Privacy Policy

The short version

• No accounts, no profiles, no logins for visitors.
• No messaging, chat, comments or public posting.
• ZIP-code search is anonymous and is not stored as a record about you.
• Two optional forms exist — Contact Us and Suggest a Resource. They are the only places where you can choose to give us information about yourself.
• Like every website, ours runs on hosting and backend services that receive routine technical request data.

Information you choose to give us

Contact Us form. If you send us a message, we receive the name, email address, subject and message you type, and we store them in our private database so we can read and answer you. A copy is also emailed to our team inbox through our email provider.

Suggest a Resource form. This form is about an organization, not about you. The organization details you enter are stored for review. Your own name and email are optional, are never displayed publicly, and are used only if we need to ask a question about your suggestion.

Gift of Hope orders. If you buy or sponsor a Gift of Hope, checkout is handled by our commerce provider (Shopify) on their systems under their privacy practices. Order, shipping and payment details go to them, not into this site’s database. We never see full payment card numbers.

Please do not send us sensitive personal details — a young person’s address, placement, case or court information, ID or Social Security numbers, medical records or photographs. We do not need them, and we ask you not to include them. See Youth Safety & Privacy.

Technical information collected automatically

We would rather be accurate than flattering here: no website can operate without some technical data. Our hosting platform, content delivery network and backend provider receive and log ordinary request information — such as your IP address, the page or file requested, date and time, referring page, browser and device type, and error details when something breaks. This happens automatically as part of serving and securing the site, and those logs are kept by those providers under their own retention practices.

To limit abuse of the two forms above, our server converts the IP address of a submission into a one-way salted hash and stores only that hash with the submission, so we can count how many messages came from the same sender in an hour. The raw IP address is not stored in our database, and the hash is not used to identify or profile you.

We keep simple, anonymous tallies so we can see which communities are using the site and which resources people find helpful. When someone searches a ZIP code, or taps a resource or a way-to-help choice, we add 1 to a daily count. Those counts are kept separately for the youth side and the helper side of the site. That is all that is stored.

We do not store a visitor profile, a name, email, phone number, account ID, exact location, IP address, device fingerprint, advertising ID, or any cookie or identifier that would follow you between visits or between sites. Because no visitor-level record exists, a ZIP search can never be connected back to a person. No advertising, profiling or remarketing tools are used.

Our site code also contains a small, provider-agnostic event helper that would send anonymous interaction events (for example, “a sponsorship option was selected”) if an analytics tool were installed. As of the date of this policy no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking script is loaded on the site, so those events go nowhere. If we ever turn one on, we will update this section before doing so.

Cookies and local storage

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Some features keep information in your own browser rather than on our servers: the Gift of Hope shopping cart and the step-by-step application tracker on the “after 18” guides save your progress in your browser’s local storage so it is still there when you come back. That data stays on your device, we cannot read it, and clearing your browser data removes it. Our hosting and commerce providers may set cookies that are necessary to operate the site and checkout.

ZIP code searches

When you enter a ZIP code, it is used to build the results page for that area — the ZIP appears in the page address (for example, a page for 95207) and is used to look up resources for that area. A five-digit ZIP describes a general geographic area and does not identify you. We do not link ZIP searches to a person and we do not build a profile of you. As with any page request, the request itself appears in provider logs described above.

Our promise, in plain language: Help Foster Youth will never email, call, text, or otherwise contact you because you searched for help on this website. A ZIP search triggers no outreach of any kind, and it shares nothing about you with the organizations listed. If you choose to contact an organization listed here, that organization may communicate with you according to its own policies — but Help Foster Youth does not share your information with those organizations simply because you searched for resources.

Our resource database

Behind the scenes we maintain a private database of organizations, programs and the sources we used to review them, plus the two form submissions described above. The database is not open to public or browser access — every table denies direct public read and write access, and submissions are written only by our server code after validation.

Who we share information with

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We also do not share your information with the organizations listed on this site simply because you searched for resources — searching triggers no outreach from us and no notification to them. Information reaches only the service providers needed to run the site: our hosting and backend platform, our email delivery provider (for contact notifications), and our commerce provider for Gift of Hope orders. We may disclose information if required by law or where necessary to protect someone’s safety.

Data minimization, retention and deletion

Our working rule is to ask for the least amount of information that lets the site work, and to avoid collecting anything about a young person’s identity or location. Form fields exist only where a human reply requires them; the resource search itself asks for nothing.

Contact messages and resource suggestions are kept while we are working on them and for a reasonable period afterward as a record of what was reviewed, then deleted or stripped of personal details. Server and provider logs age out on those providers’ schedules. If you sent us a message and want it deleted, ask us and we will remove it, unless we are required to keep it.

Other websites

Most of what this site does is point you to other organizations. When you follow a link, that website’s own privacy practices apply and it may collect information in ways we do not control and cannot see. That includes government agencies, nonprofit programs, and our commerce provider’s checkout.

Children and youth

This site is meant to be usable by teenagers preparing to leave foster care, so we deliberately built it to work without an account, a name, an age or a date of birth. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and we ask young people not to send us identifying details. We are taking the conservative approach of minimizing youth data regardless of which privacy laws technically apply to us, and we make no claim of certification or compliance under any specific law here.

Updates to this policy

This policy will be updated before any new feature that collects personal information is activated — including accounts, analytics, donations or scholarship features. If those arrive, this page will describe what is collected, why, and how it is handled.