Privacy Policy
1. Who we are
Car Advisor is a mobile application that helps people assess a used car before buying it, using official vehicle records and our own analysis.
This policy explains what we do with your information, and what we do not do with it. It applies to the Car Advisor app and to this website. The website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and keeps no record of visits.
The data controller, the organisation legally responsible for your information, is:
| Company | Car Advisor Technologies Ltd |
|---|---|
| Registered in | England and Wales, company number 17447111 |
| Registered office | 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom |
| Contact for privacy | privacy@getcaradvisor.uk |
| ICO registration | ZC258944 |
If you want to exercise any of the rights in section 9, that contact address is the one to use.
2. The short version
We have tried to build this so that there is very little about you to hold.
What we hold about you
- The registration numbers of cars you look up
- A random identifier for your device, which is not linked to your name
- If you buy something: a record of what you bought, including the order number Google Play gives you
- Anything you choose to type in, such as a mileage or an asking price
- Basic technical records of requests to our server
What we never hold
- Your name, address or phone number, unless you send it to us yourself
- Your card or bank details. We never see these at all
- Any photograph or camera image
- Your location
- Your contacts, messages, files, or anything else on your phone
What we never do
- Sell your information, to anybody, for any purpose
- Use it for advertising, or share it with advertisers
- Track you across other apps or websites
- Build a profile of you to make automated decisions about you
Car Advisor has no accounts. You never sign up, never sign in and never give us your name or email address, whether you use it for free or buy something. If you change phone, the order number Google emails you as your receipt is all you need to get back what you bought.
3. What we collect, why, and our lawful basis for it
Under UK data protection law we must have a specific lawful reason for each use of your information. This table is that list in full.
3.1 Using the app for free
| What | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle registration numbers you type or scan | To look the car up in official records and produce your report | Contract: this is the service you asked for |
| A random device identifier created on first launch | To keep your free usage allowance separate from other people's, and to attach any purchase to the right device. It is generated on your phone, contains nothing about you or your handset, and we cannot connect it to you | Legitimate interests: running the service fairly and preventing abuse |
| A mileage you type in, where a car has no readable record, and an asking price if you type one | To assess the car and whether its price is fair. We only ask for a mileage when the official record cannot tell us | Contract |
| Technical request records: the request made, the registration it was about, when, whether it succeeded, how long it took, and which version of the app and which kind of phone (Android or iPhone) made it | To keep the service working, find faults, and stop abuse. The device identifier in these records is replaced with a one-way scrambled value. After two years, everything that could identify you is removed, including the registration, and what remains is kept only as anonymous statistics | Legitimate interests: security and service reliability |
3.2 If you buy something
| What | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| A record of the purchase: what was bought, for which vehicle, when, and the order number the store gives you | To give you what you paid for, to let you restore it on a new phone with that order number, to handle refunds, and to keep the accounting records the law requires of us | Contract, and legal obligation for the accounting record |
We never receive your payment details. Purchases are taken by Google Play or the Apple App Store, who are the seller of record. Your card number, bank details and billing address are handled entirely by them and are never sent to us, never pass through our systems, and are not ours to lose. We receive only confirmation that a payment succeeded and a reference number for it.
3.3 Analytics, which you can turn off
We want to know which parts of Car Advisor people actually use, so we can improve the ones that matter and stop maintaining the ones that do not. That is the only purpose.
You can turn it off at any time in the app's settings. It is free, it takes one tap, and it has no effect on anything else in the app. We look only at totals, such as how many people used a feature, and never at what any one person did.
| What | Why | Lawful basis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Which screens are opened, which features are used, and whether an action succeeded or failed, attached to the scrambled device identifier, never to your name or email | To understand what to improve | ||
| Where you installed the app from, for example a link in one of our Instagram posts, taken from the link's campaign label and never from anything about you | To understand which of our posts and links bring people to the app | Legitimate interests, as above. Sent only while analytics is on | Legitimate interests: improving the service. UK law allows analytics used only to improve a service without asking first, provided you are told and can switch it off, which you can |
What analytics never includes: the registrations you look up, anything you have typed, your email address, or anything that could identify you to us or to anybody else. It is never used for advertising and never shared with an advertiser.
3.4 MOT reminders
If you ask for a reminder before an MOT is due, that reminder is created and stored on your phone by your phone. It is not sent from our server, we are not told that you set it, and we do not hold a list of who has reminders for which cars. Turning off notification permission removes them.
