Privacy Policy

About this policy

Car Advisor is a vehicle-research service. It helps shoppers review vehicle specifications, market-price information, owner reports, recalls, service bulletins, efficiency information and other purchasing considerations. This policy explains the information the current service uses and stores.

Information used for vehicle research

Depending on the feature you use, you may provide:

• A vehicle identification number (VIN).
• Asking price, mileage and the state where you are shopping.
• A trim or configuration choice when the VIN does not resolve it.
• Vehicles, priorities and a current-car choice for Compare Cars.
• An optional helpful/not-helpful response and optional feedback comment.

Asking price, mileage, shopping state, comparison priorities and current-car selections are used to produce the requested research or comparison. Car Advisor does not store those shopper inputs in its vehicle cache, analytics tables or operational-monitoring tables. An explicitly identified source trim may be stored with vehicle specifications. A shopper-selected trim is used to improve market-value research but is not stored as VIN-confirmed trim.

How VINs are handled

Car Advisor uses a VIN to identify and research a vehicle. A VIN may be stored in the vehicle specification cache and VIN search history, and may be sent to relevant vehicle-data providers when required to retrieve specifications. Admin activity displays masked VINs rather than displaying the complete value.

VIN is excluded from anonymous research analytics, feedback records, Compare monitoring and browser-error monitoring. Whether a VIN is treated as personal information can depend on context and applicable law.

First-party research analytics

Car Advisor generates a random anonymous session identifier and stores it in your browser's sessionStorage. It is intended to represent the current browser-tab session rather than a persistent advertising identity. It helps count anonymous sessions and associate research lifecycle events.

Research analytics may include whether research started, succeeded or failed; year, make and model when known; verdict and Deal Quality; whether a shopper-confirmed trim was used; and whether major research components were available. VIN, asking price, mileage and shopping state are not stored in these analytics. Car Advisor does not use this identifier to build an advertising profile.

Optional feedback

After successful research, you may optionally select Yes or No in response to “Was this research helpful?” and may add a comment of up to 500 characters. Feedback may be reviewed through protected Admin tools. Please do not include names, contact details, account information or other sensitive information in a comment.

Operational monitoring

Car Advisor records limited research and Compare lifecycle information and sanitized browser-error categories to understand availability and reliability. Application monitoring for Compare and browser errors excludes VIN, price, mileage, location, vehicle identity, shopper/session identifiers, IP and User-Agent fields, raw error text, request bodies, URLs and stack traces.

Hosting, database, network and uptime providers may independently process ordinary technical request metadata needed to provide and protect their services. Their handling of that information is governed by their own terms and practices.

Vehicle-data and service providers

Current research may involve:

• NHTSA and its vPIC service for VIN decoding, recalls, owner complaints and manufacturer communications.
• Vehicles.dev for vehicle specifications and market-value research.
• fueleconomy.gov and EPA data for efficiency and compatible vehicle configurations.
• Hosting, PostgreSQL database and externally configured uptime-monitoring infrastructure.

Car Advisor sends only the information needed for the requested lookup. For example, VIN is used for VIN-based specification research, while market-value research may use year, make, model, mileage, state and available trim or configuration information. Provider availability, coverage and data practices are outside Car Advisor's control.

Cookies and browser technologies

Car Advisor currently does not use application cookies for shopper tracking, advertising pixels, browser fingerprinting or third-party analytics SDKs. It uses sessionStorage for the first-party random research analytics identifier described above. The current service does not create a persistent cross-site advertising profile.

Retention

• Vehicle specification cache: retained until manually removed, corrected or superseded.
• VIN search history: retained for 90 days.
• Research attempts without feedback: retained for 90 days.
• Research attempts with feedback and their feedback: retained for one year.
• Compare attempts and sanitized browser-error events: retained for 30 days.

Cleanup runs in bounded batches and may take more than one cycle to remove all expired records. These beta retention periods may be adjusted as the service, operational needs and applicable requirements evolve. Vehicle cache rows are not automatically removed solely because of age.

Security

Car Advisor uses reasonable application safeguards, including restricted Admin access, limited monitoring fields and server-held provider credentials. No system or transmission method can be guaranteed perfectly secure.

Privacy questions and data requests

You may request access, correction or deletion where applicable. For a VIN-related request, providing the relevant VIN allows the operator to locate vehicle-cache and search-history records. Do not include unrelated personal or sensitive information.

Car Advisor does not maintain shopper accounts or collect names or email addresses with anonymous analytics. As a result, it may not be reasonably possible to locate a particular anonymous session or feedback record unless sufficient non-sensitive context is available. Car Advisor will not collect additional identity information merely to locate anonymous records.

Children

Car Advisor is a vehicle-research service and does not intentionally collect information from children. No minimum age is stated in this draft pending qualified legal review.

Sale and cross-context advertising

Car Advisor currently does not sell shopper information or use it for cross-context behavioral advertising. It does not currently operate active insurance, financing or vehicle-history referral integrations. This policy will be updated if those practices change.

Policy changes and legal review

This policy may change as Car Advisor evolves. Material updates will be posted with a revised date. Final wording, VIN treatment, retention periods, session-storage analytics, provider disclosures, children-related language, jurisdiction-specific requirements and future referral practices remain subject to qualified legal review. This draft is not legal advice.