Privacy Policy

When you create an account and use the app, we may collect the following data:

• Your email address, and the name you choose to be known by.
• The emergency contact you choose, if you choose one: their name and their phone number, so the SOS screen can call them. You pick that person in your phone's own contact picker, which hands us only them.
• The vehicles you add: make, model, trim, year, fuel type, odometer reading, and the VIN if you scan or enter one.
• What you paid for a vehicle and the year you bought it, if you enter them. They are optional, they exist only so the Trade-In Oracle has somewhere to start from, and they never move your health score.
• Your service history: what was done, the date, the mileage at the time, and any notes you write.
• Your plans: notes and booked dates for services that have not happened yet.
• Your fill-ups, if you log them: the date, the odometer reading, how much fuel or electricity went in, what it cost, and whether the tank was filled or splashed. This is what Running Costs is worked out from.
• A repair quote you are working through, if you enter one: the services on it and the price against each. One quote is kept per vehicle and the next one you enter replaces it.
• Your preferences, such as your distance unit, the language you read the app in, and whether notifications are switched on.
• What you write to the assistant, and what it writes back. Both are kept on your account so the conversation belongs to you rather than to one phone.
• Whether you have a subscription, which one, and when it runs out. See Subscriptions and payment.

If you have only visited the website and installed nothing, none of the above applies to you. What that leaves is set out under This website: server logs, and a waitlist address if you chose to give one.

We do not collect your address, your card or bank details, your address book, or any information about you that the app does not need to do its job. Choosing an emergency contact never gives us the rest of your contacts: the picker runs outside the app and returns the one person you tapped.

We are collecting your data for several reasons:

• To keep your garage and your service history on your account, so they are there when you sign in.
• To work out what your vehicle needs next, and when it falls due.
• To calculate the health score the app shows you.
• To work out what your vehicle costs to run, from the fill-ups you log.
• To value your vehicle when you ask for that, and to compare a quote you were given against your own record.
• To remind you before a service is due, if you allow notifications.
• To answer you when you write to us about your account.
• To answer your questions in the assistant, about the vehicle you actually own rather than a car in general.
• To know whether you have paid, so the paid features are available to you and not to somebody who has not.

We do not use your data to advertise to you, we do not build a profile of how you drive, and we do not send you marketing you did not ask for.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the law requires us to have a lawful basis for every use we make of your data. Ours are these:

• To provide the service you asked for. Holding your account, your garage, your service history and your preferences is how the app does the job you installed it to do. Answering you in the assistant is part of that job, not an extra, and so is giving you the features you have paid for.
• Your consent, for anything the app has to ask permission for: the camera, your photo library, notifications, and your location. Each one is a separate choice and you can take any of them back at any time. Taking one back does not make what happened while it was given unlawful.
• Our legitimate interests, in keeping the service running and secure, preventing abuse of it, and finding and fixing faults. Counting how many assistant messages an account sends in a day sits here: without it one account could spend the budget that keeps the assistant free for everybody. We have weighed that against your privacy and kept it to what running the app safely actually needs.
• Complying with the law, in the rare case that we are obliged to keep or produce something.

You are not obliged to give us any of this. An account needs an email address and a health score needs a vehicle, so withholding those means the app cannot do that part of its job. Everything else is optional, and refusing it leaves the rest working.

The website has its own two, for the only two things it does: our legitimate interest in server logs that keep the site up, and your consent for the waitlist. Both are set out where they apply, under This website.

Some of what the app produces is never sent to us at all. It is created on your phone, kept on your phone, and removed with the app:

• Photographs of your vehicle. A picture you take or choose is saved into the app's own storage on the device. Only a reference to it is stored on your account. The picture itself is not uploaded.
• The place a photograph was taken. Photos are re-encoded before they are saved, which removes the location your camera wrote into the file.
• Reading a VIN barcode. The camera is read on the device and nothing is sent while you scan. The VIN is only kept if you go on to save the vehicle. What happens to it afterwards is described under Looking a vehicle up.
• The Pre-Purchase walkaround. The questions you answer about a car you are thinking of buying, and the asking price you enter, are held in memory while you work through them and are not stored on your account or sent to us.
• Service reminders. Your phone schedules these itself from figures it already holds. No server watches your mileage.

