Privacy and your data

An order for a medicine says more about a person than almost any other purchase. A prescription for sildenafil, for an antidepressant, for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis or for an antiviral is a piece of health information with a name attached to it. This page says what happens to it, who can see it, and how long it stays.

This page covers the catalogue: orders, prescriptions sent to the pharmacist, delivery addresses and payment. Contact with the Italian practice behind it — telephone calls, e-mail, appointments and clinical notes — is governed by a separate notice written in Italian, privacy e cookie policy. The controller is the same for both.

Who holds the data

The data controller is the Studio di Psicologia, Psicoterapia e Sessuologia del Dr. Biserni Andrea, Via Pian di Guido 6, 52036 Pieve Santo Stefano (AR), Italy — [email protected], +39 347 445 4271. Because the controller is established in Italy, the General Data Protection Regulation applies to this service wherever you happen to live, and so do the rights listed further down. No data protection officer has been appointed: a practice of this size is not required to have one, and requests reach the controller directly.

What is collected, and why

• Order and contact details — name, delivery address, email, telephone. Needed to form and perform the contract (article 6(1)(b) GDPR). Without them there is no parcel and no confirmation.
• The prescription itself and what is written on it — the prescriber’s name and registration number, the medicine, the strength, the quantity, the date, and your name. This is health data, processed in the special category under article 9(2)(h) GDPR, for the supply of a medicine and the professional checks that go with it. A prescription is not an optional attachment: it is the lawful basis on which a prescription-only medicine moves at all.
• What you volunteer about your health — current medication, a condition, a reaction. Processed on the same footing, and only to carry out the check you are asking for.
• Payment records — the fact and amount of a payment, kept because tax law requires it (article 6(1)(c)). No card number is entered on this website and none is stored by us; payment is arranged against the written confirmation.
• Technical logs — IP address, time, page requested, browser type, written by the web server as it is on every website. Used to keep the site working and to spot abuse, on the basis of legitimate interest (article 6(1)(f)), never to build a profile.

There is no marketing. No newsletter exists, no promotional email is sent, and no address is ever sold, rented or shared with a third party for their own purposes. If you order once and never again, you will not hear from us again.

Who else sees it

A prescription is read by the pharmacist performing the check and by nobody else. The delivery address is given to the carrier, which cannot deliver without it; the carrier is not told what is in the parcel beyond what a customs declaration legally requires. A customs authority that detains a parcel may ask for a copy of the prescription, and that request is complied with. Payment and invoice records are seen by the accountant, as a processor, for tax purposes only. The company hosting this website has technical access to the server and acts as a processor on instruction.

That is the complete list. Nobody else is given your data — not a partner site, not an advertising network, not a data broker. No automated decision-making and no profiling is carried out on any of it: every prescription check is a person reading a document.

How long it is kept

• Prescriptions and the record of what was supplied against them — kept for as long as pharmacy and professional record-keeping rules require, and no longer. This record cannot be deleted on request while that period runs, which is the one real limit on the erasure right below.
• Invoices and payment records — ten years, the period set by article 2220 of the Italian Civil Code.
• Emails that did not lead to an order — deleted once the enquiry is plainly closed, and within twelve months in any event.
• Technical server logs — weeks, not years.

Where it goes geographically

The data stays on servers in the European Union. Three transfers are worth naming explicitly because they are easy to overlook. The site loads its typefaces from Google’s servers, which means Google receives your IP address in order to send a font. The map embedded on the practice’s location pages loads from Google only when you open one of those pages. The WhatsApp button opens a conversation handled by WhatsApp Ireland, part of Meta: the message content is end-to-end encrypted, but the number and the conversation metadata pass through that company’s infrastructure. If any of the three matters to you, a telephone call or an ordinary email avoids all of them.

Cookies

There is no tracking on this site — no analytics, no advertising pixel, no heat-mapping, no chat widget, no consent banner, because none is needed. The only cookies set are technical and first-party: WordPress session cookies for whoever logs in to administer the site, and the WooCommerce basket cookies woocommerce_cart_hash, woocommerce_items_in_cart and wp_woocommerce_session_*, which remember what you put in the basket between one page and the next. They expire with the session or within two days. Blocking them in your browser is possible and makes the catalogue awkward to use rather than unusable.

Your rights

Under articles 15 to 22 GDPR you may ask for a copy of the data held about you, have it corrected, ask for it to be erased or its use restricted, object to processing, and receive it in a portable format. Write to [email protected]; the answer comes within thirty days and costs nothing. Two honest qualifications: identity may have to be confirmed before data is released, since handing a prescription history to the wrong person would be the worse failure; and erasure does not override the retention periods above.

If you think the handling is wrong, you can complain to the Italian supervisory authority — Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, Piazza Venezia 11, 00187 Rome, garanteprivacy.it — or to the supervisory authority where you live, or go to court. You do not need our agreement to do any of that.

Discretion in practice

Parcels carry no product name and no pharmacy branding, as described on shipping and delivery. Email replies quote an order reference rather than a medicine in the subject line. Nothing is ever confirmed to a third party who telephones about somebody else’s order, including a spouse and including someone who knows the order number. The clinical half of this practice works under the professional secrecy imposed by article 11 of the Italian psychologists’ code of conduct and article 622 of the criminal code, and the same reflex is applied here: the separate Italian-language privacy e cookie policy covers that side of the studio.