Privacy policy

What we collect

When you submit a wait-time report, we store the wait duration, care stage, crowd level, and the time of submission. We do not collect or provide form fields for your name, diagnosis, symptoms, health card number, medical record number, phone number, email address, or any other personal or medical detail.

Anonymous identifiers

Your browser generates a random anonymous token used only to prevent abuse (for example, limiting how many reports one device can submit per hour). The server never stores this token directly — only a one-way cryptographic hash of it, which cannot be reversed back to the original value.

Location

Sharing your location is optional and is only used, if you consent, to confirm a report is plausibly near the hospital you selected. We never store your precise coordinates — only whether the report was plausible and a coarse distance range. You can use WaitWise fully without granting location access.

Network information

To limit abuse, we derive a short-lived, one-way hash from network information associated with your request. This hash rotates daily and your raw IP address is never stored.

Data retention

Wait reports are automatically excluded from public estimates after a configured expiry window (shown on each hospital’s page) and are periodically deleted. See docs/privacy-and-data-retention.md for the current retention schedule.

Contact

See our contact page for how to reach the operator of this service.