The app asks for the following, and each one is optional. Refusing any of them leaves the rest of the app working, and all of them can be changed later from the Settings screen or from your device settings:

• Camera, to scan a VIN barcode and to photograph your vehicle.
• Photos, so you can choose an existing picture of your vehicle.
• Notifications, to remind you before a service falls due.
• Location, used by Nearby Services, by Part Finder and by the SOS screen, and by nothing else. Your position is read on the phone at the moment you ask for it, used to find what is around you or to write the message you are about to send, and then dropped. It is never stored on your account, never attached to a vehicle, and never sent to us.
• Bluetooth, used only to talk to an OBD-II adapter you have plugged into your vehicle. It is not used to find your location, and it is not used to look for anything other than an adapter.

Finding what is around you means asking a map service where the nearest garages, fuel or parts shops are. On an iPhone that is Apple Maps and on an Android phone it is Google Places. They receive the point you are searching from and the kind of place you are looking for. They do not receive your name, your account or anything about your vehicle, and what comes back is not stored.

Some of what the app tells you comes from public vehicle and safety databases rather than from us. Asking them a question means sending them enough to answer it. These are the only ones, and this is everything that goes to each:

• Safety recalls. Your vehicle's make, model and year are sent to the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and to the European Commission's Safety Gate, to find campaigns affecting that model. Neither is told who is asking.
• Your VIN. If you have saved one, opening the Recalls screen sends it to NHTSA's public vPIC decoder, which returns the make, model, year and trim as NHTSA themselves record them. This is done so a car you saved as "VW Golf" still matches a database that spells it "Volkswagen". The VIN is sent to nobody else, and it is never sent to the assistant.
• Pre-Purchase Check. If you use it, the registration you type is sent to the Netherlands vehicle registry, which is an open government database. That is a plate you are looking up rather than one of your own vehicles, and we do not keep the search or the result.

These services are not ours and they are not acting on our behalf. They are public databases we ask questions of, and their own terms apply to what they do with a request. We send them nothing that identifies you.

If you connect an OBD-II adapter, the app can read what your vehicle has recorded about itself. The adapter is a separate piece of hardware you buy and plug into the port under your dashboard. It is not made by us, and it talks to your phone over Bluetooth rather than through us.

A scan reads the following from the vehicle:

• Its stored, pending and permanent fault codes.
• Whether the check engine light is on, and how many faults the vehicle says are behind it.
• Live sensor readings, such as engine speed, coolant temperature, fuel level and battery voltage.
• The VIN, as the vehicle itself reports it.
• The name the adapter gives itself, and which of the vehicle protocols it is using.

A scan stays on your phone. It is held only while the app is open, it is never saved to your account, it is never uploaded to us, and it is gone when you sign out or close the app. Nothing about a scan is kept as history, so the app cannot show you what your vehicle said last month.

The app only ever reads. It does not clear fault codes, does not write anything to your vehicle, and cannot change how your vehicle behaves.

The assistant answers questions about the vehicle you actually own, which means it has to be told about it. When you send a message, that message and the following leave your device so a reply can be written:

• What you typed, and the earlier messages in the same conversation.
• Your vehicle: its make, model, trim, year, fuel type and odometer reading, with its health score and how that score was reached.
• What that vehicle needs next, what you have already logged, and any open safety recalls the app has found for it.
• The name you chose to be known by, your distance unit, and the language you read the app in.

If you have run an OBD-II scan and ask the assistant about it, the fault codes and the sensor readings from that scan are sent with your message so the answer can be about your vehicle rather than about vehicles in general.

