Privacy policy

What we collect

• Cookies and similar technologies. See Cookies below for the categories we and our partners may use, and how to control them.
• Your account. Email address, optional name, a scrypt hash of your password (never the password), and your settings — the studies you follow, saved searches, notification choices, and whether you allow study teams to contact you.
• Medical records you choose to upload. If you upload records to your profile we store the file and the text we extract from it, so you can find it later. This is health information about you and we treat it as such: it is private to your account, stored outside the public web root, and shared with a study’s manager only if you explicitly switch sharing on. You can delete any record at any time, which removes both the file and its text.
• Interest you register in a study. If you tell a study you want to take part, we record that and pass your message on — see “Who we share with” below.
• Server logs. Our web server records requests in the ordinary way — IP address, timestamp, path, user agent, response status. We aggregate these into visit counts by country and device class. We do not store your full IP address in the application database.
• A partial address with your recent searches. When you are signed in and run a search, we keep it in your recent-search history along with the last two bytes of your IP address (for example 208.113) — never the whole address. Our administrators can see recent searches with this partial address to detect misuse of the service. It is deleted with your account, and because it is only a fragment it cannot identify the device it came from.
• A country at sign-up. When you register we resolve your IP address to a country code and keep only that code, so we can report where sign-ups come from. The address itself is discarded.

Cookies and similar technologies

We and the partners we work with may use cookies, local storage, pixels, tags, software development kits and similar technologies on this site. This section describes every category that may be used, so that you know what to expect; not all of them are in use at any given moment.

• Strictly necessary. Needed for the site to work at all — keeping you signed in, remembering that you dismissed this notice, and protecting forms against abuse. The sign-in cookie is __Host-xm_session and holds a signed user id, role and expiry; your cookie choice is recorded in xm_cookie_consent as either all or essential. These cannot be switched off from within the site — without them you could not stay signed in, and we could not remember that you said no.
• Preference. Remembering choices you make, such as your interface language (NEXT_LOCALE) and the locations you want studies shown for.
• Analytics and performance. Understanding which pages are used, how people move through the site, which searches return nothing useful, and where errors occur, so we can improve it. This may include third-party analytics providers.
• Advertising and marketing. Cookies and identifiers used to select, deliver, measure and report on advertising — ours or a third party’s — on this site and elsewhere. These may include audience building, remarketing and conversion measurement, and may be set by advertising networks, exchanges, measurement providers and social platforms acting as third parties.
• Functional and embedded content. Cookies set by services embedded in a page, such as video players, maps, chat or support widgets, and sharing buttons.

Your choice. The notice at the foot of the page has two buttons: Accept all and Reject non-essential. Rejecting is honoured on every later visit, not just the one — that is what the xm_cookie_consent cookie records. Clear your cookies for this site to be asked again.

Controlling cookies. Every browser lets you see the cookies a site has set, delete them, and block some or all of them — look for “Cookies” or “Site data” in its privacy settings. Most browsers also offer a “do not track” or tracking-protection setting, and mobile operating systems offer a way to reset or limit the advertising identifier. Blocking strictly necessary cookies will stop you from being able to sign in.

We never place your uploaded medical records, or the content of them, into a cookie, an advertising identifier, or anything shared with an advertising partner.

What we do not collect

• No health information beyond the records you choose to upload yourself. We never infer a diagnosis about you, and nothing on the site requires you to upload anything.
• No payment information. Nothing here is for sale, we never charge you, and we never pay you.

Where the trial data comes from

Every study record is published by a public clinical trial registry and is already public information. It describes studies and their sponsors and investigators — not visitors to this site. Where a record lists a contact name, telephone number or email address, that is the registry’s own published contact for the study, reproduced as published. See where this data comes from for which registries feed the site and what the known gaps are.

Not medical advice

This site is an index of registry records. It does not diagnose, does not recommend treatment, and does not tell you whether you are eligible for a study. Whether a study is appropriate for you is a decision for you and your own clinician, and eligibility is determined only by the study team.

Your rights

Because we hold no personal data about visitors beyond server logs and the cookies described above, there is normally nothing to export or erase. If you believe we hold information about you and want it removed, or you want a copy of it, write to us and we will act on it. If you are in the EU or UK you may also complain to your national data protection authority.

Changes

This deployment now has accounts, email notifications and optional medical-record upload, and this page was rewritten to say so. We will not quietly broaden what we collect under an unchanged policy: when what we collect changes, this page and the version above change with it.