Privacy

This privacy notice explains how Alpine Diagnostics handles personal data on our website alpinediagnostics.ch, in our online shop at products.alpinediagnostics.ch, when we prepare a radiology second opinion and when you contact us. It applies to both websites and covers patients and customers, visitors, newsletter subscribers, doctors and other business contacts, and applicants. The shop also takes orders for our sister practice Cannatherapy, and this notice applies to those orders as well.

1. Who is responsible

Alpine Diagnostics KlG, Turbinenstrasse 50, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland (enterprise identification number CHE-290.638.465), is responsible for the processing described in this notice. For questions about your data or to exercise your rights, write to info@alpinediagnostics.ch or to the address above.

2. Medical secrecy

Images, medical reports, your answers in our questionnaire and anything else about your health are health data, which the law protects particularly. Our radiologists and the staff who assist them are bound by professional secrecy under Article 321 of the Swiss Criminal Code. We use your images, reports and questionnaire answers only to prepare your second opinion, to answer your questions about it and to keep the patient record the law requires, and never for advertising or analytics. With one tick box in our medical questionnaire you consent to this, including processing by the service providers named in section 6, and release us from medical secrecy towards them to that extent. You can withdraw this consent at any time with effect for the future. In public, for example in replies to online reviews, we do not disclose whether someone is our patient.

3. What we process and why

Second opinions: your name, date of birth, contact details and country; the images and earlier reports you upload; your answers in our medical questionnaire; the report we write; and our correspondence about your case. We use them to read your images, write and deliver your report, answer your questions and keep your patient record. If a doctor or clinic sends us your case, we receive this data from them.

Orders and payments: your name, email address, phone number and billing address; what you ordered; the payment method and status; if you came to the shop from one of our advertisements or links, the identifier of that click or link, which we keep only to see which of our advertising works; the appointment you book, if any; and technical data such as your IP address, which help to prevent fraud. We do not receive your full card details: the payment provider you choose processes them.

Messages: when you write to us by email, on WhatsApp or through the contact form on our website, we process your name, contact details and message to answer you. The contact form asks for your name, email address, an optional phone number, the topic and your message, and sends them to our mailbox by email.

Emails and newsletter: customers receive emails from us about their orders. If you subscribe to our newsletter or agree to receive information about similar services of ours, we use your email address for this until you unsubscribe; every such email contains an unsubscribe link.

Website visits: the servers process technical data such as your IP address, the date and time, the page requested, the page you came from and your browser, to deliver the pages, keep them secure and fix errors. Cookies and similar technologies are covered in section 8.

Social media: when you visit our profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok, the networks process your data under their own privacy notices. For the statistics Meta provides about our Facebook and Instagram pages, we are jointly responsible with Meta Platforms Ireland Limited.

Doctors, clinics and business partners: business contact details and our correspondence, which we may also take from public sources such as professional directories and company websites, to work with you or to propose working together.

Applications: your application documents and our correspondence, used only for the application process.

Data about other people: if you send us data about someone else, for example your child or a relative you represent, please make sure you are entitled to do so.

4. Legal bases

Swiss data protection law does not require a legal basis for each processing. We follow its principles and, where it requires a justification, rely on our contract with you, your consent, our overriding interests or the law. If you live in the EEA or the UK, the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to our processing, and we rely on these legal bases:

You do not have to give us your data. Without your images, medical information and contact details, however, we cannot prepare a second opinion or process an order.

5. Sending us images and documents

After your order you receive a personal upload link from Tresorit, a Swiss service with end-to-end encryption: your files are encrypted on your device before they are sent, and Tresorit cannot read them. We deliver your report the same way, as an encrypted download link by email. Please send images, reports and other medical documents only through this link, not by email or WhatsApp.

We protect your data with technical and organisational measures: encrypted connections, access only for the people who need it, and confidentiality obligations for everyone who works with us. No transmission over the internet is completely secure, which is why we ask you to use the upload link for medical documents.

6. Who receives your data

Within Alpine Diagnostics, only the people who need your data for their work see it: the radiologists who read your case, our patient care team and, where necessary to run the practice, our management. Apart from the service providers listed below, we disclose patient data to others only with your consent, for example to your doctor if you ask us to, or where the law requires or permits it, for example to authorities and courts, or to our legal advisers and insurers to establish or defend legal claims.

We also work with service providers. Most of them process data on our behalf, under contracts that oblige them to confidentiality and data protection; some, such as payment providers and our AI provider, process data under their own responsibility. These are the providers, what they do for us and where they process data:

7. Artificial intelligence

We do not use artificial intelligence for diagnostic assessment: every finding and conclusion in your report comes from a radiologist. We use AI purely for operational efficiency behind the scenes. In doing so, personal data from our business systems, such as order details and correspondence, may be processed by our AI provider Anthropic, including in the USA. Anthropic processes this data under its own responsibility, in accordance with its terms and privacy policy.

8. Cookies and similar technologies

Website: alpinediagnostics.ch stores your language and your cookie choice, which it needs to work. Google Analytics and Google Ads run only if you allow them in the cookie banner. The profile pictures in our Google reviews load from Google, which receives your IP address but not the address of the page; the map on the contact page loads only when you click “Show map”. Details are in our cookie policy at alpinediagnostics.ch/cookie-policy, and you can change your choice at any time under “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page.

Shop: Shopify sets the cookies the shop needs, for example for the cart and checkout. Google (Analytics, Ads and Tag Manager), Meta and Brevo PushOwl run only if you accept them in the shop's cookie banner. They then learn which pages you view and what you buy, partly together with your email address or phone number, which Google and Meta receive in coded (hashed) form, and can use this for advertising. Because our services are medical, this can reveal that you are interested in a radiology second opinion or a Cannatherapy consultation. If you decline, the shop and your order work exactly the same. You can change your choice at any time under “Cookie preferences” at the bottom of the shop.

9. Data outside Switzerland

Some providers process data outside Switzerland: in the EU, and in Canada and Israel, which Switzerland, the EU and the UK recognise as adequate; and in the USA and India, which they do not recognise in general (in the USA only for companies certified under the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or its EU and UK counterparts). For these transfers we rely on the provider's certification under that framework or its counterparts where it has one, and otherwise on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, recognised by the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner and, for the UK, supplemented by the UK Addendum, or on an exception provided by law, for example where the transfer is necessary to perform a contract you asked for. Large providers such as Google, Meta, Shopify and Stripe also use data centres in other countries; the same safeguards apply there. You can ask us for a copy of these safeguards.

10. How long we keep data

After these periods we delete or anonymise the data, unless we need it longer to establish or defend legal claims.

11. Your rights

You can ask us at any time whether we process data about you and receive a copy. You can have incorrect data corrected, have data deleted, object to processing, receive the data you gave us in a common electronic format (data portability) and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future. If the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies, you can also ask us to restrict processing.

Right to object: if the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies, you can object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing based on our legitimate interests, and at any time, without giving reasons, to direct marketing.

Write to info@alpinediagnostics.ch. We may ask you to confirm your identity, and we answer within 30 days. Some rights have limits: for example, we must keep the patient record for the period the law requires, even if you ask us to delete it.

We do not make decisions about you that are based solely on automated processing.

12. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first so that we can put it right. You can also complain to a data protection authority:

13. Changes

We update this notice when our processing or the law changes. The current version is published on alpinediagnostics.ch and in our shop, with its date at the top.