Privacy policy

We don’t sell your information

Not your email address, not the cars in your Garage, not what you note about them, not the files in your Glovebox — not to anyone, at any price. We don’t share them with advertisers or data brokers, and nothing you keep in your account is used to target ads. What you store here is used for one thing: showing it back to you.

Server logs contain no IP addresses

Our CDN logs the URL, status, user agent and timing of each request, and the client IP field is deliberately excluded from the delivery. That is why our own traffic reports count requests and never “visitors”: we could not count visitors if we wanted to. Logs expire automatically after 120 days.

If you sign in

Signing in with Google, GitHub or Microsoft stores your name, email address, the provider's id for you, your plan, your API keys and per-day request counts against them. We also store, once, where you first came from — a short tag such as msads written at sign-up from a ?src= or utm_source parameter, so we can tell whether an advertisement produced a customer. It is recorded on the first visit only, never updated afterwards, never shared, and contains nothing about you.

If you use Recall Watch

We store the VINs and stock numbers you enter, the vehicle each VIN decodes to, and a dated log of every change to its open recalls. The log is what the product is for, and it is kept for three years so it can answer a question about a vehicle you have already sold. Delete a VIN and we record that it was removed and what was open at the time; delete your account and all of it goes.

If you use the Garage

We store the model years you add, a VIN if you add one, a nickname if you give one, and the date you last looked at each car — a snapshot of what was on file then, so the Garage can say what is new. If you note them down, we also keep what you tell us about each car: its trim and version, the state you buy fuel in, its mileage and the month it went into service, your service log and reminders, and which recalls you have had done. They are private to your account and used for nothing but showing them back to you. Adding a car turns on the recall email for it, sent to the email address your Google, GitHub or Microsoft sign-in gave us; the switch in the Garage and every email’s unsubscribe link turn it off, and removing the car stops it and deletes what you noted about it. If you turn on the weekly Garage email (off unless you do), we keep a note of what each one covered, so the next says only what is new; its unsubscribe link deletes that note. Delete your account and the Garage goes with it.

Sharing a car’s record. If you make a share link for a car, or one for your whole Garage, anyone who has that link can read the service record — the model year, its mileage, your service log and recall marks, and its VIN, costs and notes only while you leave those ticked — until you stop sharing, which kills the link at once. It never shows your name, your email address or a car’s nickname, the page tells search engines not to index it, and the link’s key is in the part of the address browsers do not send to servers.

The Glovebox. Receipts, photos and documents you add to a car are kept in private storage of our own, encrypted at rest, and can be opened only through your signed-in Garage, by links that expire after 15 minutes. They are never on a share link, we do not look through them, and nothing reads them except to show them back to you. Delete a file and it is deleted from storage at once — no old copies are kept; removing the car deletes its files; deleting your account deletes all of them. Each file is stored under a random name, never the one it had on your phone. Limits: 15 MB a file, 100 MB an account. We suggest leaving out registration and insurance cards, which carry your home address.

If you ask for recall or bulletin alerts

We store your email address and the vehicles or models you asked about, nothing else. A subscription from the public form is inactive until you confirm it (one turned on from your Garage is not, because your sign-in already verified the address), an unconfirmed one is deleted after seven days, and every message carries one-click unsubscribe that takes effect immediately. Recall alerts and weekly bulletin alerts are separate lists: joining one never joins you to the other.

What your browser stores

A signed-in session cookie; a small readable cookie holding your display name and plan so the header can render; and a few entries in local storage — the plan you clicked, the ?src= tag described above, the car you chose to add while you sign in, which cars are in your Garage (so a vehicle page can say so without asking the server), and your progress on today’s crossword. Google Analytics sets its own first-party cookies (_ga) to tell one visit from the next; see Analytics below for what it is and is not allowed to do. Our own cookies never leave this site; Google’s advertising cookies are described under Third parties.

Third parties

Advertising. Google AdSense and Mediavine (through its Grow script, faves.grow.me) serve the advertising on public reading pages. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a visitor’s prior visits to this website or other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet. You can opt out of personalized advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, and out of some other vendors’ use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info. How Google uses information from sites that use its services: policies.google.com.

Decoding a VIN. When you decode a VIN or paste a VIN list on the decoder, the fleet check or Recall Watch, your browser sends it straight to NHTSA’s public vPIC decoder (vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov). Decoding alone does not send it to WhichTrim; a VIN reaches us only when you sign in and save or watch it.

Affiliate partners may set a cookie when you click through to them. Payments are handled by Stripe and we never see a card number. Analytics. Public pages load Google Analytics so we can see which pages are read and which tools are used the same day rather than two days later in Search Console. It is configured with Google Signals and ad personalisation switched off, it is not loaded on the signed-in dashboard, and the events we send are names of things done (“a VIN was decoded”, “a comparison was run”) — never the VIN, the vehicle, the email or anything you typed. Opt out with Google’s browser add-on or any content blocker.

If you use the contact form

The contact form sends us one email containing your name if you give it, your email address, the topic you chose, your message and the page you came from. It goes to our own mailbox and nowhere else; we use it to reply, and keep it only as long as the conversation needs. To stop the form being used to flood that mailbox, the site keeps a one-way hash of the sending address for three days, which counts messages and cannot be turned back into the address. Your IP address is not recorded. Ask and we will delete the correspondence.

If you publish a garage in the Showroom

A garage you publish at whichtrim.com/g/ is public: its name, the region you chose (if any), each car you include with its trim and factory figures, and the photos, captions and modifications you add. It never shows your VIN, service log, email address, name, the nicknames or state from your private Garage, or your mileage. Each photo is sent to Amazon Rekognition, which checks it for us (is it a car, is it safe to publish, where are the plates and faces to blur) and keeps nothing; the photo is then re-made from its pixels, so its location and other hidden data never reach the page. Uploads that fail the check are deleted. Stopping the Showroom takes every page down at once, and deleting it deletes your photos. Reports from visitors reach us with the page they were about and nothing about the person reporting. See the Showroom terms.

Owner complaint text

Complaint narratives quoted on vehicle pages come from NHTSA's public filings. Before storage we remove whole sentences containing a VIN, phone number, email address or URL, and no full VIN from a complaint is ever stored or published — only the first nine characters, which identify the vehicle type and not the vehicle.

Questions or a deletion request: the contact form (choose “Privacy or a deletion request”), or privacy@whichtrim.com.