Information processed by the service
Hosting infrastructure may process ordinary request information such as IP address, browser and device information, requested URL, timestamps, referring page, and operational error data. This information may appear in short-lived server, security, or deployment logs used to operate and protect the service.
Is This A Good Car? does not intentionally place complaint narratives, source payloads, filesystem paths, or application secrets in its operational logs.
Candidate-tool query parameters
The Should I Buy This Car tool places the selected year, make, model, mileage, and optional asking price in the page URL so the server can render the requested analysis. URLs may be recorded by browser history, hosting logs, analytics referrer rules, or someone with whom the URL is shared. Do not place a VIN, name, email address, or other personal information in these fields.
Mileage and asking price are used as vehicle-research context. They are not treated as identity information and are not sent as analytics event properties by Is This A Good Car?.
Optional analytics
If a valid Google Analytics 4 measurement ID is configured, Google Analytics scripts may load and receive limited interaction events such as a vehicle search, vehicle or guide view, research-link click, or candidate-tool submission. Is This A Good Car? does not send VINs, names, email addresses, exact location, mileage, asking price, or NHTSA complaint narratives in these events.
Google Analytics may use cookies or similar browser storage according to Google's own services and policies. When analytics is not configured, Is This A Good Car? loads no GA4 script and sets no analytics cookies of its own.
Public datasets and external links
Vehicle research is derived from public NHTSA records. Those records describe vehicles and submitted reports rather than Is This A Good Car? user accounts. Links to NHTSA and other external services are governed by the destination service's privacy practices.
Owner Experience submissions
The optional Owner Experience form collects catalog vehicle identity, relationship to the vehicle, likes, dislikes, would-buy-again choice, consent, originality confirmation, and a private email. It may also collect optional ownership duration, mileage, self-reported repairs, subjective category ratings, comments, and display name. Contributions begin as pending and may be reviewed, approved, rejected, flagged, retained, aggregated, or publicly displayed according to the consent presented at submission.
Email is required privately for moderation, follow-up, abuse prevention, and deletion requests. It is encrypted in storage and a keyed hash is used for duplicate detection. Email, moderation notes, consent internals, and abuse metadata are excluded from public queries, page markup, structured data, and analytics events. A short-lived keyed hash derived from request network information may be retained for basic rate limiting; the application does not intentionally persist the raw IP in its review tables.
Moderation, publication, and automated summaries
No submission is published automatically. Review text may be rejected or removed for prohibited content, privacy risk, suspected copying, abuse, or irrelevance. Approved contributions remain subjective and self-reported. Consent includes possible future aggregation and automated or AI-assisted summarization, but the current milestone does not run AI summarization or publish review structured data.
Retention, removal, and choices
Is This A Good Car? retains submitted review data while it is needed to operate Owner Experience, moderate abuse, honor the contributor's consent, and maintain the research corpus. A fixed retention period has not yet been adopted. To request deletion or correction, use the review contact address published when collection opens and provide the private email used to submit plus the submission reference. Identity must be verified before a moderator permanently deletes the review and associated moderation history. Hosting and analytics providers separately determine retention for their operational systems.
This MVP privacy language requires qualified legal review before review collection is promoted at material scale.
Questions and future updates
Is This A Good Car? may update this page as the product, providers, or legal requirements change. Material changes will be reflected by the updated date. No business address or legal entity is represented on this page.
Learn more about Is This A Good Car? or review the research methodology.