Privacy Policy

GIE Dental Laboratory Inc. ("GIE," "we," "us") operates a dental laboratory in Glendale, California. This policy explains how we handle information collected through this website and through the case-submission tools we provide to dental practices.

01Who this policy is for

We are a business-to-business laboratory. Our clients are licensed dental professionals and their practices. We do not sell products or provide services directly to patients, we do not advertise to patients, and we do not provide clinical care.

If you are a dental patient seeking your own records, or inquiring about how your information is handled, the practice that treated you holds your dental record and should be contacted directly. Their privacy notice, not this one, governs your care. We cannot release patient records directly to a patient; finished work and case data are returned to the prescribing practice.

If you are a dentist, practice staff member, or other business contact, this policy describes what we do with the information you give us.

02Patient information in dental cases

This is the most sensitive category of information we handle, and it warrants specific treatment.

When a practice sends us a case, the submission may include information about a patient — commonly a name or initials on the prescription or folder label, a date of birth, clinical and shade photographs, intraoral scan files, and radiographic or CBCT data. We receive this information for one purpose: to design and fabricate the restoration or appliance the practice has prescribed, and to support that case afterward if it needs an adjustment or a remake.

We do not use patient information for marketing. We do not sell, rent, or trade it. We do not use it to build advertising profiles, and we do not disclose it to anyone beyond the providers listed in section 5 who help us receive, store, and produce the case.

Our status under HIPAA

Dental laboratories are treated as health care providers for this purpose. The American Dental Association's published position is that a dental practice does not need a business associate agreement in order to share protected health information with its laboratory concerning the treatment of an individual. We will nonetheless sign a business associate agreement on request — many practices prefer one as a matter of policy, and we are glad to accommodate that.

Where a practice's own Notice of Privacy Practices governs the patient information it sends us, we handle that information consistently with it.

Scope of the information we require

We ask practices to include only the information required to fabricate the case. Social Security numbers, insurance or policy numbers, billing records, and a patient's full chart are not required for fabrication, and we ask that they not be included.

03Information we collect

Information you provide directly

• Contact and Send-a-Case forms. Your first and last name, email address, phone number, practice or company name, and the content of your message.
• Digital case and photo uploaders. The files you upload, plus the case or patient label, the doctor's name, and any notes you enter. Accepted file types include intraoral scan and model files (STL, PLY), DICOM data, images (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP), PDFs, short videos, and ZIP archives.
• Case review portal. If we share a case for your review, we record the comments, approvals, and markup you enter on that case.

Information collected automatically

• Your IP address, which we use to apply upload rate limits and to block automated abuse of our forms.
• Technical and usage information — browser and device type, approximate region, the pages you visit, how you arrived at the site, and how long you stay — collected through analytics as described in section 6.

Information we do not collect

This website does not process payments; we do not collect credit card or bank account details through it. We do not ask for Social Security numbers. We do not collect demographic details such as age, gender, race, or household income, and we do not attempt to infer them. Account billing is handled outside this website through our lab management system.

04How we use information

• To answer your questions and respond to inquiries and quote requests.
• To receive, design, fabricate, track, and return the cases you send us, and to handle adjustments, remakes, and warranty work on them.
• To communicate with you about a case in progress — clarifications, design approvals, and scheduling.
• To protect our forms and uploaders from spam and automated abuse.
• To understand which pages and resources practices find useful, so we can improve them.
• To meet our legal, tax, and recordkeeping obligations.

We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information. We do not use your information or your patients' information for targeted advertising, and we do not make automated decisions about you.

05Service providers

We engage a limited number of outside providers to operate this website and transfer case files. Each receives only the information required to perform its function.

Provider	What it does	What it handles
Cloudflare	Website hosting, content delivery, form processing, bot protection	Page requests, IP addresses, form submissions in transit
Google Cloud Run	Receives uploaded case files and routes them to our storage	Uploaded files and the accompanying case details, in transit
Google Workspace	Stores case files and hosts our email	Case files, case labels, and our correspondence with you
Resend	Delivers form submissions and upload notifications to our inbox	The contents of the form or notification email
Google Analytics	Website traffic measurement	Usage and device information; see section 6
Google Maps	The location map embedded on our Contact page	Your IP address and map interactions, when that page loads

Your case files, our email, and all of our laboratory work stay in the United States — the work itself is performed entirely in Glendale, California. One qualification applies: Cloudflare operates a global network, so the server delivering a page to your browser may be the one nearest your location rather than one in the United States. This affects page delivery only, not the storage location of case files.

