Privacy Policy

In short

• Our booking assistant is an artificial intelligence (AI). What you write to it is processed by our AI provider in the United States and copied to the clinic on Telegram, with your contact details masked, where copies are deleted after 30 days.
• The AI never has access to your patient form, your health history or your clinical record. Of the information we hold about you, it only ever receives the date, time, length and location of your own appointments, and only once your first and last name, email and phone are verified.
• Please don’t share health details in the chat: the assistant doesn’t need them to book. Your health record is completed separately, in the patient form.
• We don’t sell your information. The site uses no advertising trackers and no audience-measurement tools.
• Several of our providers are located outside Québec (see “Our providers”).

Who we are

Clinique Shanti (O&A inc.) is an acupuncture clinic at 5282 3e Avenue, Montréal, Québec H1Y 2W5, and 2381 rue Principale Ouest, suite 210, Magog, Québec.

Person in charge of the protection of personal information

Use these contact details for any question, request for access or correction, withdrawal of consent, or complaint. We reply within 30 days.

Which law applies

The clinic is located in Québec. Your information is protected by Québec’s Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (as amended by Law 25) and by the professional secrecy that binds members of the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec. The U.S. HIPAA law does not apply to the clinic.

The booking assistant (AI chat)

What we collect: your name, email, phone number, clinic location, preferred date and time, whether it’s a first treatment, and anything you write in the conversation.

How it works:

• Your messages are sent to Anthropic (United States), which provides the assistant’s AI model, to generate replies.
• Every message you send and every reply from the assistant is copied in real time to a private Telegram chat used by the clinic, so we can monitor the assistant and correct its mistakes. Your contact details are masked there (partial email and phone, name reduced to initials), and these copies are deleted automatically after 30 days.
• We record your email and phone as soon as you type them, then your name, location, date and time when you pick an appointment. The text of the conversation is not stored in our database. This information is deleted 7 days after your last activity, or 30 days if you left us your email without finishing your booking.
• If you left us your email without finishing your booking, we may send you a single reminder email within about 24 hours. It includes an unsubscribe link. We don’t send it if you booked in the meantime.
• If you ask for your upcoming appointments, the assistant asks for your first and last name, your email and your phone. If all three match, the list is emailed to the address on your booking: it never appears in the conversation, and the assistant gives the same answer either way, without confirming or denying that an appointment exists.
• To move or cancel an appointment, the assistant asks for the same details. Our server, not the AI, checks them against our calendar. An appointment’s details are only given if all three match, and another person’s information is never revealed. Only upcoming appointments are covered: the assistant never confirms or denies a past appointment.
• If you book while an upcoming appointment already exists under your name with the same email or phone, the assistant tells you, to avoid a duplicate booking, without giving you its details.
• Your browser keeps a session identifier (cs_chat_session), erased when you close the tab.

What the AI receives, and what it never receives:

• It receives what you write in the conversation, including your name, email and phone if you give them.
• It receives the list of open time slots, which contains no patient information.
• When you book, move or cancel an appointment and your first and last name, email and phone all match, it receives the date, time, length and location of the upcoming appointments involved. Nothing else from our calendar: not your name, email or phone as stored there. The list of your upcoming appointments is emailed to you without going through the AI.
• It never receives your patient form, your health history, your clinical record, or any other patient’s information.

The assistant makes no decisions about your care. You can always book by phone at (514) 220-2877 instead of using the chat.

Your appointment

When an appointment is booked, we create an event in our Google Calendar (United States) with your name, phone, email, language, location and duration. We send you a confirmation email, and a cancellation email when applicable, through Resend (United States). The clinic receives a Telegram notice with your initials, date, time and location.

The patient form (first treatment)

What we collect: first and last name, date of birth, gender, address, city, postal code, phone, email, height, weight, diagnosis, scars, surgeries, trauma, accidents, medications (name and dose), symptoms and other health information, your consents, your signature, and your newsletter choice.

Why: to create your acupuncture record, as required by the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec.

How: your answers are encrypted in your browser before they are sent, with a key whose secret part only the clinic holds. They travel encrypted through our host and stay encrypted in our database in Canada (Montréal) until the clinic retrieves them on its computer; the online copy is then deleted. No email is sent, and this form never goes through the booking assistant’s AI. The clinic receives a Telegram notice that contains no personal information.

Consent: this information is sensitive. We collect it only with your express consent, given in the form.

Retention: your record is kept on the clinic’s computer for at least 5 years after your last treatment, as required by the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec, then securely destroyed.

Reminder emails

If you are already a patient, we may email you an invitation to book again when your follow-up lapses, at most 3 times in a row. We use your email and your appointment history from our calendar for this. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing is permanent.

If an email bounces or is marked as spam, we stop writing to that address.

Cookies and trackers

The site uses no targeted advertising, no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel and no other audience-measurement tool. It only uses:

• the chat session identifier, erased when you close the tab;
• the iubenda consent banner (Italy), which remembers your choice.

The Facebook and Instagram links are plain links: nothing is sent to those networks unless you click.

Our providers

We share your information only with the providers the site needs to operate, who process it on our behalf.

Information communicated outside Québec

Your information may be communicated outside Québec, including to the United States, through the providers above.

What we don’t do

We don’t sell, rent or trade your information. We don’t use it for advertising.

Security and incidents

Access to your information is limited to the people who need it, and connections to the site are encrypted (HTTPS). If a confidentiality incident presents a risk of serious harm, we will notify you and the Commission d’accès à l’information.

Your rights

You can ask for:

• access to your information, and a copy in a structured, commonly used technological format;
• correction;
• withdrawal of your consent;
• deletion, except what the law requires us to keep (the clinical record, for at least 5 years).

Write to the person in charge of the protection of personal information (contact details above). If you’re not satisfied with our answer, you can file a complaint with Québec’s Commission d’accès à l’information (cai.gouv.qc.ca).

Changes

We will update this page if our practices change, and update the date at the top.