Privacy & KVKK

Doctor profiles are built from public academic records. For a given doctor we may hold:

• Name, academic title, specialty and sub-specialties.
• City, institutional affiliations, roles, and the years those roles cover.
• Specialty thesis metadata: YÖK thesis number, Turkish and English title, source-permitted abstract and keywords, year, awarding university and advisor.
• Publication metadata: title, journal, year, PMID, DOI, OpenAlex or TR Dizin identifiers, preprint status, citation count and author position; and, where the source permits it, abstracts, abstract sections, MeSH terms and keywords.
• Research topics and the individual source records that support them: theses, publications and, where separately reviewed and enabled, current verified claims from an official practice website.
• Languages of practice and a short professional biography, where these appear in a public academic profile.
• Source and identity provenance, indexing state, and the observation, review and expiry dates needed to audit a verified official-practice claim.

We do not hold, request or infer special-category data about doctors: no health data, no beliefs, no union or political affiliation.

Academic and professional material is made public by its authors, institutions, indexes or official practices. We process professional records under KVKK Article 5(2)(d) — personal data made public by the data subject — and, for permitted compilation and indexing, under the legitimate-interest basis in Article 5(2)(f). We balance that interest against the individual's rights by enabling sources only after source-use and legal review, storing abstracts and index terms only where permitted, showing provenance, using expiry for official-practice claims, and acting on removal requests immediately. We do not rely on consent for this professional data, so withdrawing consent is not the mechanism for removing it — the opt-out request below is.

Using symptom search does not create a durable patient record. We collect identifying or contact data only if you send an information request. That form asks for your name, the contact channel and details you choose, your country, your preferred language, a description of what you need, and — optionally — a timeline and a message. It is submitted only with your explicit consent under KVKK Article 5(1), given through a checkbox that starts unticked, and the moment of consent is stored with the request.

The raw symptom wording you type, literal treatment values and the assistant's patient-specific response are processed for the current request but are not written to application logs or durable conversation history. Stored chat records use fixed placeholders and may retain canonical topic and facet identifiers plus a secret-keyed integrity token used only to stop a follow-up from silently changing the structured concern; the token cannot be recomputed from the stored record alone. Durable analytics, where used, contain anonymous aggregate counts, resolved topic or facet identifiers, requested match mode, latency and result counts — not the raw wording.

Semantic embeddings are disabled by default; adding a provider key alone does not enable them. They may be switched on only through a separate configuration opt-in after the provider agreement, international-transfer position and Zero Data Retention or an approved equivalent have been cleared. Before an enabled provider call, common direct identifiers are minimized and input length and latency are bounded. The raw query and resulting vector are not logged or stored by Psyduck. If the provider is disabled, times out or fails, the search continues with strict lexical and medical-concept matching and never broadens automatically to generic specialists.

Contact and information-request data is passed to the partner clinic that answers it, and not to an embedding provider. Only if optional semantic search has passed the safeguards above and is enabled may minimized symptom wording be sent to that approved processor for the current search. We do not sell personal data, share it with advertisers or data brokers, or use it to profile you. Any international transfer takes place only on grounds permitted by KVKK Article 9.

Doctor records are kept while the profile is published. Information requests are kept for as long as it takes to answer them and to evidence that consent was given, then deleted. Removal requests and the action taken on them are retained as a compliance record.

Psyduck sets no advertising or analytics cookies and embeds no third-party trackers. The only state the site keeps is what the pages and the chat need in order to work.

You may ask whether your personal data is processed and request information about that processing; learn its purpose and whether it is used accordingly; know the third parties it is disclosed to; request correction of incomplete or incorrect data; request erasure or destruction; ask that any correction or erasure be notified to those the data was disclosed to; object to a conclusion drawn solely from automated analysis; and claim compensation for damage caused by unlawful processing.

Use the opt-out form: tell us which profile it concerns and what is wrong with it. The profile is flagged the moment the request arrives — it disappears from search and its page returns “not found” while we review, because removing too early is the safer error. If you ask for a correction instead, we fix the record and keep it published. You receive an answer by e-mail. The route is open to the doctor and to a legal representative.

Go to the opt-out form

Write to kvkk@psyduck.example with “KVKK” in the subject line. Requests are answered in Turkish or English within the period KVKK sets — at the latest 30 days.