How Healing Grounds handles your health data

Data breaches are getting bigger and more personal. Health data in particular is a coveted target: sensitive enough to pressure people with, valuable enough to demand ransom for. With increasingly smart AI, breaking in is also getting easier.

Decentralised instead of centralised

That’s why at Healing Grounds we deliberately choose not to collect health data; we keep it decentralised: with people themselves, rather than gathered in one central place. That’s not just a matter of principle, it’s also practically sound.

Hacking one person gives an attacker the data of exactly one person. Hacking one central organisation gives them everyone’s data at once, which makes such a place a far more attractive target.

That’s precisely why we leave it with you: you decide for yourself which health data you share with whom, we only keep data that’s genuinely necessary, such as your email address to stay in touch, for example.

The questionnaire: nothing is stored

The clearest example is the Positive Health questionnaire, the Spider Web. Your answers are never sent to a server; while you fill it in, they stay only in your own browser.

You download or print the result yourself. Leave the page, and that data is gone from your browser. Healing Grounds never received it in the first place. What isn’t there can’t be hacked either.

In how you get in touch, too

The same thinking sits behind our contact page. Calling or texting is the most private route; only your own phone provider knows a call took place. Signal, a popular alternative to WhatsApp, keeps no record of who you contact or how often.

WhatsApp is different: Meta can’t read the content of your messages, but it does see that you had contact with Healing Grounds and how often. Since WhatsApp carries adverts, that can count towards your advertising profile if your account is linked to Facebook or Instagram.

Email and video calls run on Google Workspace, which we use free of charge as a foundation through Google for Nonprofits: not end-to-end encrypted like Signal, but Google doesn’t use the content for advertising.

We explain that so extensively on purpose, from the core values of trust, connection and autonomy. You get to choose which channel suits you, and that’s only possible with the right information.

Want to know more? Read our privacy statement or the explanation per contact channel on the contact page.