1. Who We Are

BuyCarCheck (buycarcheck.com) is a UK-based vehicle information service that provides free and paid vehicle history checks using data sourced from the DVLA and other authorised data providers. References to "we", "us", or "our" in this policy refer to BuyCarCheck.

2. What Data We Collect

Vehicle check queries

When you enter a vehicle registration number, we submit it to the DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service API to retrieve publicly available vehicle data. We do not store registration numbers you search.

Anonymous visit data

We collect anonymous page view data including: the page visited, approximate country and city (derived from your IP by our hosting provider — the IP itself is never stored), browser family, device type, operating system, referrer URL (origin and path only, query strings stripped), session duration, and scroll depth. This data cannot be used to identify you.

Payment data

If you purchase a full vehicle report, payment is handled entirely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.

3. Cookies & Session Storage

We do not use tracking cookies. Our visit tracker uses browser sessionStorage to assign a temporary anonymous session ID that is automatically cleared when you close your browser tab. No persistent identifiers are written to your device.

4. How We Use Your Data

To return vehicle information in response to your query
To understand which pages are most visited and improve the service
To detect and block automated bot traffic
To process payments via Stripe for premium reports

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with third parties for marketing purposes.

5. Data Retention

Anonymous visit records are retained for up to 24 months for analytics purposes, after which they are deleted. Payment records are retained by Stripe in accordance with their own privacy policy.

6. Your Rights (UK GDPR)

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

Access the personal data we hold about you
Request correction or deletion of your data
Object to processing of your data
Lodge a complaint with the ICO (ico.org.uk)

Because our visit tracking is fully anonymous, we are generally unable to identify records belonging to a specific individual. For payment-related data requests, please also contact Stripe directly.

7. Third-Party Services

DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service — vehicle data provider
Stripe — payment processing
Vercel — hosting and geo-IP resolution
Supabase — anonymous analytics database

8. Contact

For privacy-related queries, please email privacy@buycarcheck.com.

Privacy Policy