Privacy policy

Who is responsible for your data

LEMA Dental Clinic, Istanbul, Türkiye, is the controller of the personal data described here. [TO CONFIRM: the registered legal entity, its registered address and its trade registry number, and the VERBİS registration where one is required.]

The clinic operates under the licensed names shown on our contact page and holds a Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate from the Turkish Ministry of Health.

What this website collects

Nothing. This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, carries no advertising or tracking pixel, and has no contact form. There is nothing here that identifies you, follows you between pages, or is shared with an advertising network.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. The patient films on this site are served from our own servers rather than embedded from YouTube, so watching one tells nobody but us. The map on our contact page is OpenStreetMap rather than Google, so looking up an address does not hand your visit to an ad platform.

Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs — the IP address a request came from, the time, the page, the browser — for security and to keep the site running. [TO CONFIRM: the hosting provider, the retention period for those logs.]

What happens when you contact us

The moment you press WhatsApp, dial one of our numbers or send an email, you are giving us information directly. What we receive depends on how you reach us: a phone number, a name, an email address, whatever you write to us, and — very often — photographs of your teeth.

WhatsApp is operated by Meta and is not ours. Messages you send through it pass through Meta’s systems under Meta’s own privacy policy before they reach us. If you would rather not use it, email and telephone reach the same coordinators.

Health information and photographs

Photographs of your mouth, your dental history and anything you tell us about your health are special-category data under the GDPR and sensitive personal data under Turkish law (KVKK). We ask for them because a treatment plan and a price cannot honestly be given without them.

We use them to assess your case, to prepare your plan, to carry out your treatment and to keep the medical record the law requires us to keep. We do not use them for anything else.

We never publish a patient’s photograph, film or story without separate, specific, written consent for that publication — and consenting to treatment is not consenting to publication. Consent to publish can be withdrawn at any time, and we will take the material down.

Why we are allowed to hold it

• Your explicit consent, for the health data you send us and for anything we publish.
• The performance of a contract, where you have asked us for a plan, a quotation or treatment.
• A legal obligation, for the medical records and invoices that Turkish healthcare and tax law require us to keep.
• Our legitimate interest in running and securing this website, for the server logs described above.

How long we keep it

Medical records are kept for the period Turkish healthcare legislation requires, which is longer than most people expect and is not a period we can shorten at request. [TO CONFIRM: the retention period and the rule it comes from.]

Enquiries that do not become treatment are kept only as long as they are useful to the enquiry, and are then deleted. [TO CONFIRM: the period.]

Who else sees it

Only the people who need it to do the work. Inside the clinic that is the treating doctor, the laboratory technicians who make what goes in your mouth, and the coordinator handling your case.

Outside it, that can include the dental laboratory where work is produced, and — if you use them — the hotel and transfer partners who arrange your stay. They receive what they need and nothing more. [TO CONFIRM: the partners who receive patient data, so they can be named here.]

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

Sending your data to Türkiye

If you are in the EU or the UK, contacting us means your data travels to Türkiye, where the clinic is. Türkiye is not covered by an adequacy decision, so that transfer rests on your explicit consent to have your case handled here, and on the safeguards the clinic applies to the data it holds.

If you would rather that did not happen, do not send us your information — no part of this website requires it.

Your rights

Under the GDPR and under KVKK you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to our processing, and withdraw a consent you have given. Withdrawing consent does not undo what was lawfully done before it.

Some rights meet a limit here: we cannot delete a medical record we are legally required to keep, and we will say so rather than quietly do nothing.

Write to [email protected], or to the clinic at the address on our contact page. [TO CONFIRM: the address or named person that should answer data-protection requests.]

If you are not satisfied

Tell us first — most of it is a misunderstanding we can fix. If that does not resolve it, you can complain to the Turkish data protection authority (KVKK), and if you are in the EU or the UK, to your own national supervisory authority.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. We do not change it quietly.