4. Where your information is processed, and who else sees it
To produce a report we have to ask official sources about the car. We share the registration number with them, and nothing about you.
| Who | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) | The registration number | Official vehicle record: make, model, tax and MOT status |
| DVSA (Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency) | The registration number | Official MOT history |
| Vehicle Data Global Limited (UK, company 16053104) | The registration number | Valuation and provenance checks, where you have bought one |
| Market Check Cars, Inc. (United States) | The registration number and mileage | Market valuation data |
| Anthropic (Claude) and Google (Gemini) | The vehicle facts already gathered | To write the plain-English explanation of the findings. Your device identifier and email are not sent. Neither provider is permitted to train models on this data |
| RevenueCat, Inc. | The purchase receipt and the random device identifier | To verify that a purchase is genuine |
| Google Play / Apple | Your payment, handled entirely by them | To take the payment |
| Hetzner Online GmbH (Germany) | Everything our server holds, as listed in section 3 | Hosting: our server runs in their data centre in Germany. Backup copies are kept on computers we control in the United Kingdom |
These organisations act as our processors, meaning they may use the information only to do the job we have asked of them, under a written contract, except DVLA, DVSA, Google Play and Apple, who are independent controllers acting under their own terms and their own privacy notices.
We do not sell your information and we never will. Nobody outside this table receives it, except where we are legally compelled to disclose it (for example by a court order), or where it is necessary to investigate fraud or a threat to someone's safety.
International transfers
Some of these organisations are outside the United Kingdom, principally in the United States. Where information leaves the UK we rely on either the UK's own adequacy decisions, or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, together with an assessment of the protections in place. You can ask us for details of the safeguards used for any specific transfer, using the contact address in section 1.
5. How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| The official record of a car, held so that looking it up twice does not cost twice | Up to 24 hours, or one hour when its MOT is close to due, then refreshed. This is information about the car, not about you |
| Purchase records | Six years after the end of the relevant financial year. We are required to keep accounting records for this long, so this is not ours to shorten |
| Technical request records | 2 years in full. After that the scrambled identifier, the registration and the exact time are removed automatically, and what remains (the date, which feature was used, whether it worked, and the make and model of car) is anonymous and kept to understand demand. Anonymous information is not personal data |
| Analytics, unless you turned it off | 26 months, then reduced to anonymous totals |
| Cars you have saved, your settings, your reminders | These are stored on your phone only. Deleting the app deletes them, and we never held them |
6. Other people's information
The vehicle records we obtain are records about a car, not about its keeper. DVLA's and DVSA's public interfaces do not return the name or address of any registered keeper, and we neither receive nor request that information.
7. Automated decisions
We do not make automated decisions about you.
Car Advisor does make automated assessments about cars. That is the product. Those assessments are calculations over official records, they are explained to you rather than hidden, and they are advice about a vehicle, not a decision about a person. They have no legal effect on you and nothing about you is scored, profiled or ranked.
Car Advisor is not a substitute for a professional inspection, and its assessments are not a guarantee about any vehicle.
8. Security
- Information in transit between the app and our server is encrypted.
- Administrative access to our server needs a key held only by named administrators; passwords cannot be used to sign in to it.
- Purchase records are held in an append-only form, so a record cannot be quietly altered after the fact.
- API keys and credentials are never included in the app you download.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If we suffer a breach affecting your information, we will report it to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours where the law requires it, and we will tell you directly where there is a high risk to you.
9. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- Be told what we hold about you, and get a copy of it
- Have it corrected if it is wrong
- Have it deleted, where we have no overriding reason to keep it. Note that we must keep purchase records for six years, as section 5 explains
- Restrict or object to our use of it, including any use we have based on legitimate interests
- Take it elsewhere, in a portable form
- Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is our basis, which for us means notifications. Analytics is covered by your right to object, and you can exercise it yourself in the app's settings
- Not be subject to a decision made solely by automated means with legal or similarly significant effects. As section 7 says, we make none
To exercise any of these, write to the contact address in section 1. We will respond within one month. There is no charge.
If we get it wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's independent regulator, at ico.org.uk, by telephone on 0303 123 1113, or in writing to Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. You can complain to them without asking us first, though we would rather have the chance to put it right.
10. Deleting your information
Car Advisor has no accounts, so there is no account to delete. What we hold is tied to a random identifier created on your phone, not to your name.
- What is on your phone (saved cars, settings, reminders) is deleted when you delete the app. We never held it.
- What we hold on our server can be deleted on request. Email privacy@getcaradvisor.uk. Because we do not know who you are, we will ask only for enough to find your records, such as the registration of a car you checked or a Google Play order number, and nothing more.
What survives, and why: the accounting record of a purchase (its date, amount and store order number) is kept for six years because tax law requires it. Anonymous statistics are not information about you and cannot be connected to you, so they are not affected.
We will complete a request within one month. You do not have to give a reason, and nobody will ask you for one.
11. Children
Car Advisor is intended for people old enough to buy a car, and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us with information, contact us and we will delete it.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change how we use your information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where a change materially affects you (a new purpose, or a new recipient), we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and where the change relies on consent we will ask you again rather than assume it.
Previous versions are available on request.
13. Contact
privacy@getcaradvisor.uk
Car Advisor Technologies Ltd
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom
Company number 17447111, registered in England and Wales