Your computer has a sticker with its serial number. So do cars, but the automotive industry standardized these serial numbers across manufacturers. The VIN is designed to be publicly visible (look at the bottom of your windshield on the driver’s side) and is printed or etched in many places in your car. If you ever bought a vehicle history report or went on a dealership website, you have probably seen and entered many VINs before. To know more about the VIN and how to find it, watch our tutorial.

Not by itself, only if associated with other information that can identify you. This is the conclusion reached in the European Union under GDPR (arguably the toughest privacy regulation in the world).

If you think about it, it makes sense: a VIN is like an address. Your address, associated with you, is clearly personal information… but if you read street signs and glance at numbers on mailboxes and doors, you are not collecting personal information: you simply know where you are.

That said, we would not ask you for your VIN unless it was really necessary, and we are thoughtful about minimizing the ability to reconduct the VIN to you (e.g. we mask your full IP address, we do not sell or share search results with other companies) unless you ask us to, e.g., so we can act for free as your agent and contact your leasing company so they protect your specific car as you direct us to.

By asking for the VIN upfront we can both deliver better quality information and make it easier for you to act on it. There is a reason why you can’t get an insurance quote, a vehicle valuation, or a vehicle history report without entering a VIN. Similarly, we decode that VIN beyond its make, model, and year: the VIN helps us understand what features and technologies may be present in your vehicle (increasing the accuracy of our Vehicle Privacy Labels) and being off by just one digit would provide wrong results in our Vehicle Privacy History.

Many visitors of our website also choose to take advantage of the many free protections we offer (e.g. requesting that your auto insurance and auto finance companies protect the data in your car in various scenarios). None of those companies would be able to do anything to improve your data privacy and security if they could not confirm your VIN.

We are well aware of the industry quip – “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product”… but consider these two facts: (1) we are fortunate enough that a growing number of automotive businesses (dealerships, fleets, etc.) pay for our B2B services, hence we don’t need to monetize consumers or their traffic, and (2) we believe that sunshine is the best disinfectant, hence raising awareness with privacy-minded consumers of the privacy challenges posed by vehicles can hopefully motivate more companies to improve their practices. Privacy4Cars’ mission is “Driving Privacy”: by providing free services we want to make it easier for you and your fellow humans who use cars to visit medical offices, take kids to school, connect their phones (but don’t text and drive!), head to a place of worship with their family, and live life… in a more privacy-caring world.

We understand some Privacy Badger users (which we love!) are told there is a tracker. You likely see these trackers: hCapcha (stops spam registrations and login attempts on our site), and cdnjs.cloudfare and cdn.jsdeliver.net (both accelerate your website content). We do not use trackers, and in fact, we encourage you to use a more private browser (i.e. not Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Apple Safari) and to turn on Global Privacy Control to universally opt out of tracking while you browse the web.

The reason why there is no cookie banner on our site is because we have no adware (cookies, pixels, etc.). Did we mention we are truly free and we don’t believe you should be “paying with your data”?

Our lawyers will tell you to read our privacy policy, but in short, the main information we capture is the VIN, for the reasons explained above, and a partial IP, which is very uncommon (almost all websites log full IPs, but did we mention we are thoughtful about privacy?). The partial IP is used to determine your rough geography, which has two main purposes: (a) show more accurate information (e.g. the Vehicle Privacy Report for a specific vehicle dramatically changes if you are in the US, Canada, Europe, or another jurisdiction. just toggle the flag at the top of the report and see for yourself); and (b) show you which local auto dealerships are taking a better stance for privacy, so you can vote with your wallet if you are in the market for a car.

If you choose to request our free services, you’ll fill forms, so we collect that info too, but we use it only to fulfill the tasks you appointed us to do.

You are already here, and that’s a great start. Our top three suggestions are:

1. Take advantage of our free services for the cars you own or recently traded. You will raise protections for yourself and others by telling auto finance, insurance, and manufacturing companies you want them to improve their privacy practices.
2. If you are in the market for a car, please consider visiting the dealerships that support us: they are taking privacy above and beyond their competitors. If you go somewhere else, ask them for written evidence if they claim they will protect your data (sadly ~80% of those promises are not fulfilled) and double check here what they claimed would happen to your data if you buy a car from them (sadly more than 90% of salespeople will say things that do not reflect reality). If you could tell them to look into Privacy4Cars for fair and transparent disclosures and to protect data in cars on their lot we’d love that!
3. Tell others. Since we don’t have consumer revenues, we also have no marketing budget. We had over 100,000 visits on Vehicle Privacy Report in the first 6 months entirely through word of mouth… but a lot more are needed if we want to make a dent in automotive privacy. Please help us in spreading the word.