our internal do-not-contact list and keep it there indefinitely, which is why we must retain the number itself even after honoring a deletion request: we cannot keep honoring "never contact me" if we erase the record of it.

Calling hours and identification. We do not place telemarketing calls or texts before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. in your local time, and we observe stricter limits where a state imposes them. Our callers identify themselves, the company they are calling for, and a number where that company can be reached.

Important limit on what we can do. Revoking consent with us stops contact from us. It does not automatically stop contact from a provider we already matched you with, because that provider is a separate business with its own records and obligations. To stop hearing from a specific provider, tell that provider directly. We will pass along a request if you ask, and we will stop sending your information to anyone new, but we cannot guarantee another company's compliance.

If the number is not yours. If we called or texted a number you never gave us, tell us at (844) 980-4200 or support@hearingaidfinder.org. We will suppress the number, stop contact, and tell you what record we hold of where it came from. We also check numbers against the FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database and suppress numbers we find have changed hands.

Call recording and monitoring. Calls between you and us, and calls we transfer to or receive from a provider, may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance, training, customer service, dispute resolution, and legal compliance. Where the law of your state requires all-party consent to record, we will tell you at the start of the call, and continuing the call indicates your consent. If you do not want to be recorded, say so and we will stop recording or end the call.

Section 9How we share information

We share information in the following ways. We do not publish or post your information publicly.

• Matched hearing care providers. This is the purpose of the Site. We transmit the information you submitted, including your name, phone number, ZIP code, and your answers about hearing difficulty and coverage, to participating providers, so that they can contact you with pricing. Those providers are independent businesses. We do not control them, we do not supervise their clinical judgment or their sales practices, and their use of your information is governed by their own policies. We may also transmit the information to call centers or marketing agencies acting for those providers.
• Other advertisers and marketing partners. We may share information with other businesses that we believe can offer you relevant products or services related to the request you made, and with marketing partners for lead validation, data enhancement, suppression, and email or direct mail marketing.
• Advertising and analytics platforms. Google, Meta, and similar platforms, as described in Cookies, pixels, and advertising.
• Service providers. Vendors that host our Site and data, deliver calls and text messages, validate phone numbers, provide customer support tooling, store records, and provide security and fraud prevention. They are permitted to use the information only to perform services for us.
• Legal and protective disclosures. When we believe disclosure is necessary to comply with law or legal process, respond to a government or regulatory request, enforce our Terms of Use, investigate suspected fraud or a threat to anyone's safety, or protect our rights and property.
• Corporate transactions. In connection with, or during negotiation of, a merger, financing, acquisition, sale of assets, reorganization, or bankruptcy. Any successor will remain bound by this policy for information it receives, unless and until it gives you notice of a change.
• With your direction. Any other sharing you specifically ask us to do.
• Aggregated and de-identified information. We may create and share information that no longer identifies you, such as statistics about how many visitors in a region report difficulty in restaurants. We will not attempt to re-identify it.

Section 10Sale, sharing, and targeted advertising

This section is our disclosure under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended, and under comparable laws in other states.

Yes, we sell and share personal information as those laws define those words. Those definitions are broad. "Sale" means disclosing personal information to a third party for money or other valuable consideration, and "sharing" means disclosing it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Because providers pay us for the referrals we send them, and because our advertising pixels disclose information to Google and Meta for advertising purposes, both activities fall within those definitions. We are telling you this plainly rather than burying it.

In the twelve months before the last update of this policy, we disclosed the following categories:

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16 years of age. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes beyond those permitted by California law without offering you the right to limit that use.

We do not use your information for profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not engage in automated decision-making of that kind.

To opt out, see Do not sell or share my information. Opting out does not stop us from passing your information to a provider you have already asked us to connect you with, and it does not require providers who already have your information to delete it.

Section 11Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the rights below. We honor these rights for residents of every U.S. state that grants them, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. As a matter of practice, we will consider a request from anyone in the United States, whether or not your state has a law requiring it.

• Know and access. Confirm whether we process information about you, and get a copy in a portable form, along with the categories we collected, the sources, the purposes, and the categories of third parties who received it.
• Correct. Ask us to fix inaccurate information about you.
• Delete. Ask us to delete information about you, subject to exceptions, such as records we must keep to document your consent, to comply with law, to prevent fraud, or to defend legal claims.
• Opt out of sale, sharing, and targeted advertising. See Do not sell or share my information.
• Limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal information. Ask us to restrict our use of your hearing health and coverage answers to what is necessary to provide the service you requested.
• Withdraw consent. Withdraw the consent you gave for processing sensitive data, or for marketing calls and texts, as described in Calls, texts, and call recording.
• Non-discrimination. We will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or provide a lesser quality of service because you exercised a privacy right. We do not offer financial incentives for your data.
• Appeal. If we deny your request, you may appeal. See below.

How to submit a request

• Email: support@hearingaidfinder.org with the subject line "Privacy Request."
• Phone: (844) 980-4200
• Mail: Clerk Chat Inc., Attn: Privacy, 575 Market St., Suite 2080, San Francisco, CA 94105

Please tell us which right you are exercising, the state you live in, and enough detail for us to find your records, which normally means the phone number and ZIP code you submitted.

Verification. To protect you, we must verify your identity before acting on a request to know, correct, or delete. We do this by matching the information in your request against what we already hold, and we may ask for additional confirmation, such as a reply from an email address on file. If we cannot verify you, we will tell you and will treat a deletion request as an opt-out request where the law allows. Requests to opt out do not require verification.

