Privacy policy

What we collect

The registrations you check, your email address when you ask for a detailed report or a car buying checklist, messages you send us, and standard server logs. Card details are handled by Stripe, and PayPal payments by PayPal: they never reach our servers.

We count visits to see how the site is used and which adverts work. For this we keep, for each visit, the day, the site or advert that led here, the pages opened, how long the visit lasted, the country your IP address belongs to (worked out on our own server) and whether a phone or a computer was used, under an anonymous code made from your IP address and browser. The code changes every day, cannot be turned back into your IP address, and is not stored on your device.

When something goes wrong on a page (an error message, a payment that does not go through, an email we could not send), we record it with the page, the registration and the order it concerns, so that we can put it right.

Why

To deliver reports (on screen and by email to the address you pay with), let you reopen past orders, answer support requests, and prevent fraud. If you enter your email address to get a detailed report, or with a free check, and leave without the report, we may send you reminder emails about that car: one a few minutes later, one an hour later, then at most one a day for 7 days. They stop as soon as you buy a report or use the link in any of them to stop reminders. We send no other marketing emails. Our lawful bases under UK GDPR are contract and legitimate interests.

Cookies

When you open a report you bought, we store one cookie on your device that remembers your reports, so you can reopen them and use the checks left in a pack without creating an account. When you enter your email address to get a report, a second cookie carries it to the payment page for a month, so we do not ask for it again.

Vehicle data

We show MOT test records for a vehicle. We never show keeper names or addresses. If you believe a page about a vehicle should be removed, contact us and we will review it.

Retention

Order records are kept for 6 years for accounting purposes. Contact messages are deleted after 2 years. An email address entered for a report that was never bought is erased after 30 days. Visit counts are deleted after 13 months, and records of errors after 30 days.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data or ask us to delete it via the contact form. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).