Privacy Policy

This site is a place to read about fertility. You can read all of it without giving me anything at all — no account, no sign-up, no tracking. This page explains the few situations where I do end up holding something about you, and what I do with it.

Who is responsible

I am — Dr Ewa Goncikowska, MD PhD, specialist in reproductive medicine, based in Dubai, holding DHA medical licence no. 07841170. I run this site personally. It is not a clinic website and it is not connected to any employer’s systems. For anything on this page, write to me at ewa@goncikowska.online.

What this site collects

Nothing, if you just read. There is no analytics on this site, no advertising and no advertising cookies. The map on the Contact page is a static illustration rather than an embedded map, so nothing loads from outside when you visit that page. The one page that reaches a third party is Ask me anything, where the question form is protected against automated abuse by Google reCAPTCHA — see below. The hosting platform records standard server information — IP address, browser type, pages requested — which is what makes the site work.

The question form, on the Ask me anything page, asks for an optional first name, which the form works without, and for the question itself, which is required. That is all. The question is free text, so what goes into it is up to you.

Please keep it to what makes the question answerable. Please don’t include your full name, ID or passport number, contact details, or anything identifying someone else — a partner, a relative, a doctor treating you.

If you write to me directly, by email or on WhatsApp, I have whatever you send me and, in the case of WhatsApp, your phone number. I invite direct contact for questions about your own situation, so these messages tend to contain more personal detail than the form does. See the section below on what that means.

Spam protection on the form

The question form is protected by Google reCAPTCHA, which is what stops it being flooded by automated submissions. It is a Google service. When you open the Ask me anything page, your browser contacts Google, and Google receives your IP address, technical information about your device, and information about how you interact with that page, and sets cookies for this purpose. That information goes to Google under Google’s own privacy policy and terms of service. It is used to tell people apart from automated traffic; I never see it. If you would rather not involve Google, write to me by email instead.

Why this involves health information

A question about fertility is likely, by its nature, to say something about your health. Under UAE data protection law that is sensitive personal data, and it needs a stronger basis than an ordinary email address would.

For that reason the form asks you to confirm, in a box you tick yourself, that you are content for me to process your question, including any health information you put in it, so that I can answer it. The exact wording you agreed to and the time you agreed are stored alongside your question, so what was consented to is clear afterwards.

Sending anything is entirely voluntary. You can read every page here without ever writing to me.

Writing to me directly

Email and WhatsApp are convenient, and they are not private in the way a clinic’s records are. Both are ordinary consumer services, and messages sent over them pass through and are stored on the providers’ systems, outside the UAE. WhatsApp messages are encrypted in transit, but Meta still holds the account and connection information around them.

If you would rather not send health details that way, use the form without a name, or ask a general version of your question and keep the specifics for a consultation.

Publication of questions

Publication is a separate choice. The form has two boxes: the first, which is required, covers my processing your question so that I can answer it; the second, which is optional, is what allows the question to be published. Leaving the second one unticked does not stop you asking, and does not affect whether you get a reply.

I publish selected questions here with a general explanation, always anonymously. Most questions are not published, and sending one doesn’t mean it will be published or that it will get a reply.

Anonymously means, in practice:

  • your first name, if you gave one, is removed and never published;
  • identifying detail is removed, generalised or changed — exact ages become ranges, named clinics and cities come out, dates become approximate, and if a set of circumstances is distinctive enough to point at one person, I change it or I don’t publish the question;
  • anything about another person comes out;
  • the wording gets edited for length and clarity, and similar questions are sometimes merged, so what appears is usually not word-for-word what was sent.

Nothing here is medical advice, and reading it doesn’t make you my patient. See the Medical Disclaimer page.

Notes from practice

Some pieces on this site are reflections drawn from real consultations. Where that is the case, they are written so that no individual can be identified: details are changed, circumstances are combined or generalised, and nothing that could point to a particular person is kept.

How long I keep it

Questions that are published: the anonymised version stays on the site; the original submission is deleted once the edited version goes up.

Unpublished questions and direct correspondence, by email or WhatsApp, are deleted once they are no longer needed.

Who else can see it

I read everything myself.

The site and the form run on Webflow, which stores submissions on its own servers, primarily in the United States. Spam protection on the form is Google reCAPTCHA, so Google receives technical information from that page. WhatsApp is operated by Meta, and email reaches me through Gmail, operated by Google.

Nothing is sold, shared for advertising, or passed to anyone else, except where UAE law or a competent authority requires it.

Your rights

You can ask me what I hold about you, ask me to correct it, ask me to delete it, ask me to stop using it, ask for a copy in a portable format, and withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing consent stops future use; it doesn’t undo what was already done lawfully. You can also complain to the competent authority.

To have a published question taken down, write to me and quote the wording or the page, so I can find it. I won’t ask you to prove who you are — establishing who sent an anonymous question would mean collecting more about you than I ever had. I’ll take it off the site; search engine caches and third-party archives are outside my control and may take longer to clear.

I answer requests within one month.

Cookies

No advertising cookies, no tracking cookies, no analytics, and no embedded maps or videos that would set any. The hosting platform sets a small number of strictly necessary cookies needed for the site and the form to work. On the Ask me anything page, Google reCAPTCHA also sets cookies, which are what let it tell people apart from automated submissions.

Contact

My privacy address is ewa@goncikowska.online.

Changes

If this changes, the new version goes up here with a new date. Material changes won’t be applied backwards to questions already sent without asking again.

Last updated: 26 August 2026