Privacy Policy

What a wait report contains

When you submit a wait time, four things are stored: which emergency department you are reporting, the wait in whole minutes, which stage of the visit you are describing, and how busy it looks. The server records when it received the report.

There is no free-text box anywhere on the form. That is deliberate — a text field is where a name, a phone number, or a symptom ends up, and the only reliable way to avoid storing those is to have nowhere to put them.

Please do not submit medical details or anything identifying about yourself or anyone else. Nothing on this site asks for it, and it is not needed to make a wait estimate useful.

What is never collected

• Names, email addresses, phone numbers, or accounts of any kind
• Health-card numbers or any other identifier
• Symptoms, diagnoses, medications, or clinical notes
• Photographs or uploads — there is no upload feature
• Your movement history or any ongoing location tracking

Location

The hospital directory can sort by distance. If you choose that, your browser asks your permission and the coordinates are used in your browser only, to order the list. They are not sent to our server, not stored, and not attached to anything you submit. Decline, and everything else on the site still works.

How long things are kept

Public wait estimates use the last six hours. A report older than that stops counting toward the number shown on the site, though the report itself still exists.

Reports are deleted after 90 days. This is automatic and runs daily.

Abuse-prevention hashes are cleared after 24 hours, when that protection is active. It is not active today: it needs a reliable way to tell connections apart, which this deployment does not currently have, so no such value is being recorded at all. If that changes, what is stored is a keyed one-way hash — never an IP address itself — and it is cleared within a day while the report is kept.

Removing that hash substantially reduces what a report could be linked back to. We are not going to tell you the remaining data is absolutely anonymous: a report still says that someone was at a named emergency department at a known time, and no honest policy claims that can never be connected to anyone.

Cookies and what is stored in your browser

There are no advertising or analytics cookies. There is no tracking pixel, no tag manager, and no third-party script anywhere on this site.

• Administrator session cookie — set only if you sign in to the moderation area. Members of the public never receive it. It holds a random token, not your identity.
• Offline cache — if your browser installs the app, it stores pages and images so the site opens without a connection. This lives on your device and can be cleared from your browser settings at any time.
• Install prompt preference — a small note in your browser recording that you dismissed the install banner, so it does not keep asking.

Maps

Map tiles are loaded from OpenFreeMap. Loading a map means your browser contacts that service directly, as it would for any image on the web. We send it nothing about you or your report.

Sharing

We do not sell data, and we do not share it for advertising. Aggregate wait estimates are public by design — that is the point of the site — but they are aggregates, not individual submissions.

Moderation

Reports may be reviewed by a moderator, who sees exactly what is listed above and nothing more. There is no field in the system that would show them who submitted a report, because no such field exists.

Accuracy

Wait times here are reported by members of the public. They are not official hospital figures and are not verified. In an emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. Do not use this site to decide whether to seek care.

Questions

If something here is unclear or looks wrong, please get in touch through the contact page.