Privacy and research notice
What happens to what you tell us
Version 2026-10-a · October 2026
The short version. We use your question to decide what videos to make and to make them. Email and on-air credit are optional. The health background questions are optional too, they're stored apart from everything that could identify you, and they're only used for research after independent ethics review. You can ask us to delete anything.
What we collect
- Your question and follow-up answers, plus the short summary you check before sending.
- Optional contact details: an email address, and how you'd like to be credited if we read your question on air.
- Optional health background, only if you choose to add it: age range, sex, gender, race or ethnicity, country, height and weight, diagnosed conditions, number of regular medicines, habits like smoking, drinking, activity and sleep, and family history. Every item can be skipped.
- Technical data: your IP address is held briefly in memory to limit abuse. We don't store it with your submission, and we don't use advertising or tracking cookies.
How we use your question
- To choose episode topics and make the videos. If we feature your question, the narrator reads a paraphrase with identifying details removed.
- To credit you only in the way you chose. The default is anonymous.
- To email you about your question if you left an address. We won't add you to a mailing list or sell or share your address.
The AI interviewer
The follow-up questions are written by an AI model, Claude, made by Anthropic. To do that, your question and answers are sent to Anthropic's API, which processes them under Anthropic's commercial terms. The AI doesn't see your email, your credit preference or your health background. Please leave out names and other identifying details when you write your question.
When a question comes in, the team gets a copy by email. Before it's sent, the AI and an automatic check remove identifying details such as names, places, dates and contact details from your question and answers. That copy never includes your email address or your health background.
The optional research data
Health Loom hopes the questions people ask, together with anonymous health backgrounds, can become a useful primary source for epidemiology: who is asking about what, and how that lines up with conditions and habits. Here's how we protect it.
- Consent. It's only collected if you choose "Yes, I'll add it". Saying no doesn't affect your question.
- Separation. Your answers are stored under a random research code, in a separate place from your question, email and name. The research record keeps only the month you sent it and broad topic tags for your question (like "sleep"), not the question itself.
- Coarse by design. We ask for age ranges rather than birthdays, and country rather than location.
- Ethics review. We'll only analyze or share these answers as part of a study that an independent ethics committee (an IRB or research ethics board) has reviewed.
- De-identified sharing only. Results are published in aggregate. Any data shared with research partners is de-identified, and small groups are suppressed so that no one can be singled out.
- Re-contact only if you ask. If you tick the box to hear about future studies, we keep that request with your email, not with your health answers.
Your choices
- Withdraw from research: send us your research withdrawal code (it starts with R-) and we'll delete those answers. Because the code is the only link, we can't find your research answers without it.
- Delete your question or email: send us your reference code (it starts with Q-), or write from the email address you gave us.
- Data already included in a published aggregate result can't be pulled back out of that result, but it won't be used again.
How long we keep it
We keep questions while they may still become episodes, and contact details until we've told you about your episode or you ask us to delete them. Research answers are kept until you withdraw or the research project ends.
Who can see it
The small Health Loom production team, the service that hosts this website, Anthropic for the follow-up questions and redaction as described above, and our email provider (Resend), which delivers the redacted copy of each question to the team. We don't sell personal information.
Age
This form is for people 18 and older.
Not medical advice
Health Loom provides general education. Nothing on this site or in our videos is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation. In an emergency, call 911 or your local emergency number. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Contact
Questions, deletion requests or withdrawal: info@healthloom.com.