Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

This website is operated by Equine Therapy Malibu, the practice at Shakti Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu, California. Where a data protection law uses the word controller, that is us.

The ranch is a private home as well as a working property, so its street address is not published here. Notices, questions and requests about privacy should go to hello@equinetherapymalibu.com or (310) 709-8618, and we can give a postal address for a formal notice on request.

2. Cookies, analytics, and the choice you are given

Nothing here that measures a visit runs before you say it may. On a first visit a bar asks the question once, with accept and decline the same size in the same frame and each one click, and whichever you answer is written down so that you are not asked again. What follows is the whole of it in short; the Cookie Policy is the same thing at length, key by key.

The record of your answer. Accepting or declining writes one entry, etm.cookie-consent, into your browser’s local storage. It holds three things: which of the two you chose, when you chose it, and the version of the notice you were answering. It stays on your own device and is never sent anywhere, it is what stops the question being asked again on every page, and it is our evidence that it was asked at all. That is why it is written without asking first: not storing it would mean putting the question in front of you again on every page you open. If the notice ever changes in a way that deserves a fresh answer, the version moves and the old answer is not reused for a new question.

If you accept. Google Analytics 4 loads from googletagmanager.com and reports to the practice’s own property. It records which pages were read, in what order and for how long, the site or search you arrived from, an approximate location worked out from your network address and then discarded, and the device, browser and screen you are reading on, along with a few events on top of that, of which the ones worth naming are how far down a page you scrolled and clicks that took you off the site. It sets two cookies of Google’s own, _ga and _ga_Z7GB251QPK, whose job is to tell one browser from another so that a visit is counted once rather than page by page.

What it is not allowed to do. The analytics is configured with Google signals and ad personalisation signals both switched off. That is the difference between measuring how a site is read and feeding what somebody read into an advertising machine, and it means nothing your visit here tells Google can be used to gather you into an advertising audience, to tune an ad to you, or to recognize you on another site as somebody who reads this one. Both switches are off deliberately rather than by default, they are off in the code that loads the script rather than in an account setting somebody could change without noticing, and they are written down here because a person who arrives on a page about grief should not have to guess.

If you decline, nothing is fetched and the only thing stored is the fact that you declined. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a decision already made and the analytics does not load, whether or not the bar is ever answered. Changing your mind afterwards, in either direction, is section 12 and takes one click.

One other thing is kept in your browser and it is not a cookie either. It is etm-concierge-nudged, which belongs to the assistant in section 4: it is written to your browser’s local storage the moment you close the assistant’s first-visit invitation or open the assistant at all, and its whole job is to keep that invitation from reappearing on every page you read afterwards. It holds the character 1, it is never sent anywhere, it identifies nobody, and it stays until you clear your browser data.

The assistant itself is ours, drawn by this site rather than loaded from a chat company, and it has section 4 to itself. Beyond that there is nothing. No advertising or conversion pixels, no session recording, no heat maps, no embedded players and no social buttons. The typefaces are served from this site’s own servers rather than requested from a font service while you read, so opening a page here does not tell a font company that you did.

3. What we collect, and only when you send it

There is no account to open, no password to keep, and no profile behind any of this. Three forms, and the assistant, which has section 4 to itself.

The contact form

Your name, your email address, a phone number if you choose to add one, the reason you picked from the list, and your message. It is sent to the ranch as an email. If the mail service is unavailable, the form hands the same message to your own mail app instead, in which case it travels as ordinary email and never passes through this site at all.

The session enquiry form

Everything above, and the answers you give about the visit you are asking about: whether you are coming on your own, as a couple, or as a group; for a group, how many people, what kind of group it is, the organization or team if you name one, whether anyone in the party is under eighteen, and how much experience the group has around horses; when you are hoping to come; what you are hoping for; and anything else you add. It arrives as one email at the ranch.

The newsletter signup

Your email address, and nothing else. It goes onto a mailing list held by our email provider. Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and leaving takes one click.

4. The site assistant

In the corner of every page there is a button, and behind it a small panel where you can ask a question in your own words and be pointed to the right page or the right person. It is a program, not a person, and the first thing the panel says, above the conversation where it cannot scroll away, is exactly that: “A chatbot, not a person, and good at getting you where you need to go. This is not therapy and not clinical advice. What you write here is handled as set out in our privacy policy.” On a first visit a short invitation appears beside the button after about twelve seconds, and once you close it or open the assistant it does not come back, which is the whole job of the note etm-concierge-nudged in section 2.

Where what you type goes. When you press send, what you wrote, together with the earlier turns of that conversation, goes to our own server first and from there to Anthropic, the company whose Claude model writes the reply. Our server adds its own standing instructions about what the assistant may say and where it may send people, and it passes on the most recent fourteen turns at most, each cut at 1,500 characters, which is also as much as the box lets you type. The key that opens Anthropic’s service is held on the server and never reaches your browser, and Anthropic receives the request from our server rather than from you, so what it sees is the conversation and those instructions, and not your name, your email address or your network address unless you type them in. Anthropic is a company in the United States, and it holds that traffic under its commercial terms for API customers, which do not use what is sent to train its models, rather than under the terms of its consumer chat product.

