Respect for your family includes respect for your information.

Starting with an inquiry

General inquiries should contain the adult sender’s contact information and a general question. Please do not include a child’s name, medical records, photographs, diagnosis, or other identifying details in the initial message.

What the inquiry forms collect, and why

The inquiry forms ask for adult contact information and details relevant to the selected topic. Depending on the form, this may include a name, email address, optional phone number, school or organization, interests, and a message.

The website has four inquiry forms. Each asks only for what the team needs to read and answer it, and a checkbox to agree to that use.

• Family and Professional Inquiries: name, email address, phone number (optional), whether you are a parent or guardian, a professional or someone else, organization (optional), how you heard about the site (optional) and a message (optional).
• Student volunteer inquiry: name, email address, school or program, year or level (optional), interests (optional), a message (optional) and a confirmation that you are 18 or older.
• General inquiry (contact form): name, email address, a topic and a message.
• Partnership inquiry: contact name, email address, organization, what you are interested in and a message (optional).

No form asks for a child’s name, age, diagnosis or hospital, and you should not write them in a message. The website is for adults: it does not ask for or knowingly collect information from children.

Where it is kept, and who reads it

What you send is saved in a database that the foundation runs on its own servers. It is not sent to a form service, a customer-relationship tool or any other outside company. A copy of each inquiry is emailed to the foundation’s inbox, through the mail provider that delivers the foundation’s email, so that the team can read it. The emailed copy stays in that inbox until the team deletes it.

To limit abuse, each saved submission also records the time, a one-way scrambled form of the sender’s network address (the address itself is not kept) and a shortened description of the browser (its first 200 characters). The same scrambled address is also kept for two days in a counter that limits how many forms one sender can send, then removed. None of this is used to identify anyone.

How long it is kept

Submissions are deleted from the database 180 days after they were sent, by a job that runs daily. The emailed copies are in the foundation’s inbox, and the team deletes them there too.

Privacy questions, and asking for deletion

To ask what we hold, or to ask us to delete something you sent, tell us the email address you used. The team will find it and delete it, in the database and in the inbox. There is no automatic self-service yet.

You can reach us here:

• The contact form, with the topic “Privacy or website accessibility”.
• By mail: Beyond the Bedside Foundation, 633 Beaubien St, Fl. 2, Detroit, MI 48266.
• By email: info@beyondthebedsidefoundation.org.

What the site does not do

• No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels and no social-media widgets.
• No third-party scripts, fonts or images: everything the site loads comes from the site itself.
• No cookies are set by the site.

One small thing is kept in your browser: the opening film on the home page plays once per visit, so the site stores a single marker, “opening seen”, in your browser’s session storage. It lives only until you close the tab, is never sent to a server, and contains nothing about you.

The servers and network equipment in front of the site keep ordinary operating records, for example access logs that include network addresses, for running and protecting the service. They are not used for profiling or shared for advertising. The site’s own logs carry no field values: nothing you type into a form is written to them.

Changes to this notice

If this notice changes, the effective date at the top of the page changes with it.