Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Your account: name, email address, country, and whether you're a patient or a surgeon. Your password is held by our sign-in provider; we never see it.
• Questions and posts: what you ask, answer, comment or post, and any photos you add. Questions can be asked anonymously.
• Consultations: the surgeon, time, place or video, your reason for booking, messages in the consultation chat, and when a video call started and ended. Video calls are not recorded.
• Your health background (optional): date of birth, sex, pregnancy, weight and height, allergies, conditions, past operations, medicines, smoking and substance use, blood group and genotype.
• Test results (optional): reports and images you upload.
• Records from your surgeon: the summary they send you, prescriptions and investigation requests.
• Payments: amounts, dates and payment references. Card details are entered with Paystack, our payment provider; we never see or store them.
• Surgeons also give us: licence numbers, licence certificates and expiry dates, qualifications, clinics, fees and hours, bank details for payouts, and private consultation notes.
• Technical information: error reports (the page, your browser type and the error) so we can fix problems; phone notification settings; and a daily count of profile views, made with a one-way code so the viewer can't be identified.

How we use it

• To run your account and show your questions, answers and profile.
• To arrange, hold and follow up consultations, and process payments, refunds and payouts.
• To check surgeons' licences with their regulators and remind them before a licence expires.
• To send emails and notifications you need (bookings, payments, replies), and others you can switch off in Settings.
• To keep AskaSurgeon safe: moderating content and preventing fraud and misuse.

Our legal bases: providing the service you asked for (contract); your explicit consent for health information and test results, which you can withdraw at any time; legal obligations such as tax and accounting records; and our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure.

Your health information stays in your control

• Your health background and test results are private to you. AskaSurgeon staff can't see them.
• You choose which surgeon sees them, for which consultation, and for how long. You can stop sharing at any time.
• Surgeons see shared test results on screen only. They can't download them, and you can see each time they open one.
• Health background sharing ends automatically when your surgeon sends your summary.

Who sees what

• Your surgeon: your name, booking details and reason for booking, and whatever you choose to share. Their notes about you are private to them.
• The public: questions and answers, surgeons' profiles and posts. Your name shows on questions unless you ask anonymously or keep your questions off your profile.
• Pharmacies, laboratories and radiology centres: only what you take to them. AskaSurgeon partners who look up your request or prescription by its reference see your name, patient ID, what was requested or prescribed and by whom, and record what they did; partner labs can send your results to your AskaSurgeon record. Anyone checking a reference at askasurgeon.co/verify sees only the surgeon, the date, whether it's current, how much has been supplied or done, and your initials.
• Service providers who process data for us: Supabase (database, sign-in and file storage), Cloudflare (hosting and security), Paystack (payments), Brevo (email), and Anthropic (AI that drafts and arranges surgeons' notes when the surgeon asks, and reads licence documents for our checks). They may only use it to provide their service to us.
• Authorities: only where the law requires it, or to protect someone from serious harm.

Some providers store data outside your country, including in the European Union and the United States. Where the law requires it, we rely on safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

• Your account information, until you delete your account.
• Health background and test results, until you delete them or your account.
• Consultation, prescription and payment records, for as long as the law requires surgeons to keep medical records and us to keep financial records. Surgeons keep their own clinical notes as their professional duty requires.

Your rights

Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the UK GDPR and similar laws, you can ask to see, correct, download or delete your information, object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw consent.

• Delete your account any time in Settings → Delete my account.
• Change notifications and profile details in Settings.
• For anything else, email admin@askasurgeon.co. We reply within one month.

If you're unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), or the data protection authority where you live.

Security

Information is encrypted in transit and stored with access controls, so each person sees only what they're allowed to. Video calls connect directly between the two devices, encrypted, and are not recorded. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we'll tell you and the regulators as the law requires.

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to remember your settings. We don't use advertising or tracking cookies.

Age

AskaSurgeon is for people aged 18 and over.