Privacy policy

• Account: your email address, a password we only ever store hashed, your display name and username, and when you joined.
• Profile: anything you choose to add, such as a bio, a city or region, a website and a profile photo.
• Your garage: the vehicles you add and everything you attach to them, including photos, build notes, modifications, service records, costs, documents and identifiers.
• Activity: posts, comments, likes, saves, follows, blocks, mutes and reports.
• Technical: session cookies, the browser and device your sessions come from, and server logs. Logs deliberately exclude VINs, documents, exact locations and tokens.

We do not collect your precise location. Any location on your profile, a vehicle or a post is text you typed.

These are never shown on a public build page, a profile, or in search, and are not visible to other members:

• VIN, chassis or serial numbers.
• What you paid for a car, and the cost of any modification, task or service.
• Documents in the vault: receipts, title, registration, insurance.
• Your service log, build tasks and valuation snapshots.

Vehicles are also per-vehicle visible: public, followers only, or private. The Share tab lists field by field what a public build page shows and what it hides, before you create the link.

Every image you upload is re-encoded on our server and all embedded metadata, including GPS coordinates from your camera, is stripped before the file is stored. Documents that are images are re-encoded the same way. Private documents are stored under keys that cannot be guessed and are only reachable through links that expire after five minutes.

To run your account and show you your own data; to show your content to the audience you chose; to keep the place safe through moderation and rate limiting; and to send the notifications you turned on. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use your private garage records for advertising.

• Other members, but only to the extent your visibility settings allow.
• Our hosting and storage providers, which run the servers and hold the files.
• Anyone you deliberately send a public build page link or QR code to.
• Authorities, where we are legally required to respond.

When you follow a link to a publisher, forum, channel or marketplace, you leave Auto Collective and that site's own privacy policy applies. We do not share your identity with them.

We set a session cookie so you stay signed in, and we store your theme choice in your browser. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Some spaces in the app show ads, and some invite businesses to advertise with us. Every ad is labelled Sponsored. Ads are not chosen using your garage, your searches, your activity or any other personal data about you, and we do not use advertising cookies or trackers. The pictures are served from our own site.

Tapping an ad opens the advertiser's own website in a new tab. The link tells them which spot and which ad it came from, and nothing else from us. Once you are on their site they can see your visit as any website can, and their own privacy policy applies.

If you send an enquiry through the advertising form, we collect the name, email address, business name, website and message you enter, and, if you are signed in, a link to your account. We use it only to reply to you about advertising. We keep it while we are talking, delete it 12 months after the enquiry is closed, and delete one that nobody answered after 24 months. You can ask us to delete it sooner, and deleting your account also deletes enquiries you sent while signed in.

We keep your data while your account is open. Deleting a vehicle, a post or a document removes it from the site immediately. Deleting your account removes your profile, garage, posts, comments and documents, and queues your uploaded files for permanent deletion from storage. Backups age out on their own schedule and are not used to restore deleted accounts.

You can download everything we hold for you from Settings at any time.

You can see, correct, export and delete your data from within the app. Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to processing or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to markwlamplughjr@gmail.com and we will deal with it.

Auto Collective is not for under 16s. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we close it and delete the data.