Privacy Notice

Compare the Dentist is operated by CTD Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales with company number 17336987 and registered office at No.2 Silkwood Office Park, Fryers Way, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, WF5 9TJ. In this notice, "we", "us" and "our" mean CTD Limited.

You can contact us at support@comparethedentists.com. Our privacy contact is privacy@comparethedentists.com. Complaints: complaints@comparethedentists.com. Enquiries submitted through the website are received at enquiries@comparethedentists.com.

This notice explains how we collect, use, share and retain personal data when you use our website, browse clinic listings, submit an enquiry, communicate with us, register a clinic, use Smile Preview, or otherwise use our services.

We operate an online dental comparison, enquiry-management and introduction platform. We do not provide dental treatment, diagnosis or clinical care ourselves. Treatment relationships are between you and the participating clinic.

Depending on how you use the service, we may collect identity and contact details (such as name, email, telephone and postcode); enquiry details (including treatment interest, symptoms, dental history, availability and photographs you choose to upload); clinic account and business information where you sign up as a clinic user; and technical or usage information from your device and browsing.

Special category health data. Some information you provide in an enquiry may reveal information about your health. Where we process that information to receive and share your enquiry with suitable clinics through our platform, we rely on your explicit consent for that special category data. You may withdraw that consent at any time for future processing by contacting us, although this may mean we cannot continue to operate your enquiry.

When you submit an enquiry, we may contact you to clarify it and may send it to one clinic or a limited number of suitable participating clinics. Clinics may contact you directly. If the first clinic does not accept, respond to or progress the enquiry within the applicable period, cannot assist, is unavailable, or reallocation is otherwise reasonably necessary, we may send the enquiry to another suitable participating clinic.

Submitting an enquiry does not guarantee that any clinic will accept it, offer treatment, offer a particular date, offer a particular price, or achieve any clinical outcome. Any treatment, consultation, finance, deposit or other arrangement is made directly between you and the clinic or finance provider concerned, not with us, unless we expressly state otherwise for a future service.

When a clinic receives your enquiry it will usually act as an independent controller for its own patient-contact, assessment, appointment, treatment and record-keeping purposes. The clinic is responsible for its own privacy notice and for the lawfulness of its own onward use of your data.

We will only send you direct marketing by email or text where we are permitted to do so. Marketing choices are separate from your enquiry submission and you can opt out at any time.

Where you have given permission through our cookie settings panel or an equivalent consent, we may share contact details and marketing and behavioural information with other brands, companies and entities within the same corporate group as CTD Limited, and commercial partners we work with. This sharing is limited to contact details and marketing and behavioural information. We do not share the content of your enquiry, your symptoms, dental history, treatment details, photographs or documents with them for marketing purposes. We do not share your contact details with advertising platforms such as Meta, Google or TikTok for that purpose.

Opting out of marketing does not stop us sending you service messages, and you cannot opt out of these while you hold an account with us or have an open enquiry. Service messages are the communications we need to send in order to operate the platform, administer your enquiry or account, or meet a legal, regulatory or safety obligation. They include enquiry confirmations and status updates; notices that your enquiry has been allocated, accepted, expired or reallocated; secure links, verification codes and login or security alerts; consultation reminders and requests for information we need to progress your enquiry; replies to your questions; complaint and dispute correspondence; urgent-care and safety notices; notices of service interruption or maintenance; and notices of changes to our terms, this notice or our fees.

We send service messages because they are necessary to perform or take steps towards a contract with you, or in our legitimate interests in operating the platform and keeping you properly informed about a service you have asked for. Service messages are kept factual and operational. We do not use them to promote treatments, offers or services you have not asked about, and we do not use a service message as a way of sending you marketing you have opted out of.

We use cookies and similar technologies as explained in our Cookie Policy. Advertising, remarketing and other consent-based technologies are used only where we have a valid consent signal. Technologies that are strictly necessary to provide the service you have asked for, technologies used solely to produce aggregate statistics about how the site is used so that we can improve it, and technologies that simply remember your display and accessibility preferences, are used without consent because the law permits it. You can object to the statistical and preference technologies at any time through our cookie settings panel, free of charge and in one step.

We use large language models and similar automated tools to help us receive, summarise, categorise and route enquiries, to match enquiries to suitable participating clinics, to draft and quality-check communications, to moderate reviews and other content, and to support our customer service, reporting and analytics. Those tools are supplied to us by service providers acting as our processors under written contracts and on our documented instructions. We do not permit our artificial intelligence providers to use your personal data to train, fine-tune, retrain or otherwise develop their models or those of any third party, and our contracts with them prohibit it. Where information is passed to these tools, direct identifiers are replaced with tokens wherever the task does not require them, so that the tool works with the minimum information necessary. Automated tools support decisions taken by our people; we do not use them to take decisions producing legal effects concerning you, or similarly significantly affecting you, without meaningful human involvement. If you are unhappy with an outcome that an automated tool contributed to, you can ask us to explain it and to have a person review it by contacting our privacy address above.

Some of our service providers may process data outside the UK. Where we make a restricted transfer, we will use a lawful transfer mechanism such as adequacy regulations or appropriate safeguards, and we will take any additional measures required by law.

We keep personal data only for as long as we have a continuing and demonstrable purpose for holding it, and no longer. A purpose may be operating and administering your enquiry, account or clinic relationship; keeping an accurate record of what was done, by whom and when; establishing, exercising or defending legal claims; meeting a legal, regulatory, professional or tax obligation; investigating and preventing fraud, misuse and security incidents; or dealing with a complaint, dispute or regulatory enquiry. These purposes do not all come to an end at the same moment, so different categories of information are held for different periods.

As a general guide, we keep enquiry and account records for the period of the relationship and then for a period reflecting the limitation period for legal claims, and we keep records held for tax or statutory reporting for the period the law requires. When every purpose for holding information has come to an end, we delete it or put it beyond use. Where possible, we anonymise or aggregate information used for analytics and service improvement, and we may keep anonymised or aggregated information indefinitely because it is no longer personal data.

You may have the right to request access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, portability and withdrawal of consent where consent applies. To exercise your rights, contact privacy@comparethedentists.com. You also have the right to complain to the ICO.

Our ordinary enquiry route is not an emergency service. If you have severe pain, swelling, uncontrolled bleeding, facial trauma, breathing difficulty, or another urgent dental problem, contact NHS 111 or the equivalent urgent-care service in your area, or seek emergency treatment as appropriate.

We may update this notice from time to time. The version on this page is the current version.