Privacy Policy

Last updated October 2026

DPT Den is a study and planning tool for people at any stage of the physical therapy career path, operated by DPTDEN LLC, an Illinois limited liability company (referred to here as "DPT Den," "we," "us," or "our"). This page explains what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how you can control it. It's written to be a clear, honest policy, not a substitute for legal advice.

What we collect

  • Account info, via Clerk. When you create an account, your name, email address, optional profile photo, and password are collected and stored by Clerk, our authentication provider. Your password never touches our own servers, and we never see it in plain text.
  • Profile info you choose to share. Your career stage (pre-PT applicant, DPT student, or licensed PT) and current focus, so the site can point you toward relevant tools.
  • Your saved activity. Exercises you save, tests you mark reviewed, certifications you bookmark, checklist items you check off, coffee-chat students you request to connect with, quiz question attempts, and continuing-education hours you log (including any label you type in for what you took). All of this is tied to your account and only ever shown back to you. It's not made visible to other users.
  • Fit calculator submissions. If you use the program fit calculator, we store the numbers you enter (GPA, GRE score, observation/clinical/volunteer hours) and the resulting score. This is academic and experience data you chose to enter for an estimate, not medical or health information. New Fit Finder assessments require a free account and are tied to that account. Earlier anonymous submissions remain stored without an account identifier. Draft inputs may remain in this tab to recover after a session expires; signing out clears those drafts.
  • Daily results. Advanced results are saved to your account when you play while signed in or save a completed guest round after signing in. Public leaderboard participation uses your chosen username. Beginner progress stays on your device. Account deletion removes account-linked results.
  • Basic technical data. Like any hosted website, our hosting infrastructure automatically logs standard connection information (things like IP address, browser type, and request timing) for security and operational purposes. We don't combine this with your account to build an advertising profile.
  • Website analytics. We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand which pages people visit and where visitors find DPT Den. It collects page views, referring websites when available, approximate country, and browser, operating system, and device information. Analytics uses anonymized data and does not use cookies or connect page views to your DPT Den account.

What we don't do

Tutor applications include your name, email, current position, school, proposed rate, teaching topics, qualifications, and availability. New applications are linked to your signed-in account and limited to one every seven days. We store applications for manual review in our admin dashboard. Authorized administrators can view registered users and signup dates, review applications, and send approval or rejection decisions. Partnership forms send your contact details, organization, and message to our admin inbox so we can respond.

  • We don't sell your personal information for money.
  • We don't run our own analytics or tracking software that profiles individual visitors.

We do use Google AdSense to show ads on the site, which involves Google and its advertising partners setting their own cookies, described under "Cookies & advertising" below. Some privacy laws, like California's CCPA/CPRA, treat that kind of ad personalization as a "sale" or "share" of information even though no money changes hands; see that section for how to opt out of it.

Beyond the service providers described below, we don't share your data with other companies for their own marketing or advertising purposes. We may disclose information when we believe it's necessary to operate the service, comply with a legal obligation, respond to a lawful request from authorities, protect the security of DPT Den or our users, enforce our Terms of Service, or as part of a business transaction like a merger or acquisition (in which case this policy would still apply to your information going forward).

Third-party services we use

These providers process data on our behalf as part of running the site:

  • Clerk provides authentication: account creation, sign-in, and session management. Clerk stores your email address and password and issues the session cookie that keeps you signed in.
  • Neon hosts our Postgres database, where the account and activity data described above lives.
  • Bunny.net (Bunny Stream) hosts and delivers the exercise demonstration videos in the exercise library. When you load a page with a video, your browser requests that video directly from Bunny's servers.
  • Vercel hosts the site and provides Web Analytics. Vercel processes the technical request data and anonymized website analytics described above. Learn more in Vercel's analytics privacy documentation.
  • Google AdSense serves the ads shown on the site. Google and its advertising partners may set their own cookies to do this, as described below.

Cookies & advertising

Resend processes transactional emails for partnership inquiries and application decisions. Partnership messages are received in our Gmail admin inbox. Admin sign-in uses Clerk and its essential account session cookies. Admin access is restricted to a small list of authorized administrator accounts.

Clerk sets an essential session cookie so you stay signed in between visits. The site can't keep you logged in without it. Vercel Web Analytics does not use cookies, and we don't run any other analytics or marketing cookies of our own.

We use Google AdSense to display ads on DPT Den. Google and the third-party vendors it works with use cookies to serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites, and to measure how those ads perform. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings, or opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting aboutads.info.

Content you submit

Our tutor directory is curated through applications. With your consent, an approved application publishes your name, position, school, hourly rate, and teaching topics. Your email, qualifications, and availability are visible to you and the review team. Application decisions and any rejection explanation are shown privately on your Tutors page. We save whether you dismissed your approval notice. You can hide your approved profile. Admin removal or six months without accepting a student removes the public listing, closes unanswered requests, and keeps your application and request history for you and the review team. You can reapply under the weekly submission limit. When you request a tutor, your name, phone number, email, and study description are shared with that tutor for review and direct contact. You can see whether your request is pending, accepted, declined, or closed. These contact details and requests are not part of the public directory. The coffee-chat directory is curated by us. The free-text you can enter, like a label for a continuing-education entry, is stored on your account and shown only to you.

Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect the information we maintain. However, no method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

Data retention & deletion

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account and its associated data from the Account page while signed in, or request help by emailing admin@dptden.com. When we delete your data, we generally remove your profile, saved activity, and identifying information from our active database; some information may be retained for a limited time afterward where we need it for legal, security, fraud-prevention, or dispute-resolution reasons, or because it still exists in a routine backup that hasn't yet cycled out.

Your privacy rights

Deleting your account removes your account-linked tutor applications and listing, your tutoring requests, and requests addressed to that listing when our account-deletion webhook is processed. Older applications submitted without an account and messages in our inbox may be retained separately. Earlier applications can be matched to an account only through a verified email address. To update or remove an older application, contact admin@dptden.comusing the email you applied with.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you. You can exercise these by emailing admin@dptden.com, and we'll respond as required by applicable law.

Children's privacy

DPT Den is intended for people old enough to be applying to, attending, or licensed from a professional doctoral program, and isn't directed at children under 13. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date above.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email admin@dptden.com.