Your data, our manners,
and what we promise not to do with it.

Different bits of the site need different bits of you. We try to ask for the least possible at any moment, which is more than can be said for most things in modern life.

• Account information. Your username, email address, hashed password, and any profile details you choose to add. We need this to recognise you when you come back and to stop somebody else pretending to be you.
• Vehicle and project content. The photos, notes, build records, parts lists, and stories you upload to the Vault, the Garage, or your profile. This belongs to you. We hold it so you and the people you choose can see it.
• Commerce information. Shipping addresses, order history, and the limited card details Stripe hands back to us. We never see your full card number, because frankly we do not want to.
• Usage information. Which pages you visit, which stories you read all the way through, which products people click but never buy. This tells us what is working and what is so dull that nobody finished it.
• Device information. Browser type, operating system, IP address, rough location based on that IP. Standard stuff that the internet itself sends to every server you talk to.
• Communications. Anything you send us by email, contact form, or feedback widget, so we can actually reply.

We process your personal data on one of the lawful bases the GDPR provides. The plain translation of those bases is roughly as follows.

• To run the service. Logging you in, showing you your own garage, sending the order you paid for, processing returns. This is contract performance.
• To keep the service upright. Spotting fraud, blocking abuse, fixing bugs, paying tax, keeping the lights on. This is our legitimate interest in not being out of business by Tuesday.
• To make the service better. Looking at aggregate patterns so we know which stories land, which products people actually want, and which features were a vanity project. Also legitimate interest.
• To talk to you. Sending you the newsletter you asked for, the receipts you should keep, and the occasional update about something we have built. Marketing only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
• To obey the law. Responding to a court order, a tax authority, or any other official who has the right to ask. We will tell you when we are allowed to.

Almost nobody, and certainly nobody you have not heard of. We do not sell your data, we do not rent it, and we do not pass it to advertising networks so they can pursue you across the internet with shoes you already bought.

We do rely on a small set of trusted suppliers to do the bits we cannot do ourselves. Stripe handles payments. Cloudinary stores and serves images. Postmark and similar send transactional email. Our hosting provider runs the servers. Each of them has a written data-processing agreement with us, can only use your data on our instructions, and is bound to the same standards we are. A current list is available on request.

Account data lives as long as your account does, plus a short tail in case you change your mind about deleting it. Order records have to be kept for seven years for tax reasons, which is not our rule but everybody's. Usage logs are kept in identifiable form for ninety days and then either deleted or aggregated beyond recognition.

Our servers are in the European Union and the United States. When data moves between the two it does so under Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission, which is the boring document version of a sealed diplomatic pouch.

You can ask us, at any time, to do any of the following. We will respond within a month, free of charge, unless your request is genuinely excessive (one chap once asked for everything, in print, in Comic Sans).

• Tell you what personal data we hold about you and give you a copy.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete it, where we are not required by law to keep it.
• Restrict how we use it while a question is being resolved.
• Object to processing we have based on legitimate interest.
• Receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format.
• Withdraw any consent you have previously given.
• Complain to your local supervisory authority if you think we have got it wrong.

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored in readable form. Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS. Admin access is role-gated, logged, and reviewed. We are, however, a small team running on the open internet, so we will not pretend we are unhackable. If something does go wrong we will tell you, promptly, in plain language, with whatever advice is actually useful.

The service is not intended for anyone under the age of sixteen. Please come back when you are older, ideally with a project car of your own.

We may update this page as the service evolves. The "last updated" date at the top will change when we do, and for anything material we will tell you by email before it takes effect. We will not change it quietly and hope you do not notice.

Questions, complaints, requests, corrections, or simply a confused email about cookies all go to privacy@autodyssey.com. A real human reads it.