Advocate · Last updated 1 August 2026
Advocate is a personal medical assistant delivered over SMS, operated by Chad Anderson (Anderson Innovations) for a small number of invited friends and family. This policy describes exactly what it collects, where that information goes, and what it will never do with it.
Only what is needed to send you a useful message. All of it comes either from you directly or from what you text back.
| Category | Examples | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Contact details | Mobile number, first name, optionally an email address | To text you, address you by name, and record your consent |
| Scheduling preferences | Time zone, what time you wake, whether you want quiet days | So the morning message arrives in your morning, not someone else's |
| Health logistics | Medications and refill timing, appointment dates and locations, the pharmacies, clinics and providers involved | This is the substance of what the service tracks for you |
| Message content | The full text of messages sent to you and replies you send back | To understand your answers and keep an accurate record of what you were told |
| Activity record | An audit log of every change the system made and why | So it is always possible to reconstruct what happened on your behalf |
Some of this is health information. It is treated as the most sensitive thing in the system, because it is.
Your information is used for exactly one purpose: running this service for you — composing your messages, keeping track of what needs doing, and, with your explicit approval each time, contacting a pharmacy or an office on your behalf. It is not used to train anything, to build a profile, or for any purpose you did not ask for.
Three parties, each for one narrow technical function, and nobody else:
| Who | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Twilio | Your mobile number and the text of messages to and from you | They are the telephone carrier gateway. A text message cannot reach your phone without passing through one. |
| Anthropic (Claude) | Message text and the specific facts being phrased or interpreted, when this feature is enabled | To word your message like a person and to understand free-text replies. Anthropic's API does not train on data submitted through it. |
| Google Calendar | Appointment entries only, and only if you switch it on | Optional convenience, off by default, and entirely skippable. If offered, you will be told plainly that a personal Google calendar is an ordinary consumer account and sits outside any health-privacy protection. |
Nothing is shared with anyone else. Information is disclosed outside this list only if the law compels it, and you will be told if that ever happens unless the law forbids telling you.
Everything lives in a database on a private server that the operator runs and physically controls. The database is not reachable from the public internet, and traffic between the service and the telephone gateway travels over TLS. Backups are taken nightly and kept for two weeks on that same private machine.
Information is kept for as long as you use the service — the system remembering things for you is the feature. When you ask for it to be deleted, it is deleted. See §6.
When the service phones a pharmacy or an office for you, the call is not recorded. What is kept is a short written summary of the outcome, the same as a note you would write yourself after making the call. This is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight — it avoids collecting the most sensitive possible record of your medical life, and it sidesteps two-party call-recording law entirely.
STOP to any message. You
will receive nothing further, immediately and permanently, unless you later
reply START.PAUSE to mute messages without
opting out, and RESUME to bring them back.Requests go to chadander@gmail.com and are handled by a human — the operator. There is no ticketing system; there are not many of you.
This service is not HIPAA-covered, and does not claim to be. HIPAA applies to healthcare providers, health plans and their contractors. Advocate is a personal tool you chose to use, operated by an individual rather than by a clinic, so it falls outside that regime.
That is stated plainly because claiming otherwise would be false, and a privacy promise that isn't true is worse than no promise. What protects your information here is the design described above — a private server, a short vendor list, no advertising, no recording — together with the commitments in this policy, which are binding on the operator.
Where state privacy laws give you rights over health information — including Washington's My Health My Data Act, Nevada SB 370, and California's CMIA and CCPA — those rights are honoured for everyone, regardless of where you live, because it would be strange to do otherwise for a service this small.
If your information is ever exposed to someone who should not have it, you will be told directly and promptly, along with what was exposed and what is being done about it — including the names of any third parties involved. Notification obligations under the FTC Health Breach Notification Rule will be met.
This service is for adults. It is not offered to anyone under 18, and information is not knowingly collected from children.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, you will be told by text before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.