Your VIN is not sent. That is true of the VIN you entered and of the one a scan read from the vehicle: the scan carries it, and it is removed before the message leaves your phone. Neither is your email address, your location, your photographs, what you paid for the vehicle, nor anything about any other vehicle on your account.

The reply is written by an artificial intelligence provider working on our behalf. They are bound by contract, they process your message only in order to answer it, and they are not permitted to use it to train their models or for any purpose of their own.

We count how many messages your account sends each day, so that a free allowance means something and one account cannot spend the budget that keeps the assistant available to everybody. The count is a number per day. It does not record what you asked.

The assistant is not a mechanic and it does not inspect your car. What it tells you is guidance. Anything that affects your safety should be looked at by somebody qualified.

The score out of 100 is worked out by the app itself, on your phone, from figures you gave it. Five things feed it and nothing else does:

• Service upkeep, worth 50 of the 100 points. What you have logged, what the schedule says is due, and what is overdue. This is the largest part of the score and the only part that goes up when you do something.
• Mileage against the vehicle's age, worth 20.
• The age itself, worth 12.
• The make's reliability record, worth 10.
• The powertrain, worth 8.

Your VIN does not feed it, and neither does what you paid for the vehicle. Both are held for other purposes and are deliberately kept out of the scoring.

It is arithmetic, not a judgement about you. It decides nothing, it is shown to nobody but you, and the app breaks it down so you can see which of the five moved it and by how much. We do not profile you, we do not score how you drive, and no decision affecting you is made automatically anywhere in this app.

If you subscribe, the payment itself is handled entirely by Apple or by Google, in their own app store, under their own privacy policies. We never see and never hold your card number, your bank details or your billing address.

What we hold is the outcome:

• Whether your account currently has a subscription, which product it is, and the date it runs out.
• A record that a particular store purchase has been claimed by an account. It is stored as a one-way fingerprint of the store's own identifier rather than the identifier itself. It exists so that one subscription cannot be used to unlock any number of accounts.

Your store confirms a purchase to us directly, and tells us when a subscription renews or ends. We check it with them rather than taking the app's word for it, because otherwise anybody could claim to have paid.

GearGenius is committed to securing your data and keeping it confidential. We have done all in our power to prevent data theft, unauthorised access and disclosure, by implementing the latest technologies and software which help us safeguard all the information we collect.

Your data is held on secured servers run by trusted service providers on our behalf. They are bound by contract, they process it only on our instructions, and they are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.

Access is restricted to your own account. No other user of the app can read what you store, and your password is handled by the sign-in service rather than seen or held by us. The rules that enforce this are applied by the server, not by the app, so they hold whatever a copy of the app is modified to ask for.

No system is completely secure. If something we hold about you is ever exposed, we will tell you and the relevant authority as the law requires.

We keep what you store for as long as your account is open, because that is the point of it. A service history is worth having precisely because it is still there years later.

• Your account, your vehicles, your service history, your fill-ups, your plans and your preferences: until you delete them, or until you delete your account.
• Your conversations with the assistant: until you delete them, or until you delete your account.
• A quote you entered: until you replace it with another one, or delete the vehicle, or delete your account.
• A vehicle or a record you delete: removed from your account straight away. Copies inside routine backups age out of those backups on their own and are never restored to your account.
• Your subscription status: for as long as it is current, and afterwards for as long as your store's records of it require, so a renewal or a refund can be matched to the right account.
• Everything, when you close your account: deleted within 30 days. Nothing is held back for marketing, because we do not market to you.
• A waitlist address, if you gave us one on the website: until we have sent the one message it exists for, until you ask us to remove it, or two years, whichever comes first. See This website.
• The website's server logs: for as long as our hosting provider's own rolling schedule keeps them, for security and reliability. We take no copies.

If the law ever obliges us to keep something, we keep only that thing, only for as long as we are obliged to, and we use it for nothing else while we hold it.

