Privacy Policy

This explains what we collect when you book or enquire, why we hold it, and how to get it removed. We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles.

What we collect

When you book, we collect your name, email address, phone number, the address where the vehicle is, and a description of the vehicle and seller. When you use the enquiry form, we collect your name, contact details, postcode and your message.

We collect this because we cannot turn up to inspect a car without knowing where it is and how to reach you.

What we do not collect

We do not collect card numbers. If you choose to pay online, payment is handled by Stripe and your card details go to Stripe, never to us or to this website's database.

We do not sell or rent your details, and we do not add you to a marketing list because you booked an inspection.

The free guides and the Buyer's Inspection Guide

When you ask for a free guide, we record the make, model and year you typed, and the fuel type and gearbox if you chose them. We do not ask for your name or address. We do ask for an email address, because the guide is emailed to you. We keep that address, and the car you asked about, to send you that one email, and for nothing else. It is not a mailing list. We do not email you again about it, unless you tick the separate box for one follow-up email about the full guide. If you do, we send that one email about a day and a half later, with a link in it to stop emails, and we do not send it if you have already bought the guide. To stop one person asking for too many guides in a day, we keep a scrambled code made from your connection details and a cookie. It cannot be turned back into your address. The cookie also lets the page know you have asked for a guide before, so it can show the full guide more clearly. It is used for nothing else.

When you buy the Buyer's Inspection Guide, we collect your email address and the car you are looking at. Your payment is taken by Stripe, and we never see or keep your card number. We keep a record of the order (what you bought, the price, the date and the Stripe payment reference) for our accounts.

You can also choose to give us your first name, the car's odometer reading and its VIN or chassis number. They are optional. Your name is printed on the cover of your own guide. The odometer reading fills in which service jobs should have been done by now. The VIN or chassis number is printed so you can check it against the car, and we read only its first three characters to say which maker and country it starts with. We keep these with your order only. They are never stored with the guide we keep for the next buyer of the same car.

Your guide is made after you pay, and the PDF is kept behind a private link that only you have. Anyone you give the link to can open it, so only share it with someone you trust.

We use a small number of anonymous counts to see how the guides are used, for example how many people started one. They contain no name, email or order number.

Who else can see it

Your booking is stored in a database hosted by Supabase. Email is sent through our email provider. If you pay online, Stripe processes the payment. The guides are researched and written with the help of an AI service (Anthropic's Claude). It sees only the make, model and year of the car, the fuel type and gearbox if you chose them, and public pages about it such as recall notices and safety ratings. It never sees your name, email, VIN, odometer reading or anything else about you. The website is run on Vercel. Each of these sees only what it needs to do its job.

We will disclose information if the law requires it, and not otherwise.

Measurement, in plain terms

This site uses Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity to understand how people use it. Both set cookies. Both are run through Google Tag Manager.

**Google Analytics** tells us how many people visited, which pages they looked at, roughly where in the world they were, and how many finished a booking. It does not tell us who you are.

**Microsoft Clarity** records how people move around a page: scrolling, mouse movement, taps and clicks. **We have configured it to hide the contents of every form field**, so what you type into the booking or enquiry form is not recorded. It is used to find parts of the site that confuse people, not to watch individuals.

We also count how far people get through the booking page using a random number stored in your browser tab. That one is not a cookie and is deleted when you close the tab.

If you would rather not be measured at all, both Google Analytics and Clarity respect browser and extension level blocking, and turning that on will not stop you booking an inspection. Visitors in the EU and UK are not measured by default.

How long we keep it

We keep booking records for as long as we need them for tax and business records. Enquiries that do not become bookings are cleared out once they are no longer useful. Analytics data is kept on Google's and Microsoft's standard retention periods.

We delete your name, odometer reading and VIN 12 months after you buy a Buyer's Inspection Guide. We keep the order record itself for our accounts.

Seeing, correcting or deleting your information

Call or email us and ask. Our contact details are in the footer of every page. We will tell you what we hold, correct anything wrong, and delete what we are not required to keep.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version appears on this page.