What we collect, and what we do with it.

Most people who contact us are not the person who would move in. You are usually a son, a daughter, a spouse, or a social worker, and you are answering questions about someone else.

That matters, so we want to say it plainly. When you tell us about your loved one’s health, you are giving us information about another person. We treat that information as carefully as we would treat our own residents’ information. We ask you to share only what you are comfortable sharing, and only what helps us give you a straight answer.

What you tell us about yourself. Your name, your phone number, your email address, and your relationship to the person who needs care. If you tell us a good time to call, we save that too.

What you tell us about your loved one. Depending on which form you use, this can include their name, their age, the county they live in, where they are right now (at home, in a hospital, in rehab, in another community), and what kind of help they need.

Our short questionnaire also asks more specific questions. It asks whether your loved one needs help with bathing, dressing, walking, or medications. It asks about memory loss or confusion. It asks about hospice. It asks about things like wound care, insulin, or behavior that is hard to manage. It asks whether they receive SSI, Medi-Cal, Medicare, long term care insurance, or VA benefits.

We know those are personal questions. We ask them for one reason: California licenses us to provide certain kinds of care and not others. Answering them lets our admissions team tell you honestly and quickly whether we are the right place, and if we are not, point you toward the kind of community that is. We are not going to leave you guessing while your parent sits in a hospital bed.

What we collect automatically.When you visit the site, our systems record your device’s internet address (IP address), what kind of browser and device you are using, and which page you came from. If you arrived from an ad or a link with tracking information attached, we record that too, so we know which of our efforts actually help families find us.

What we do not collect. We do not ask for Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, or copies of medical records through this website. Please do not send those through a web form or email. If we need them later, we will tell you a safe way to get them to us.

We use this information to:

• Call, text, or email you back about care for your loved one
• Decide whether our community can meet your loved one’s needs, and tell you if it cannot
• Prepare for your tour so you are not repeating yourself when you arrive
• Answer questions about the Assisted Living Waiver and other programs
• Keep our own records of who contacted us and when
• Understand which pages and which ads help families find us, so we spend our money sensibly

We do not use it to make automated decisions about anyone. A person at Portola Gardens reads every inquiry.

Our staff.Inquiries go to our admissions team and community leadership. What you tell us about your loved one’s care needs goes only to mailboxes at portolagardens.com.

The people who help us with our advertising.We work with outside help to run our ads and see which ones bring families to us. They are told that an inquiry arrived and which ad or page it came from. They are not told anything about your loved one’s health, care needs, or coverage.

Companies that run our systems. We use outside companies to host the website, store our records, and send email. Today those are Vercel (website hosting), Supabase (our database), Resend (email delivery), and Google (a spreadsheet our admissions team works from). They are allowed to use your information only to provide those services to us, and not for their own purposes.

Nobody else. We do not sell your information. We do not trade it. We do not give it to referral services, placement agencies, or lead brokers. If a law or a court order requires us to hand something over, we will, and we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

We do not run advertising or analytics tags that follow you. We advertise on Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta. We do not send Meta, or any other advertising company, anything you tell us on this site. Nothing about your loved one’s health, their insurance, or their care needs leaves us for an advertising platform.

What we do use. We use a basic visitor counting tool from Vercel, the company that hosts this site. It does not use cookies, it does not follow you to other websites, and it does not build a profile of you. It tells us how many people read a page, and nothing about who they are.

Other parties tracking you across websites. California law requires us to tell you whether other companies may collect information about what you do online, over time, and across different websites, when you use our site. The answer is no. There are no third party advertising or analytics trackers on any page of this website.

Do Not Track. Some browsers can send a signal saying you do not want to be tracked. There is no agreed industry standard for what a website must do with that signal, so we do not respond to it. It does not matter much here, because we are not running the kind of tracking it was meant to stop.

Some California privacy laws apply only to companies above a certain size, and Portola Gardens is below that size. We are giving you these rights anyway, because you should have them.

You can ask us what we have. Email hello@portolagardens.com or call (415) 337-1587 and ask what information we hold about you or your loved one. We will answer within 30 days.

You can ask us to correct it. If something we have is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. This is also how you update your phone number or email.

You can ask us to delete it. If you decide Portola Gardens is not the right fit, or you simply want us to remove your inquiry, ask and we will delete it. If your loved one has already moved in, the records we keep about their care are governed by the rules that apply to licensed care facilities, and we will explain what we are required to keep.

Your rights under California’s “Shine the Light” law.California Civil Code section 1798.83 lets California residents ask a business once a year for a list of the third parties it gave their personal information to for those third parties’ own direct marketing. Portola Gardens does not share your personal information with third parties for their own direct marketing purposes. If that ever changes, we will ask your permission first. To ask about this, write to Portola Gardens, Attn: Privacy, 350 University Street, San Francisco, CA 94134, or email hello@portolagardens.com.

How we verify it is you. Because this information is sensitive and often concerns someone who cannot answer for themselves, we will ask a couple of questions to confirm who you are before we release, change, or delete anything. We will not ask you to send a photo of your ID.

If your loved one does not move in, we keep your inquiry so that we still have the history if you come back to us months later, which families often do. We review these records periodically and delete the ones we no longer need.

You do not have to wait for that. Ask us to delete your inquiry and we will, at any time.

If your loved one becomes a resident, their care records are kept separately from this website information, under the rules that apply to licensed care facilities in California.

Tell us and we will stop. There is no form to fill out and no hoops.

• Say so on the phone to whoever is calling you
• Reply STOP to any text message
• Reply to any email and say “please remove me”
• Email hello@portolagardens.com
• Call (415) 337-1587

We will honor a request to stop calling within 10 business days, and we keep a record of it for 5 years so it does not get lost when staff change. Asking us to stop contacting you does not affect your loved one’s application in any way.

This website is for adults making decisions about care for older adults. We do not offer services to children, we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and we do not direct any part of this site to children. If you believe a child has sent us information, email hello@portolagardens.com and we will delete it.

We limit access to inquiries to the staff who need them, and what you tell us about care needs is sent only to mailboxes at portolagardens.com. Our website and database are protected in transit and at rest by our providers.

No system is perfect. If information about you is ever exposed, California law requires us to notify you, and we will.

If we change how we handle your information in a way that matters, we will update this page and change the effective date at the top. For significant changes, we will also post a notice on our home page for at least 30 days. If we have your email address and the change affects information we already hold about you, we will email you.

We keep the old versions. Ask and we will send you the one that was in effect when you contacted us.

RCFE License #385601045. Licensed by the California Department of Social Services, Community Care Licensing Division.

If you want to check our license or our inspection history, you can look us up directly at the state’s facility search, or read our own licensing and transparency page.