Authorized agents. Someone may submit a request for you if you give them written permission or they hold a valid power of attorney. We may ask the agent for proof and may ask you to confirm directly.

Timing. We will acknowledge your request within ten business days and respond substantively within 45 calendar days. If we need more time, we will tell you and may extend by an additional 45 days.

Appeals. If we deny your request, you may appeal by replying to our decision or writing to support@hearingaidfinder.org with the subject line "Privacy Appeal" and your reasons. We will respond within 45 days. If we deny the appeal, we will tell you how to contact your state attorney general to complain.

Section 12Do not sell or share my information

To opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, out of its use for targeted advertising, and to limit our use of your sensitive personal information, use any of these methods:

• Email support@hearingaidfinder.org with the subject line "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information," and include the phone number and ZIP code you gave us.
• Call (844) 980-4200.
• Turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser or extension, which we honor automatically for that browser.

We will process your request within 15 business days. Because an opt-out signal sent through your browser is tied to that browser, you will need to send it from each browser and device you use, and again if you clear your cookies.

Two limits worth being direct about. First, an opt-out is forward-looking: it stops future sales and sharing but does not claw back information already sent to a provider or platform. Second, if you submit our form asking to be matched, we will send your information to providers, because that is the service you requested. If you want to stop that, do not submit the form, and call (844) 980-4200 instead.

Section 13California Shine the Light

California Civil Code section 1798.83 lets California residents ask a business that discloses personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes to provide a list of the categories disclosed and the third parties that received it, or instead to offer a way to opt out. We have elected to offer the opt-out. To ask that we not share your personal information with third parties for their direct marketing purposes, email support@hearingaidfinder.org with your full name, postal address, and the phone number you submitted.

California residents may also file complaints with the California Privacy Protection Agency, or with the California Department of Consumer Affairs, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, by phone at 800-952-5210, or by email to dca@dca.ca.gov.

Section 14Information about other people

Our form asks whether the hearing aids are for you, a spouse or partner, a parent, or someone else. If you submit information about another person, including their name or phone number, you confirm that you have that person's permission to do so and to consent on their behalf to being contacted by us and by matched providers, or that you have legal authority to act for them, for example as a guardian or under a power of attorney.

Please be thoughtful here. Providing someone else's phone number without their agreement can subject you, and us, to unwanted calls and to legal risk. If we learn that information was submitted without the person's authority, we will treat that person's wishes as controlling and will honor a request to stop contact and delete the record.

If someone else submitted your information without your permission, contact us at support@hearingaidfinder.org or (844) 980-4200 and we will remove it and add you to our do-not-contact list.

Section 15Minors

The Site is intended for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to use it or to submit information. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, we do not direct the Site to children, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

If you believe a person under 18 has given us information, contact support@hearingaidfinder.org and we will delete it. A parent or guardian who wants to arrange hearing care for a minor should contact a licensed audiologist directly rather than using this Site.

Section 16Third-party links and providers

The Site links to other websites, and matched providers may direct you to theirs. Those businesses operate under their own privacy policies, terms, and cookie practices, and we do not control them and are not responsible for them. A link is not an endorsement. Before you give information to another company, read its privacy policy.

Providers in our network are independent. We do not verify every provider's licensure, pricing, product claims, or privacy practices on an ongoing basis, and we are not responsible for how they treat your information or for the quality of the care or products they offer. If you have a dispute with a provider, take it up with that provider directly. You can confirm a hearing care professional's license with your state licensing board.

Section 17Retention

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, or as long as the law requires, and then we delete it or de-identify it. In deciding how long to keep something we consider:

• Whether we still need it to provide or improve the service you asked for.
• Whether we must keep it to document your consent to be contacted. Records of consent, including the disclosure text you were shown and the date and time you agreed, are generally kept for at least five years, because that is longer than the statute of limitations for the claims that such records defend against.
• Whether we need it to comply with a legal obligation, respond to a regulator, or establish or defend legal claims.
• Whether we need it to enforce a suppression or do-not-contact request. We keep enough information, typically a phone number, indefinitely for that purpose, because we cannot honor "never contact me again" if we delete the record of the request.
• Whether we need it for fraud prevention and security.

Lead records and the answers you submitted are generally retained for five years from your last interaction with us, unless you ask us to delete them sooner and no exception applies. Server logs and analytics data are typically retained for a shorter period, usually no more than 26 months.

Section 18Security

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect information, including encryption of our forms in transit, access controls that limit who can see lead data, and vendor diligence. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not send us sensitive documents such as medical records or identification numbers.

If you believe your information has been compromised, or you spot a security problem with the Site, contact us at support@hearingaidfinder.org.

Section 19Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date at the top and post the new version here. If the change is material, we will provide more prominent notice, such as a notice on the home page, and we will obtain your consent where the law requires it. This policy supersedes any earlier version. Your continued use of the Site after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy, except where consent is legally required. Please keep a copy of this policy for your records.

Section 20Contact us

Questions, concerns, or complaints about privacy:

• Email: support@hearingaidfinder.org
• Phone: (844) 980-4200
• Mail: Clerk Chat Inc., Attn: Privacy, 575 Market St., Suite 2080, San Francisco, CA 94105

Hearing Aid Finder is an advertising and lead-referral service, not a medical provider, hearing clinic, audiologist, or insurer. We do not sell hearing aids and we do not provide medical advice. Nothing on the Site is a substitute for evaluation by a licensed hearing care professional. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Medicare, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or any other government agency or program.