Privacy Policy

Information you provide to us. The Services do not require registration and have no account system. The information you can choose to provide while using the Services is limited to:

• Search queries and preferences — text you type into the search bar or filters, vehicle preferences you select in builder tools, and questions you ask the AI assistants;
• ZIP codes — if you enter one to localize results;
• Voice audio — if you choose to use a voice assistant feature, your microphone audio is captured for the duration of the session and processed to power the conversation (see the AI section below). Voice features are opt-in and require you to grant microphone access;
• Correspondence — anything you include if you email us.

Information automatically collected. Some information — such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or browser and device characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, country, approximate location, and information about how and when you use the Services. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of the Services (including rate limiting of our search and AI endpoints) and for internal analytics.

Approximate location. Some features (nearby listings, dealer matching, local pricing) use an approximate location derived from your IP address by our hosting provider. This is city-level at best and is used only to pre-fill a location you can override. We do not access your device’s GPS.

Sensitive information. We do not process sensitive personal information. Payment data: we do not sell anything on the Site and collect no payment data. Third-party sources: we do not collect personal information about you from third parties. (The vehicle listing data we display describes cars and dealerships, not our visitors.)

We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. Specifically:

• to deliver the search, research, and assistant features you request — e.g., running your search query against our listings index or answering a spoken question;
• to localize results when you provide or we infer an approximate location;
• to maintain the security and operation of the Services, including abuse prevention and per-IP rate limiting on costly endpoints;
• to evaluate and improve the Services, including debugging and identifying usage trends; and
• to comply with applicable legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing. We share information only with service providers who process it on our behalf to run the Services:

• Website hosting & analytics: Vercel (hosting, content delivery, IP-based approximate geolocation, and operational analytics);
• Search infrastructure: Typesense Cloud (our listings search index — your search parameters are sent to it to return results);
• Database hosting: Neon (vehicle and market data serving);
• AI service providers: Anthropic (interpreting natural-language search queries), OpenAI (voice assistant conversations and transcription), and ElevenLabs (voice assistant conversations) — see the AI section below;
• File storage / CDN: Vercel Blob (cached public documents such as manufacturer window stickers and stock vehicle images — no personal data).

We may also disclose information where required by law, to protect our rights, or in connection with a business transfer (merger, sale of assets, or acquisition).

We keep client-side storage minimal. We use browser local storage to remember interface preferences (such as your light/dark theme choice). We do not use third-party advertising cookies, cross-site tracking pixels, or social-media trackers. Our hosting provider may set operational cookies strictly necessary to serve and secure the Site. If you block cookies and local storage, the Site remains usable, though preferences will not persist.

Yes. Parts of the Services are powered by artificial intelligence (collectively, “AI Products”), provided through third-party AI service providers:

• Natural-language search: when you type a free-text search (for example, “red AWD truck under $30k”), the query text may be sent to Anthropic to be interpreted into structured filters. Only the query text is sent — no identifiers beyond what is technically necessary.
• Voice assistants: if you start a voice session, your microphone audio streams to OpenAI or ElevenLabs (depending on the feature) for speech recognition and response generation, and transcript snippets may be processed for display cleanup. Audio is processed to run the conversation; we do not use it to identify you.

Your inputs to AI Products are shared with and processed by these AI Service Providers under their own terms, solely to enable the feature. We do not use your queries or audio to train our own models. Do not share sensitive personal information with AI features.

We keep personal information only as long as necessary for the purposes set out in this notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. In practice: rate-limiting data is held transiently in memory; server logs and operational analytics are retained on our hosting provider’s standard rolling windows; and search/voice inputs are processed to serve your request and retained only in transient logs and short-lived caches. Because there are no accounts, we hold no user profiles to retain or delete.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process, including transport encryption (HTTPS) everywhere and server-side isolation of privileged credentials. However, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorized third parties will not be able to defeat our security. Transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk.

We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18 years of age. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from children under age 18, please contact us at privacy@vinspector.app.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights under applicable data protection laws, including the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information, and the right to withdraw consent to processing that relies on consent. You can exercise these rights by contacting us at privacy@vinspector.app. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws. Note that because the Services have no accounts, we typically cannot associate technical log data with a specific person; we will explain in our response if that limits what we can locate.

Voice features: you can withdraw consent to microphone processing at any time by ending the session or revoking microphone permission in your browser.

Most web browsers include a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) feature you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. No uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized, and as such we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals. California law requires us to disclose how we respond to DNT signals; because there is no standard, we do not respond to them at this time. (As noted above, we do not engage in cross-site tracking regardless of your DNT setting.)

If you are a resident of a US state with a comprehensive privacy law (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Virginia, and others), you may have the right to request access to and details about the personal information we maintain about you, correct inaccuracies, obtain a copy, or delete it, and the right to non-discrimination for exercising these rights.

Categories collected (past 12 months): Identifiers (IP address, online identifiers) and internet activity (interactions with the Services). We do not collect the other categories enumerated by California law (no names/contact details through the Site, no financial, biometric, precise geolocation, professional, education, or inference profiles), we do not sell or share personal information as defined under California law, and we do not use or disclose sensitive personal information.

To exercise your rights, email privacy@vinspector.app. We will need to verify your request; because we hold no account data, verification options may be limited. If we decline a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision, and if your appeal is denied you may contact your state attorney general.

California “Shine The Light”: we do not disclose personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes.

Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes, we may notify you by prominently posting a notice of such changes. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently.

If you have questions or comments about this notice, or wish to review, update, or delete personal information we may hold, email us at privacy@vinspector.app. Our Terms of Use are available at vinspector.app/terms.