If you write about being in danger. Before anything is sent on, your message is checked against a short list of phrases about suicide, self harm and harming another person. If one matches, the assistant stops being an assistant: it answers with a fixed message that says plainly it is not a person and not a crisis service, gives 911, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line, and asks you to reach somebody who can be with you now. That message of yours is never sent to Anthropic. The list is deliberately broad, because a false match costs somebody one caring message about resources they did not need, and a miss would cost a great deal more.

What we keep, and the honest condition on it. The conversation is not written to your browser, and reloading the page loses it. On our side the code keeps nothing unless two settings on the server are both filled in, and at the time this page was written neither had been confirmed set on the live site, so read the rest of this paragraph as what we may keep rather than what we do. If logging is on, each turn goes to a store of ours as the question, the reply, the address of the page you were on when you asked, the country your network address resolves to, and a session marker: a one-way digest of your address, your browser and the date, salted with a secret, which groups one visitor’s turns for a day and cannot be turned back into an address. No name, no email and no raw network address is recorded, though anything you choose to type into a message is kept as part of that message. A crisis turn is logged as the fact that one happened, with none of its text. If that switch is ever turned on, this paragraph changes from may to do on the same day.

Your network address, briefly. To stop a script from running up our bill, the server counts messages per network address, twenty a minute and one hundred and fifty a day, and it does so in the memory of the running function rather than in anything written to disk: your address is compared, not stored, and the count is gone when that function is recycled. Beyond that, the address goes nowhere the assistant is concerned with, except into the digest above if logging is on.

What it is not. It is not therapy, not a clinician, and not the way to reach us in a hurry. Its instructions tell it not to quote prices or dates, to hand anything it has not been told to a person, and to steer you away from putting clinical or medical detail into it, and section 5 asks you the same. The links in its replies are only ever to pages on this site; a web address it might invent is left as plain text rather than made into a button.

5. Please keep clinical detail out of the forms

This work sits close to clinical territory, and the forms on this site do not. An enquiry arrives in an ordinary email inbox at the ranch, not in a clinical record system, and the scheduler that takes bookings is not configured as a healthcare service. So write enough for us to answer you well, and no more than that.

Please do not send diagnoses, medical history, medication, records, or details about somebody else’s health through a form, an email, or the assistant here. If something like that genuinely needs to be discussed before a session, say so in a sentence and we can arrange a call. The assistant is under the same instruction from its side: it is told to steer you away from sharing clinical or medical detail, and if you write to it about being in danger it answers with the lines below and sends nothing on.

This website is not a crisis service and nobody is watching the inbox around the clock. In an emergency in the United States, call 911, or call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

6. What the server records on its own

The site is hosted by Vercel, and like any web host its servers keep operational logs: the address a request came from, the page asked for, the time, and the browser and operating system reported by that browser. These exist so that a site can be served, kept up and defended against abuse. We do not read them routinely, we do not join them to anything you have sent us, and nothing is built out of them.

7. The Instagram pictures

Every page on this site ends with recent pictures from the ranch’s own Instagram account. There is no Instagram embed, no like button and no Meta tracking script on this site. The posts are fetched by our own server, using a token that never reaches your browser, so Instagram is not told who is reading the page.

The pictures themselves, though, are loaded straight from Meta’s image servers as the page draws. That is an ordinary request for an image, and it means Meta receives your address and your browser details in the course of sending the picture, the same way it would if you opened the photograph in a new tab. It used to happen on the home page and a couple of others; since the feed moved into the footer on 2026-09-11 it happens on every page you open, including this one, which is why the sentence above changed with it. Blocking it would mean copying her photographs onto our own servers, which is a change worth making and has not been made yet, so it is written here plainly instead.

The About page carries the documentary Dance of the Wild, which is hosted by Vimeo. It does not load with the page: what the page draws is one of our own photographs, and Vimeo is only contacted if you press play. When you do, the player is asked not to track you, which is Vimeo’s own setting for it, so no Vimeo cookie is set and the view is not tied to a person. Vimeo does receive your address in the course of sending you the film, the same way it would if you watched it on their site.

8. Booking and payment happen elsewhere

Every booking link on this site leads to Acuity Scheduling, which holds the calendar, takes the appointment and takes the payment. From the moment you leave this domain, Acuity’s privacy terms and those of its payment processor apply to what you type there.