Your account and its contents sit on secured servers run by service providers on our behalf. Those servers may be in a country other than the one you live in, including the United States.

Where your data leaves the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, it travels under the safeguards the law requires for that transfer: either a decision by the relevant authority that the destination protects it adequately, or standard contractual clauses agreed with the provider. Write to us and we will tell you which one applies to you.

The same is true of a message you send the assistant, which is processed wherever the provider writing the reply operates.

This website is delivered by a different company from a network of locations, and a request from Europe is normally answered in Europe. That company is established in the United States, so the same safeguards apply to anything in its logs.

The app does not use cookies, advertising identifiers, or any other tracking technology. There is no analytics software in it, nothing follows you to other apps or websites, and we do not measure what you look at inside the app.

Everything above this section describes the app. This one is about geargenius.app, the website you are reading, which collects a great deal less. It is written to be complete on its own, so that somebody who has never installed anything can read this section and stop.

No cookies, and nothing that behaves like one. This site sets no cookies, and carries no analytics, no advertising tags, no third-party scripts, no tracking pixels and no fingerprinting. It writes nothing to your browser's own storage either. Nothing here follows you to any other site, and nothing on any other site is told you were here. That is why you have never been asked to accept anything: there is no non-essential storage to consent to, so there is no consent to collect.

What loading a page reveals anyway. Your request reaches us through the company that hosts and delivers this site, and it keeps ordinary server logs. Those hold the address your request came from, the moment it arrived, which page you asked for, whether it was served, and the browser and operating system your browser announces about itself. Every website works this way. It is not something we switched on and not something we can switch off.

• What it is for. Keeping the site up, confirming it is being served correctly, and absorbing attacks against it. Nothing else. We do not build a picture of you from it, we do not try to identify you in it, and we never join it to anything from the app.
• Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in a site that stays available and is not abused. We have weighed that against your privacy and kept it to what running a website safely actually needs.
• How long. Logs age out on our provider's own rolling schedule, for security and reliability only. We do not export them, we keep no archive of our own, and nothing from them is ever attached to an account.
• Where. The site is delivered from a network of locations, so a request from Europe is normally answered in Europe. The company operating that network is established in the United States, so where a transfer out of the UK or the EEA does happen it travels under the safeguards in Where your data is held.

The waitlist is the only thing this site asks you for. If you enter an email address there, we keep that address and nothing else. No name, no IP address stored against it, nothing inferred from it.

• Our lawful basis is your consent, given by typing the address and pressing the button. Take it back whenever you like by writing to us, and the address is deleted without our asking why.
• What we use it for. One message, telling you the app is ready. That is the whole purpose and there is not a second one.
• How long. Until that message is sent, and then it is deleted. If the app has not launched within two years of you joining, we delete your address then anyway: an address that has heard nothing for two years is not a list anybody still consents to be on.
• Never sold, never shared, never used to market anything else to you, and never handed to an advertising network.

Links that leave this site. A few pages point outwards, to a data protection authority and to a consumer body. Those are other people's websites under their own policies, and what happens once you arrive is not ours to control or to answer for.

Your rights apply here too. Everything under Your rights over your data is yours as a visitor and not only as an account holder. You do not need an account to ask what we hold about you, and if the honest answer is "an email address on the waitlist" or "nothing at all", that is the answer you will get.

The app can place an emergency call for you. It chooses a number from your device region, shows it to you before anything happens, and hands it to your phone's own dialler if you confirm.

It is an ordinary telephone call. We do not place it, record it, or send your name or your location to anyone.

Sharing your location works the same way. The app writes a message saying where you are and hands it to your phone's own share sheet; you choose who gets it and you press send. It is a snapshot of that moment rather than a link that keeps following you, and nothing about it reaches us.

