Privacy policy.
Plain language. No dark patterns. If you gave us information, this is what we do with it.
Last updated: August 5, 2026
ugoezema.com is the personal site of Dr. Ugochukwu D. Ezema, a triple-board-certified physician based in Wesley Chapel, Florida. It hosts essays, podcast episodes, and information about his speaking and clinical work. Questions about privacy: ugo@ugoezema.com.
We only collect information you actively give us through one of these forms:
- Newsletter sign-up. Email address, plus the page you subscribed from.
- Comments on essays and podcast episodes. Name, email, comment text, and the timestamp. We also record a one-way hash of your IP address for spam prevention — not the IP itself.
- Contact and speaking forms. Name, email, and whatever you wrote in the message.
Your name is shown publicly next to any approved comment. Your email is never shown publicly — it is used only for moderation replies and, if you opted in, to send you the newsletter.
We use a handful of specialist services rather than one big platform. Each holds a narrow slice of your data:
- Beehiiv — our newsletter platform. Holds your email if you subscribed to Doc Populi.
- Attio — our contact management system. Holds a record of any form you submitted (name, email, message, page you were on).
- Vercel — our hosting and file storage. Approved comments live here as JSON files that our site reads to render pages.
- hCaptcha — spam prevention. Sees a one-time verification when you submit a comment. hCaptcha does not track you across other sites for advertising.
- Postmark — sends transactional emails (e.g. confirmations for contact form submissions).
- Google Analytics + Plausible — aggregate traffic statistics. We do not use them to identify individual visitors.
This site does not use cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking. Analytics services may set their own cookies for aggregate traffic measurement. No third-party ad networks are embedded.
Every comment is reviewed before it appears. If your comment is approved, your name and comment text become public; your email and any IP-hash stay private. If it is rejected, the entire record is deleted.
We may reject or later remove any comment that is spam, threatening, defamatory, unlawful, gives specific medical advice to a named person, or reveals private information about another person. Nothing on this site is medical advice.
When you submit a comment, the option to also subscribe to Doc Populi is pre-checked. If you uncheck it, you will not be subscribed. If you leave it checked, you will get a welcome email and then a weekly essay. Every issue includes a one-click unsubscribe link that removes you immediately.
You can, at any time:
- Unsubscribe from the newsletter via the link in any email.
- Ask us to delete your comment, your Attio record, or any other data we hold about you. Email ugo@ugoezema.com and we will delete within 30 days, usually much sooner.
- Ask for a copy of whatever data we hold about you.
If you live in the European Union, UK, or California, you have the same rights under GDPR/UK-GDPR/CCPA — same email works.
Approved comments and newsletter subscriptions are kept indefinitely so the site remains useful (a five-year-old comment thread is still a five-year-old comment thread). If you ask us to delete, we do. Pending comments that are rejected are deleted immediately.
This site is not directed at children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, email us and we will delete it.
Nothing on ugoezema.com — essays, podcast episodes, comments, replies — is medical advice for you personally. If you have a medical concern, see your own physician.
If this policy changes materially, we will note the new “Last updated” date at the top and, if the change affects existing subscribers, send a heads-up in the next issue of the newsletter.