Privacy Policy

AutoShop serves two sides of the same transaction, and our role differs between them:

• Drivers — vehicle owners with an AutoShop account. We handle your information as described here.
• Shops and their staff — independent repair businesses. For their own business records — their customer list, their invoices, their service history — the shop decides how that information is used and we process it on their behalf. If you were a customer of a shop, that shop’s own privacy practices apply to its copy of your records alongside this policy.

Account and identity. Name, email address, phone number and whether each is verified, profile photo, bio and any social links you add, and your role within an organisation. If you sign in with Apple, Google or GitHub, we receive the basic profile that provider returns. Passwords are stored only as a one-way hash. Staff point-of-sale PINs are stored encrypted.

Vehicles. VIN, licence plate and state, make, model, year, trim, colour, mileage, purchase date, warranty expiry, an insurance policy reference if you add one, tyre size, photos and your free-text notes.

Service and transactions. Appointments, estimates and quotes, inspection results and their photos, invoices and line items, amounts paid, tips, refunds, and the identifiers Stripe gives each payment.

Communications. Messages between drivers and shops, reviews you write, and a log of the notifications we send you — including the subject and body of the message, where it was sent, and whether it was opened or clicked.

Consent records. When you opt in or out of marketing from a shop, we record what you chose, when, through what, and the IP address it came from — deliberately, because it is the evidence that the choice was yours.

Device and technical. IP address, browser user agent, session records, and mobile push tokens. Administrative actions by our staff are logged with the actor’s email, IP and user agent.

Location. Shop addresses and coordinates are stored. On mobile, if you allow it, your device location is used to sort nearby shops — we do not store a history of your location.

What we never store: card numbers, expiry dates, CVCs, or bank account details. Those go directly to Stripe. We keep only Stripe’s references and the amounts.

Most of it comes from you. The rest comes from:

• A shop, about its customer. A shop can create a customer and vehicle record for someone who has never used AutoShop — for a walk-in, or to record work it performed. That record exists before that person has any account. If you later sign up with the same phone number or email, the record becomes yours to see and control. See retention for how long an unclaimed record is kept.
• Vehicle data providers. When you enter a VIN or a licence plate we send it to a lookup service to decode the vehicle’s specification.
• Stripe, for payment status, payout status and subscription state.

• To run the service — accounts, bookings, estimates, invoices, payments and payouts.
• To send transactional messages you asked for: booking confirmations, reminders, estimate approvals, receipts, and security notices such as verification and password resets.
• To let drivers and shops communicate about the work.
• To keep the service safe — authentication, rate limiting, fraud and abuse prevention, and audit logging of administrative actions.
• To fix and improve the product, using aggregate usage analytics and error reports.
• To meet legal, tax and accounting obligations, and to enforce our terms.
• To send marketing, only where you have opted in — and you can opt out at any time.

Payments are processed by Stripe. When you pay, your card details go directly to Stripe and are handled under Stripe’s privacy policy. We never see or store them.

Shops that accept payments complete Stripe’s onboarding. Stripe collects the identity and business verification information the law requires of it, directly — including government identifiers. That information goes to Stripe, not to us; we receive only the resulting account status.

We share information with the providers below, only as needed to run the service. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety or our rights, or to a buyer if the business is sold — in which case this policy continues to apply until you are told otherwise.

These are off by default. A shop that enables one is directing us to send data to it:

• QuickBooks Online (Intuit) — invoices, customers, payments, refunds and tips are synced to the shop’s accounting file.
• CARFAX — service records (VIN, plate, mileage, service description, dates, and the shop’s own details) are reported to a vehicle history database, and plate or VIN lookups may be sent to it. A vehicle’s service history becoming part of its permanent record is the point of this integration.

Booking with a shop shares with it what it needs to do the work: your name, contact details, vehicle details, service history at that shop, and your messages with it.

A shop’s listing — name, address, hours, services, prices, photos and reviews — is public. Reviews you write are published with the name on your profile.