The Members Day membership is the one thing our own server has a hand in. When you press the join button, our server asks Stripe to open a checkout page and sends you to it, on Stripe’s own domain; if you typed an email address first, that address goes with the request so the page is pre-filled. The card is typed on Stripe’s page, the subscription is created and held there, and nothing about either comes back to this site. From that moment Stripe’s privacy terms apply to what you type.

This website never sees, handles or stores a card number, and it keeps no record of a booking or a membership. Enrollment for the Level 1 course also leaves this site, onto the page of the separate provider who sells it and takes that payment under their own terms.

9. Children

This website is written for adults and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child. Sessions for children are booked by a parent or guardian, and where the group enquiry form asks whether anyone in the party is under eighteen, that is a safety question answered by the adult making the enquiry rather than information gathered from a child.

If you believe a child has sent us information through this site, write to hello@equinetherapymalibu.com and we delete it.

10. Who else handles it

The complete list of companies that touch anything to do with this website. There are no others. One of them is an analytics service, it is named below, and it runs only if you have said it may. Another sees nothing unless you choose to type into the assistant, and then it sees only that.

• VercelHosts the site and serves every page. Holds the server logs described in section 6.
• ResendCarries the contact and enquiry emails to the ranch, and holds the newsletter list.
• GoogleMeasures how the site is read, and only once you have accepted. Nothing it sees here is allowed to feed ad personalisation or audience building, and it is the only third party script on the site. See section 2 and the Cookie Policy.
• AnthropicProvides the Claude model that writes the site assistant’s replies. Receives what you type into it, the earlier turns of that conversation and our standing instructions, from our server rather than from your browser, and nothing else. See section 4.
• Meta · InstagramSupplies the ranch’s own posts, and serves the pictures in them to your browser. See section 7.
• Acuity SchedulingHolds the calendar and takes bookings and payment, on its own site rather than this one.
• VimeoHosts the documentary on the About page. Reached only if you press play, and asked not to track you when you do.
• StripeProcesses the card payment that Acuity takes, and hosts the checkout page for the Members Day membership, which our server asks it to open and then sends you to. No card details pass through this site on the way there.

We do not sell personal information, we do not rent or trade mailing lists, and we do not share what you send with anybody outside that list, except where the law requires it or where it is needed to establish or defend a legal claim. All of these companies are based in the United States.

11. How long we keep it

An enquiry stays in the ranch’s email account, so that a conversation can be picked up where it was left. A newsletter address stays on the list until you unsubscribe or ask us to take it off. Either can be deleted sooner at your request, and asking costs nothing more than an email.

What you type into the assistant is not stored by this site unless the logging in section 4 is on, and at the time of writing it had not been confirmed on. If it is, what is held is the question, the reply, the page, the country and a session marker that changes every day, for as long as the store they are sent to keeps them, which is ours to set and to state here on the day the switch is turned on. What Anthropic keeps of the traffic our server sends it, and for how long, is governed by its own commercial terms rather than by anything this website decides.

What the analytics collects, if you accepted it, is held by Google on its own servers rather than by us, and how long it stays there is a retention setting on that account rather than something this website decides. If that matters to you, ask and we will tell you what it is set to.

12. Your choices and your rights

Under California law, including the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended, you can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Exercising any of those rights costs you nothing and changes nothing about how you are treated here.

We do not sell or share personal information as those words are defined in that Act, and there is no cross context behavioral advertising on this site: the analytics in section 2 is configured so that nothing it sees can be used to build an advertising audience or to follow anybody to another website. That is why there is no Do Not Sell or Share link on this site: there would be nothing behind it to switch off.

The analytics itself is a different matter, and it is yours to switch off whenever you like. This brings the bar back with both answers on it, and either one takes a single click:

Change your cookie choice

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, you have already been heard: we treat it as a decision, and the analytics does not load whether or not the bar is ever answered. Clearing this site’s data in your browser is the route that does not depend on us at all, and the Cookie Policy sets out both, along with the honest limits of withdrawing partway through a visit.

If you are reading from the European Union or the United Kingdom, the equivalent rights of access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection and portability apply. Where we rely on consent, which is the case for the newsletter and for the analytics in section 2, you can withdraw it at any time. Where we rely on a legitimate interest, which is the case for answering an enquiry you sent and for keeping the site secure, you can object.

Every one of these requests goes to the same place: hello@equinetherapymalibu.com.

13. Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection. The keys that reach the mail service, Instagram, Anthropic and Stripe are held on the server and never sent to a browser. Because no card details, no passwords and no clinical records are held here, the material a breach of this website could expose is the contents of an email inbox and a list of email addresses. That is not nothing, and it is why we ask in section 5 that it stay light.

14. Changes to this policy

If the site changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. The claims here are specific enough that a new script, a new form or a new embedded service would make one of them untrue, which is the point of writing them that way.

15. Contact

Questions about this policy are welcome at hello@equinetherapymalibu.com or (310) 709-8618. Equine Therapy Malibu at Shakti Ranch, Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu, California.