Privacy
What we collect, what we do with it, and the rights you have.
Last updated: May 14, 2026
This page explains how Help & Hope for Parents (helpandhopeforparents.com) handles the things you share. The short version: we collect as little as possible, we ask permission before publishing anything, and we don’t track you across the web.
What we collect
There are three places this site collects information.
1. The contact forms on /write-to-me
If you fill out any of the contact forms, we collect what you put in the fields:
- A name or how you’d like to be identified (you can write “Anonymous”)
- Your email, only if you choose to provide one
- Your message, story, or suggestion
- Additional context fields, depending on which form you fill out
- Whether you’ve given permission for your message to be shared anonymously on the blog
Submissions are processed by our hosting provider and delivered to our team. We read every submission. We do not share submissions with anyone outside of Help & Hope for Parents without your explicit permission.
2. Subscribing to the newsletter
The newsletter (“The Help & Hope Letter”) is published on a third-party platform. When you subscribe, you do so on their site, not ours, and your email is held by them under their own privacy policy. We can see subscriber emails through the platform dashboard but we don’t store them anywhere else.
3. Standard server logs
Like any website, our hosting provider records basic technical information about page requests: IP address, browser type, the page requested, and the time. These logs are kept by our hosting provider for a limited time for security and operations purposes. We do not analyze them.
4. Anonymous page analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages people read and which buttons they click. For example, we can see “20 people opened the FAQ about BPD and DBT this week” or “the Book a Free Call button was clicked 5 times from /story this month,” without knowing who those people are.
Google Analytics records an anonymized version of your IP address (the last segment is stripped before storage), the page you visited, the links and buttons you clicked, whether you submitted a form (the fact of submission, not its contents), and standard browser and device info. It does not record your name, email, the contents of any form, or anything that identifies you personally. We do not enable Google Signals or any cross-site advertising features.
Google Analytics sets two first-party cookies on this domain (_ga and _ga_BYQ18GHCJZ) that persist for up to two years. You can opt out by installing Google’s official opt-out browser add-on or by enabling tracking protection in your browser.
What we don’t do
- No advertising or behavioral retargeting. No Meta pixel, no Google Ads tag, no LinkedIn Insight, no retargeting tags.
- No cross-site tracking. The analytics described above stay scoped to this site. We don’t follow you around the web.
- No other cookies set by this site. Aside from the two Google Analytics cookies named above, this site sets no cookies. Third-party platforms like our newsletter and booking tools may set their own when you visit pages on their domains.
- No selling or sharing of your data. Nothing you submit is sold, traded, or shared with marketers.
- No use of your story for AI training. Submissions are not fed to AI models for training, fine-tuning, or any commercial use.
If your words appear on the blog
Sometimes we answer reader questions on the Substack publicly. This only happens when you’ve checked the permission box on the form, and even then:
- Identifying details are removed unless you’ve asked otherwise.
- Your name is replaced with “a parent” or whatever identifier you chose on the form.
- If a question would be hard to anonymize without losing its meaning, we’ll reach out before publishing.
If you change your mind about a published piece, even years later, write in and we’ll take it down.
Your rights
You have the right to:
- Access — ask what information we hold about you.
- Correct — ask us to fix anything that’s inaccurate.
- Delete — ask us to remove your submission, your published anonymized message, or both.
- Opt out of further contact — if you’ve been corresponding with us and want that to stop.
- Unsubscribe from the newsletter — use the link at the bottom of any Substack email, or manage subscriptions through Substack directly.
Under California (CCPA/CPRA) and EU/UK (GDPR) law, residents have additional rights including data portability (getting a copy of your data) and the right to withdraw consent at any time. To exercise any of these rights, write to us with “Privacy request” in your message. We’ll respond within 30 days.
Children’s data
This site is for parents and adult caregivers. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you’re a parent and you mention your teen in a submission, we treat that information as part of your message, subject to all of the protections above, not as data collected from your child.
Changes to this page
If this policy changes in a way that affects how your information is handled, we’ll update the date at the top of the page. Material changes (the kind that affect what we collect or who has access) will also be announced on the Substack.