Privacy notice

This covers cogged.co.uk, the website. The Cogged app is not released yet; what it will do with your data is described at the bottom so you can judge it before you ever install anything.

Who we are

Cogged is a product of No Fear Tech Ltd, a company registered in England. For anything on this page, including requests to see or delete your data, write to hello@cogged.co.uk. If you are not satisfied with how we handle it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

What this website collects

Nothing at all until you say yes. There is no contact form, no account, no newsletter signup and no advertising or cross-site tracking anywhere on this site.

We would like to use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages people actually read. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google a record of the pages you view, along with approximate location (usually city level, from your IP address) and your device and browser type.

It does not run until you accept it. Google’s consent signals are set to denied in the page itself, before any Google code loads, and are only lifted if you press Accept on the banner. If you press Decline, or simply ignore the banner, no analytics cookies are set and no page views are sent.

Emailing us

If you email hello@cogged.co.uk we keep the message so we can reply and, if you have asked about early access, so we can tell you when there is something to try. We do not add you to any marketing list. Ask us to delete it and we will.

Legal basis

Analytics runs on consent, under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and the UK GDPR — which is why it is opt-in and why declining is a single click, exactly as easy as accepting. Email correspondence is handled under legitimate interests: you wrote to us and expect an answer.

Who else sees it

Google, as the analytics processor, if and only if you accepted. Our hosting provider processes the request logs needed to serve the page. We do not sell data, and there is nobody else in the chain.

How long we keep it

Analytics data is retained for 14 months by Google and then deleted. Emails are kept while the conversation is live and for up to two years afterwards.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to us holding it at all. One email is enough, and there is no charge.

If you look up a registration

There is a number plate on the home page you can type your registration into. It is optional — the rest of the site works without it — and this is exactly what happens when you use it.

Your registration goes to us and then to DVLA, and nowhere else. We send it to the DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service, which returns the make, colour, fuel, engine size, and the tax and MOT status. We show you that and we are finished with it.

We do not store it. Not in a database, not in a log file, not in a session. This website has no database at all, and the lookup does not add one. Your registration exists in our server’s memory for the second or so it takes to ask DVLA, and then it is gone.

It never appears in the web address. The lookup is sent in the body of a request rather than in the address bar, which means it does not reach your browser history, our hosting provider’s request logs, or Google Analytics — all of which record the address of every page you visit. This is a deliberate design choice and it is the reason you cannot bookmark or share a result.

Our lawful basis is your request: you typed it in to get an answer, and we use it only to get you that answer. DVLA is a separate controller for what it does with the enquiry, under its own terms.

The app, when it exists

The Cogged app is not available yet, and none of the following is running today. It is here because these are commitments we would rather be held to publicly than write after the fact:

Your registration is personal data. A number plate identifies a registered keeper, so it will be stored encrypted and indexed only by a one-way hash. It will not appear in a URL, a query string, or a log file in readable form.

Audio is not kept. Speech is streamed to be understood and then discarded — with one deliberate exception. The words you say when confirming a safety warning are stored, because they are the record that the warning was given and answered. That record is written once and never edited.

The app will measure usage with Firebase Analytics, which is Google Analytics. An earlier version of this page said the app would not use Google Analytics. That was wrong, and worth correcting plainly rather than quietly: Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics under a different name, and its data lands in a Google property. What is true, and what we will hold to, is that it is a completely separate property from this website’s, and the two are never joined up.

The limits on it are specific rather than reassuring. It is off until you turn it on, and nothing is collected while we are waiting for your answer. We never set a user identifier, so nothing measured can be tied back to you or to a visit to this site. Advertising signals and the advertising identifier are switched off explicitly rather than left at their defaults, which are on.

And it carries no free text at all. Every measurement is a count, a fixed label we chose in advance, or an identifier of a vehicle model — a fastener, a job, an engine code. Your registration, your VIN and anything you said out loud cannot be included, because the app has no way to express them: the list of things it may record is fixed in the code, and a second check strips anything plate-shaped or sentence-shaped before it leaves the phone.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we will change this page and move the date at the top on the same day — not afterwards.