Our client portal is a separate service operated by another company at a different web address. When you sign in there, that company's own privacy policy and terms govern what happens on its site, not this one.

Beyond these providers, we disclose information only when we are legally required to — for example in response to a valid subpoena or court order — or where it is necessary to protect our rights, our clients, or someone's safety. If our business were ever sold or merged, information could transfer as part of that transaction, and this policy would continue to apply to it until replaced.

06Cookies, analytics & Do Not Track

Cookies and local storage we set

• A session cookie that keeps you signed in while you review a case in our case portal. It is required for the portal to work and expires when the session ends.
• Browser local storage that remembers the practice name you last entered in the uploader, so you do not have to retype it. It stays in your browser, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to measure site traffic. It sets cookies in your browser and collects the usage information described above. Google processes that information under its own privacy policy, and you can opt out of Google Analytics entirely using Google's browser opt-out add-on or by blocking cookies in your browser settings. Our site works normally if you do.

Other parties that may collect information about your activity

Two. Google may collect information about your visit through Google Analytics on every page, and through the Google Maps embed on our Contact page. Cloudflare processes requests as our hosting and security provider. We do not host advertising networks, social media tracking pixels, or third-party advertising cookies on this site.

Do Not Track

California law requires that we disclose how this site responds to "Do Not Track" browser signals. No uniform industry standard for honoring these signals was established, and this website does not currently respond to them. Visitors seeking equivalent control may use the Google Analytics opt-out linked above or their browser's cookie controls.

07How long we keep information

• Form submissions and inquiries reach us as email and are kept with our business correspondence. We remove them when they no longer serve a business or legal purpose.
• Case files are kept as part of the production record for the case. A restoration may require adjustment, remake, or warranty work years after delivery, and the original scan and design data is what makes that possible without re-treating the patient. We do not currently operate a fixed deletion schedule for case files.
• Analytics data is retained according to the retention period configured in Google Analytics.

Where a practice requests deletion of case data for a specific patient, we will comply unless a legal obligation or active business need requires retention, in which case we will say so.

08How we protect information

• The entire website is served over HTTPS with TLS encryption and HTTP Strict Transport Security, so traffic between your browser and us — including file uploads — is encrypted in transit.
• Case files are stored in access-controlled accounts. Access is limited to the staff who need it to produce or support the case.
• The case review portal uses signed, expiring session tokens rather than shared passwords.
• Our forms and uploaders are protected by rate limiting, file type restrictions, and automated-submission checks.

No method of transmitting or storing information is entirely secure, and we make no representation to the contrary. Should we become aware of a breach affecting information entrusted to us by a practice or its patients, we will notify the affected practice promptly and cooperate in meeting any applicable notification obligations.

09Reviewing or changing your information

If you want to see what business-contact information we hold about you, correct it, or have it removed, email [email protected] or call 800.292.5525. We will respond within a reasonable period and may need to verify your identity before making changes.

Requests concerning patient records should be directed to the treating practice, which holds the dental record and is the only party able to authorize a change to it.

10California privacy rights

The California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, applies to businesses with more than $25 million in annual gross revenue, businesses that buy, sell, or share the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households per year, or businesses that derive half or more of their revenue from selling personal information. GIE meets none of these thresholds, so the CCPA does not currently apply to us.

We state this rather than reproduce statutory rights that do not apply to us. The practical effect is limited: we will honor requests to access, correct, or delete the information we hold about you regardless — see section 9. Further, we do not sell or share personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

In addition, patient information we receive from a practice for treatment purposes is health information handled under HIPAA, which the CCPA expressly carves out of its scope.

Should our business exceed those thresholds, we will update this section and honor the full set of statutory rights.

11Children

This website is intended for dental professionals. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has submitted information through this site, contact us and we will delete it.

A patient in a case we fabricate may be a minor. That information reaches us from the treating practice under the authority of the dentist and the patient's parent or guardian; we do not collect it from the child, and we handle it as described in section 2.

12Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our practices or the law change. When we make a material change, we will revise the effective date at the top of this page and post a notice of the change on this page for at least 30 days. Significant changes affecting active clients will additionally be sent by email. Continued use of the site after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

13How to reach us

Questions regarding this policy, or the information we hold: