What we collect, and what we do not

There is no account to create on this site, no login, and no newsletter to sign up to. The only form is on the contact page, and it asks for:

• your name;
• your email address, so that we can reply;
• the hospital, institution or company you are with;
• your country or region, so that the right regional specialist answers you;
• your phone number — optional, and the form works without it;
• what your enquiry is about, and optionally which products interest you;
• your message; and
• the fact that you ticked the box agreeing to this policy.

Our web server also keeps the standard access log that every web server keeps: the IP address a request came from, the date and time, the page or file requested, and the browser identification string your browser sends. We use it to keep the site running and to investigate abuse, not to build a profile of you.

One more technical detail, because it involves your IP address. To stop automated spam, the form allows five messages an hour from the same connection. To count them we write nothing but timestamps to a temporary file whose name is a one-way cryptographic hash of your IP address. The IP address itself is never written down, and the hash cannot be turned back into it.

Please do not send us patient information. The contact form is for business enquiries. If you need to discuss a specific case, say so in your message and we will arrange a proper channel with your institution.

This site is aimed at healthcare professionals, educators and the institutions they work for. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.

Your message arrives as an email in a company mailbox. The people who read it are the Surglasses staff who handle enquiries, at our headquarters in Taichung, Taiwan and at our subsidiary in California.

• Our email provider. Company email is delivered and stored through Google Workspace, so your message passes through and is held on Google’s systems in the same way as any email you send us directly.
• Our web hosting provider, which operates the server this site runs on and therefore holds the access log described above.
• Our internal alert channel, but only if sending fails. If the mail server cannot deliver your enquiry, the website posts an alert — including what you wrote — to a private internal chat channel used by the small team who run this website. We do this deliberately: when delivery fails, that alert is the only surviving copy of your enquiry, and without it your message would simply vanish and we would not even know you had written.

No advertising network, data broker or analytics company receives anything from this site, because none of them is connected to it in the first place.

We are a Taiwanese company with a subsidiary in the United States, so if you write to us from anywhere else, your details are transferred to and read in Taiwan and, where relevant, the United States. Data-protection law in Taiwan is not identical to the law where you live. We keep enquiries to the minimum needed to answer you, and you can ask us to delete yours at any time.

The program that receives the contact form does not write your enquiry to a database or to a log file. It formats your message into an email, sends it, and finishes. The only thing it writes to disk is the anti-spam timestamp file described above, which holds no readable personal data and stops counting after an hour.

Because of that, the copy that lasts is the email in our mailbox. We keep enquiries for as long as we are dealing with them and for a reasonable period afterwards as a record of the conversation, and we delete them when they are no longer needed, or sooner if you ask.

Server access logs are kept for a limited period for security and diagnostics and are then discarded.

Note that we do not email you a copy of what you submitted. If you want a record of your own message, save it before you leave the form.

The single biggest protection on this site is architectural: it is a set of static files with no visitor database behind it, so there is no store of visitor records to be stolen. Alongside that:

• the form program stores nothing itself, and hashes IP addresses rather than recording them;
• no password or mail credential exists anywhere in the website’s files — they are held in a configuration file outside the website directory entirely;
• the browser is instructed by a strict content security policy to load nothing from any other website, which is also why an injected script could not run here; and
• the form is protected against the classic mail-header injection attack, along with rate limiting and a hidden field that only automated bots fill in.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. That is the other reason for the request above: please do not send patient-identifiable information through a website contact form — not ours, and not anyone else’s.

This policy covers this website. It does not cover data handled inside our medical devices and software when they are in use at a hospital or a teaching institution: that is governed by the agreement between us and that institution, and by the clinical and regulatory rules that apply there.