Our staff can access accounts to provide support and, in limited cases, sign in as a user to reproduce a problem. Those actions are recorded in an audit log.

We use cookies to keep you signed in and to keep the service secure. These are necessary — the service cannot work without them.

We also use analytics and error monitoring to understand how the product is used and when it breaks. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not run third-party ad trackers.

We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes. No mobile information — not your phone number, and not the consent you gave to be texted — is sold, rented, or shared with third parties or affiliates for their own marketing or promotional purposes. The only parties that receive it are the providers that carry the message for us (Knock, and the SMS carrier it sends through, Twilio), which may use it solely to deliver the message we asked them to deliver. Your text-messaging consent is never included in anything we share for any other purpose, and it is never passed to a shop for its own list.

What we text, and how often. Every text we send is transactional — triggered by something you did, or by a shop you are doing business with. Today that is the whole list:

• a verification code, one each time you ask for one;
• a security notice when the email address or phone number on your account changes;
• confirmation that an appointment has been booked;
• an estimate from a shop, when there is one to approve;
• a vehicle inspection report, when a shop publishes one.

What we keep. Your mobile number, whether you have verified it, a record of when and where you agreed to receive texts or withdrew that agreement, and a log of the texts we sent you. We use them only to send the messages above, to honour STOP, and to show that you agreed.

Message frequency varies, because each of those is an event and not a subscription. In practice, a repair visit produces roughly one to four messages, plus one code each time you sign in. There are no recurring texts and no promotional texts; if that ever changes it will require your opt-in first, as described under marketing.

Message and data rates may apply. Your mobile carrier may charge you for messages you send or receive. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

Stopping them. Reply STOP to any text to stop receiving them, or HELP to get help. You can also change what we send from your notification settings, or email [email protected]. Stopping texts does not close your account, and we will still email you what you need — receipts, security notices. It does mean verification codes stop arriving by text, so sign in with your email or password instead.

Transactional messages — a booking confirmation, a reminder, a receipt, a security alert — are part of the service and are not marketing. Promotional messages from a shop require your opt-in. You can withdraw it at any time, from your notification settings or by replying STOP to a text or using the unsubscribe link in an email. We keep a record of the opt-out itself so it can be honoured.

We keep your information while your account is open and for as long as we need it afterwards for the purposes described here. Specifically:

• Records a shop created for a customer who never signed up are kept for 180 days of inactivity and then archived. They are not erased, because the shop’s record of work it performed on a vehicle is also the shop’s own business and tax record.
• Invoices, payments and refunds are retained for the period tax and accounting rules require.
• Consent records are retained as evidence of an opt-in or opt-out; withdrawing consent is recorded rather than deleted.
• Security and administrative audit logs are retained for security purposes; the actor reference is disconnected when an account is deleted.
• Expired sessions and verification tokens are deleted automatically each day.

When an account is deleted, records that belong to it alone — sessions, sign-in methods, vehicles, contact methods, push tokens, API keys — are removed.

You can review and correct most of your information directly in the product. For anything else — a copy of your data, deletion of your account, or a question about how it is used — email [email protected] and we will respond within the time the applicable law allows.

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a portable copy of your information, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to complain to your data protection authority. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.

Where a shop is the one deciding how your information is used — its own customer records — we will pass your request to that shop, or you can contact it directly.

AutoShop is not intended for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. An account holder must be 18 or older. An adult may add a minor to a family group and is responsible for the information they add about them. If you believe a child has given us information directly, contact [email protected] and we will delete it.

We protect information in transit and at rest, hash passwords, encrypt stored staff PINs and third-party access tokens, scope every request to the organisation it belongs to, support two-factor authentication, and log administrative access. No system is perfectly secure, but if a breach affects you we will notify you as the law requires.

We and our providers process information in the United States. If you use AutoShop from elsewhere, you are sending your information to the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those where you live.

We will update this policy as the product changes. When a change is material we will give notice before it takes effect. The date at the top reflects the current version.

[email protected]

See also our Terms of Service.