Privacy policy

Gearboxd is a community for car and motorcycle enthusiasts. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it. We are the data controller for the personal data described here under UK GDPR.

What we collect

• Your account. Email address, username, and anything you choose to add — display name, bio, avatar, interests, favourite marques. If you sign in with Google we receive your email, name and profile picture from them; we never receive your password.
• What you put in. Your garage entries, ratings, reviews, photos, posts, comments, lists, clubs and events.
• How you found us. If you sign up with a promo code from a printed card, we record which batch it came from so we know which events are worth attending. We also record page views against a first-party cookie so we can measure how many visitors become members.
• Technical data. IP address and browser information, handled by our hosting and database providers as part of serving the site and keeping it secure.

Why we are allowed to use it

• Contract — running your account and showing you the service you signed up for.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the platform safe and free of abuse, measuring whether it works, and preventing fraud. We have weighed your interests against ours in each case, and you can object (see Your rights).
• Consent — for non-essential cookies and for marketing email, which you can withdraw at any time.

Number plates

We don't record them. Gearboxd has no registration field, our photo recognition is instructed never to transcribe a plate, and the plate records the service previously held have been deleted. A car in someone's garage is identified by their own entry for it, which carries no information about who owns it.

Automated processing

Photos and text you submit are checked by an automated moderation system before publication, and photos may be analysed to suggest which vehicle they show. These systems can block a submission. No decision here has a legal or similarly significant effect on you, and a human reviews anything that is flagged. Content is sent to Anthropic for this processing and is not used to train their models.

Who else sees your data

• Supabase — database, authentication and file storage.
• Vercel — hosting.
• Anthropic — content moderation and vehicle identification.
• Sentry — error reporting, configured not to send personal data.
• Google AdSense — advertising, only with your consent. See Advertising below.
• Stripe — payments, if you subscribe. Stripe receives your email address and card details; we never see or store a card number.
• Our email provider — sending account emails.

We do not sell your data. We do show adverts through Google AdSense, which is a third party that sets its own cookies and may use them to choose and measure adverts — see Advertising below.

Advertising

Adverts are served by Google AdSense. Where you consent to advertising cookies, Google may set cookies in your browser and use them, together with data it already holds, to select adverts and measure whether they worked. Google acts as an independent controller for that processing; what it does with the data is governed by Google's policy for partner sites.

If you decline advertising cookies, the AdSense tag is not loaded at all — we do not load it and then ask it to behave. You may still see adverts we run ourselves, which set no cookies and involve no third party.

Premium removes adverts entirely. Subscribers get no AdSense tag, no advertising cookies, and no advert slots.

How long we keep it

Your account and its content stay until you delete them. Deleting your account removes your profile, garage, posts and photos. Analytics events are kept for two years; error reports for 90 days. We may keep a minimal record of a deleted account where we need it to prevent abuse.

Your rights

You can request a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict it. Most of this you can do yourself in Settings; for anything else, email privacy@gearboxd.co.uk. If you are not happy with our response you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Contact

General: hello@gearboxd.co.uk. Privacy and data requests: privacy@gearboxd.co.uk.