At some point, you might wish to restrict the use and collection of your personal data. You can achieve this by doing the following:

• Turn off any permission, from the Settings screen in the app or from your device settings. The rest of the app keeps working.
• Delete a vehicle or a service record. It is removed from your account, not only from this phone.
• Leave optional fields empty. A vehicle works without a VIN and without a purchase price; the features that use them are the only things you lose.
• Sign out at any time. Your garage and history stay on your account until you ask us to remove them.

GearGenius will not lease, sell or distribute your personal information to any third parties, unless we have your permission. We might do so if the law forces us to.

Wherever you live, you can ask us for any of the following and we will do it. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, these are rights the law gives you rather than favours we are offering:

• Access. A copy of everything we hold about you.
• Rectification. Anything wrong about you put right. Most of it you can correct yourself, in the app.
• Erasure. Your data deleted. You can do this yourself from Settings, or ask us to.
• Restriction. Our use of your data paused while a question about it is settled.
• Portability. A copy of what you gave us, in a form you can take somewhere else.
• Objection. A stop put to any use of your data that rests on our legitimate interests.
• Withdrawal. Any permission taken back, at any time, without giving a reason.

Ask by writing to privacy@geargenius.app. We answer within one month. If what you have asked for is complicated we may need up to two months more, and we will tell you inside the first month if that is going to happen. It costs nothing, and we will not treat you any differently for having asked.

If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority in your country, and you can do that without coming to us first. Ours, because we are established in Greece, is the Hellenic Data Protection Authority at www.dpa.gr.

A number of states give their residents specific rights over personal information. We give all of them to everybody in the United States, whether or not the law in your state obliges us to:

• To know what personal information we have collected about you, where it came from, why we collected it, and who we disclosed it to.
• To be given a copy of it.
• To have it corrected.
• To have it deleted.
• To opt out of the sale or the sharing of it, and of profiling.
• To limit what we do with sensitive personal information.
• Not to be treated worse for exercising any of these.

We do not sell your personal information. We never have, and we do not share it for cross context behavioural advertising either. That is why you will not find a Do Not Sell link anywhere: it would point at a switch that is already off.

We do not profile you and nothing about you is decided automatically. Of the categories the law calls sensitive, the only one this app touches is your precise location, which is read while you are on the screen that needs it and is never kept afterwards.

Make any of these requests by writing to privacy@geargenius.app. We answer within 45 days, and if we genuinely need longer we will tell you why and take no more than another 45. You can ask twice a year at no charge. We will ask you to confirm the request from the address on the account before we act on it, which is there to stop somebody else making it for you.

You can delete your account and everything stored with it from inside the app: Settings, then your name at the top, then Delete my account. It asks you twice, and then it is gone.

Or ask us to do it, at any time and without giving a reason.

Write to privacy@geargenius.app. Your message opens a ticket with our team, and you will get a reply confirming that it has been received. We will ask you to confirm the request from the address on the account, and then your account and its contents are deleted.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. That is held by Apple or by Google and you cancel it in your own store account, which is also the only place it can be refunded.

The same ticket is how you ask for a copy of everything we hold about you, or ask for it to be corrected. Wherever you live, those requests are yours to make.

GearGenius is not intended for children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us their information, write to us and it will be removed.

We reserve the right to change this policy, and the date at the top of the page is the day it last changed. If a change materially affects what we collect or what we do with it, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect rather than leaving you to find it here.

If you have any question about this policy, about the data we hold, or about anything the app does with it, write to us at privacy@geargenius.app. Whatever it is, we are glad to hear it and happy to sort it out.

You do not need to know which right you are exercising, and you do not need to use any particular words. Tell us in your own words what you want, and we will work out which request it is. That covers asking what we hold about you, why we hold it, getting a copy of it, having it corrected, having it deleted, taking back a permission, or simply telling us that something the app did with your data did not look right to you.

Every message opens a ticket and is answered. How long we may take, and what we will ask you to confirm first, are set out under Your rights over your data and, if you live there, If you live in the United States.