Legal

Privacy notice

CarIntel holds information about stolen vehicles, and sometimes about the people around them. This explains what we keep, who sees it, and how to get it removed.

Who is responsible

CarIntel is the data controller for everything described here. We are a community service and are not a police force or any part of one. Contact us at contact@carintel.app.

What we hold

Summary
Theft reports — make, model, registration, colour, location, date
Public. Anyone, without an account.
Kept indefinitely while the register is running.
Evidence — footage and photos sent in by the public
CarIntel administrators only.
Evidence is deleted 90 days after the related report is marked recovered, or 12 months after it was uploaded, whichever comes first.
Submitter details — optional email, and the IP address used
CarIntel administrators only.
Deleted with the evidence it belongs to.
Account — name, email, postcode, alert settings
Only you. Never shown on the register.
Until you ask us to delete your account.
Sightings — time and map location you report
The vehicle's owner and administrators.
Kept with the related report.

Reports are public by design

A stolen vehicle nobody can look up is a stolen vehicle nobody can spot. Everything in a theft report — including the registration — is visible to anyone, and is indexed by search engines.

Your name and email are not attached to a report publicly. Only supply the postcode a vehicle was taken from, never a full home address.

Evidence and the people in it

Footage of a street can show people who have nothing to do with a theft and never agreed to being filmed. We treat it accordingly: files are stored privately, are never published on the register, and are only ever opened through a link that expires after 15 minutes.

Evidence is deleted 90 days after the related report is marked recovered, or 12 months after it was uploaded, whichever comes first.

Deletion removes both the file and our record of it. It is not recoverable afterwards.

Why we are allowed to hold it

We rely on legitimate interests: recovering stolen vehicles and helping people protect their property. We have weighed that against the privacy of people who may appear in submitted footage, which is why evidence is private, access-controlled, and deleted on a schedule rather than kept.

Where you give us an email address for contact about footage, that is on the basis of your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time by asking us to delete the submission.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email contact@carintel.app and we will respond within one month.

To have footage you submitted removed, email us with a rough description and the date you sent it. If you gave an email address at upload, send it from that address so we can match the submission.

If you appear in footage someone else submitted, tell us where and roughly when it was recorded. We will review it and delete it if you are identifiable and it is not needed.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Who we share it with

We do not sell data and there is no commercial product behind CarIntel. Reports are public, so anyone can read them. Evidence is shared only with CarIntel administrators, and with the police if they ask in connection with an investigation.

We use third parties to run the service: Clerk for sign-in, Neon for the database, Vercel for hosting and file storage, Resend for email, and OpenAI to read details out of screenshots submitted by administrators.

Changes

If we change what we collect or how long we keep it, we will update this page. Material changes will be noted on the about page.

This notice has not had legal review

It was written to describe accurately what the service does. Before relying on it, have someone qualified check it against your actual obligations — particularly the lawful-basis reasoning and whether a legitimate interests assessment should be recorded.