Your privacy

Your intake answers (journey stage, diagnosis type, stage, biomarker testing status), your filters (including ZIP code), the trials you star, and your recent chat messages are saved in cookies on your device. Those cookies travel with your requests so our server can run your trial search, but we don’t keep them — for anonymous use, nothing identifiable is retained server-side. Clearing your browser cookies erases everything.

Signing in stores, in our database, what you choose to save:

• Your email address (used only to sign you in and for the emails described below)
• Your profile — diagnosis type, stage, biomarker results, treatment history, journey phase
• The trials you save and the questions you keep for your doctor
• Your chat history with Arnold (text only), and a rolling AI-written summary of it
• Caregivers you’ve invited and what they can see

You agree to this at sign-in via the consent checkbox. You can download your full record or delete your account any time at Account → Privacy — deletion is immediate and all data is erased from our systems within 30 days.

The chat, voice mode, and pathology upload are powered by OpenAI. Your messages — plus, in Navigator mode, your intake context — and any photos you attach are sent to OpenAI’s API to generate responses. In voice mode, microphone audio streams directly between your browser and OpenAI; it never touches our servers, and we store only the text transcript. The Educator (“learn the lingo”) mode never receives your personal context.

Under OpenAI’s API terms, this content is not used to train their models and is deleted from their systems within about 30 days, where it is retained only for abuse monitoring.

If you upload a pathology report, the file is parsed once and discarded — we never store the original PDF or image, the extracted text, or the result on our servers.

• PDFs — we strip your name, date of birth, MRN, accession number, phone, address, and SSN from the text before it goes to OpenAI.
• Images— sent to OpenAI’s vision API as-is with instructions to ignore identifiers. For maximum privacy, black out your name and MRN before uploading.

Either way, OpenAI’s 30-day deletion described above applies. To ask about or request deletion of anything you’ve uploaded, email LCFA@LCFAmerica.org.

Every chat message is run through OpenAI’s moderation check. If a message signals a crisis, we show support resources (988) and record a short excerpt of that message — with no name, email, or account link — so we can monitor whether the safety system is working. These records cannot be traced back to you.

We use first-party analytics to understand which features help patients and to improve the site — currently Vercel Analytics, and Google Analytics as we roll it out. Before any analytics event leaves your browser, health-bearing data is stripped from the URL. We do not use advertising networks or tracking pixels, and we never sell data or share it for marketing.

Only the services needed to run the tool: OpenAI (AI responses, as above), Supabase (our database), Vercel (hosting and analytics), Google (analytics, as we add it), Resend (sending the emails below), zippopotam.us (converts your 5-digit ZIP to map coordinates for the distance filter — the ZIP is the only thing sent), and OpenStreetMap(map images on trial pages — when you view a trial’s locations, your browser loads map tiles for the areas where its sites are, so OpenStreetMap sees your IP address like any website you visit; your ZIP and address are never sent, and the map always centers on the trial’s sites, not on you). Nobody else. If you use the Report issue button, your description and a snapshot of your filters go to our development team; the optional email field and chat-history checkbox are off by default.

With an account you may receive: one-tap sign-in links, caregiver invitations you initiate, and — only if you opt in — updates capped at one per week. Every update includes an unsubscribe link, and you can change preferences at Account → Communications.

• Anonymous use — clear your browser cookies (Settings → Privacy → Clear browsing data), or use the Clear button in the chat sidebar for just the conversation.
• Account — self-serve export and delete at Account → Privacy; erased within 30 days.
• Anything else — email LCFA@LCFAmerica.org and we’ll handle it.

⚠ On a shared device (family computer, library, workplace), the next person who opens this site in the same browser will see your saved selections. When that matters, use a private / incognito window — nothing persists after you close it.

That link encodes your intake, filters, and starred trials inside the URL itself. Anyone who receives it can read what it encodes — send it to yourself over a private channel and don’t post it publicly. To share with your oncologist, use “Create shareable link” instead, which creates a short anonymous link with no personal information in the URL.

The Lung Cancer Foundation of America is a patient advocacy nonprofit — not a healthcare provider, health plan, or clearinghouse — so this tool does not operate under HIPAA and does not create medical records. It is a beta information resource to help you prepare questions for your clinical team, not medical advice.

We designed the tool to minimize collection of what Washington’s My Health My Data Act and similar laws call “consumer health data.” Where such laws give you rights to access, delete, or limit use of that data, the deletion paths above and LCFA@LCFAmerica.org are how to exercise them.

If anything here is unclear, or you want to know how a specific feature handles your data, email LCFA@LCFAmerica.org.