Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Murrieta Facial Plastic Surgery collects through murrietafacialplasticsurgery.com, how that information is handled, and who it reaches. It covers this website only.

It does not cover the medical record we keep for patients of the practice. That record is governed by federal and California health-privacy law and by our Notice of Privacy Practices, which is a separate document. Sending a consultation request through this website does not make you a patient of the practice. If you go on to be seen here, information you sent may become part of your medical record, which is governed by that Notice rather than by this policy.

The consultation form on our contact page asks for:

• Your full name, phone number, and email address, which are required so that we can reach you
• A preferred date and preferred time, both optional
• A message describing what you are considering, optional

We ask for nothing else, and we do not require you to describe a medical condition in order to reach us. Please share only what you are comfortable putting in an online form. If you would rather not use it at all, call the practice at (951) 477-1802.

When you submit the form, your request is sent from your browser directly to a request handler operated on our behalf by Halcy, our website vendor, running on Amazon Web Services. It is then emailed out: the coordinator who schedules consultations receives it, and Dr. Banthia and Halcy are copied. A copy is also written to an inquiry log, so requests can be tracked through follow-up. That log is a spreadsheet hosted in Halcy's Google Workspace and shared with the people who handle scheduling, not a file held at our offices.

Two things are worth stating plainly. Halcy receives a copy of every consultation request, because they operate the form and need to see what the practice actually received. And the company that hosts this website never receives your submission at all – the form deliberately bypasses it, so the pages you browse and the information you send travel different paths.

Halcy operates the form and the inquiry log under a written agreement with the practice governing how patient information may be used, and holds business associate agreements – the contract federal health-privacy law requires of a vendor handling health information – with Amazon Web Services and with Google, covering the request handler and the inquiry log. Those agreements cover the path up to the point your request is delivered. They do not cover the mailboxes it is delivered to, which are described under Security below.

We use what you send to respond to you, to arrange and confirm a consultation, and to keep a record of inquiries the practice has received.

We do not sell your information. We do not rent or trade it. We do not use it to build advertising profiles, and we do not hand it to data brokers.

We use PostHog to understand how visitors move through this site – which pages are read, which are ignored, where people arrive from. It is configured to collect as little as possible about you personally:

• No cookies are used for analytics. An anonymous identifier is stored in your browser's local storage instead.
• Session recording is switched off. We do not replay your visit.
• Values you type into forms are excluded from analytics events.
• The page addresses we record are stripped of anything after the question mark before the event leaves your browser. Two things sit outside that: the campaign tags that tell us which ad or search brought you here, and the address of a link you click, both of which are recorded as they are.

Analytics does record some ordinary details about the visit itself: an approximate location worked out from your IP address, usually no more precise than a city, together with your browser, operating system, device type, and screen size. We use those to see which areas the practice is reaching and whether the site works properly on the devices people actually use.

None of it is attached to your name, and nothing you type into the consultation form is sent to our analytics – that form posts to a separate service entirely.

We share what you send us only in these situations:

• With the service providers who run this website and its consultation form for us – Halcy, Amazon Web Services, and Google – under written agreements limiting what they may do with it
• With the email systems that carry and store your request once it reaches the mailboxes it is addressed to. One of those mailboxes sits on the email system of California Head & Neck Specialists, the group whose Carlsbad office this practice shares
• With the practice team involved in scheduling and caring for you
• When the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety

We do not share it with anyone else.

Consultation requests travel over an encrypted connection. The services that carry and store them on our behalf – Amazon Web Services and Google – are bound by business associate agreements that Halcy holds with each.

Once your request arrives in a destination mailbox, it is held under that mailbox's own arrangements, which are separate from the agreements above and are not ones we hold. Two of the three destinations are outside Halcy: a mailbox on California Head & Neck Specialists' email system, and Dr. Banthia's personal Google account, which is a consumer mailbox and carries no such agreement.

Within the practice, consultation requests are read by the staff involved in scheduling and consultations.

No method of transmitting information over the internet is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not use this website to send anything urgent. If you believe you have a medical emergency, call 911.

We keep consultation requests for as long as we need them to respond to you and to maintain the practice's business records. We do not delete them on a fixed schedule today, so if you would like yours removed sooner, ask us and we will remove it. If you become a patient, information relevant to your care moves into your medical record and is retained under the rules that govern medical records in California.

You can ask us what consultation requests we hold from you, ask us to correct them, or ask us to delete them. Write to the practice at either address below and we will respond.

So that you know what deleting actually reaches: your request exists as a row in the inquiry log and as emails in the mailboxes it was sent to. We delete the row and the emails. Copies may linger for a period in deleted-item folders and backups before they age out, and if a copy has been forwarded somewhere we do not control, we will tell you rather than imply it is gone.

If you are already a patient, requests about your medical record are handled under our Notice of Privacy Practices rather than under this policy, because different rules apply to it.

You are free to decline to give us any of this information, with the understanding that we may not be able to arrange a consultation without a way to reach you.

As a medical practice, we maintain a Notice of Privacy Practices describing how medical information about you may be used and disclosed and how you can get access to it. It is a separate document from this policy and is available from the practice on request.

This website is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 through this site. A parent or guardian who believes a child has submitted information here should contact us, and we will remove it on the same terms described under "Your Choices" above.

This website may link to sites we do not operate. We have no control over their content or their privacy practices, and this policy does not apply to them. Read the policy of any site you visit from here.

We may update this policy. The version published on this page is the one that applies, and we will change the effective date at the top when we revise it.

Questions about this Privacy Policy, or about information you have sent us, can be directed to Murrieta Facial Plastic Surgery at either office, or by phone at (951) 477-1802:

• 39755 Date St, Suite 105, Murrieta, CA 92563
• 2390 Faraday Ave, Carlsbad, CA 92008