Your privacy

Your phone number, to confirm who you are. Your number is stored in one place, separately from the rest of your data, in case we need to contact you later. Everything else is stored with a securely encrypted version of your number. That encryption only runs one way — it cannot be turned back into your number.

Your address, to measure how far facilities are from you. We convert your address to a geocode, storing that and your zip code, and never storing your full address.

The procedure you were referred for, your insurance plan, and network, so we can find facilities that perform your procedure and accept your plan.

A couple short questions, for Pharos’ internal research purposes. Your answers to these questions help us better understand the barriers patients face in obtaining medical care.

Your phone number and the geocode are held together and are both deleted at the end of the study. That deletion is a scheduled step of the research protocol with a named owner.

The code we text you is stored only as a scrambled value. It stops working after a few minutes and is discarded as soon as you use it.

Your answers and your searches are kept after the study ends, filed under the encrypted version of your number. A search record holds the procedure, the plan and network, the first three digits of the zip code you searched from — never the full five — a summary of the results, which parts of them you opened, and a rounded figure for the median household income of that zip code area. That figure describes an area rather than you, and on its own it can narrow to a single zip code.

If you start and do not finish, no participant record is created. The verification attempt expires on its own and is removed.

We do not ask for your name, your email address, your date of birth, your insurance ID or member number, or any payment details. Pharos is free and sells nothing.

We do not record your IP address or anything about your device. We place no advertising and no tracking cookies, we build no profile of you, and we do not sell or share anything with advertisers or data brokers. The one cookie we set keeps you signed in on this site and does nothing else.

The research team. Your number is also handed to the messaging service that delivers your verification text, and is used for nothing else.

Findings may be published, including in peer-reviewed work. Anything we publish reports patterns across many searches together, and could not identify an individual search or the person who made it.

Writing to us from our contact page is separate. That form opens a message in your own email app addressed to the research team — nothing is submitted through Pharos, and nothing you write there joins the research record.