Privacy Policy

The short version. Anky holds your email address, what you have listed, what you have swiped, and what you have said to other people through it. The Anky app on iPhone has no advertising network, no analytics service and no tracking of you across other apps or websites — none of that is built into it at all. This website and the browser version of Anky at app.ankycar.com use one set of marketing cookies, LinkedIn's, and only if you accept them there (section 12). Your data is stored in the United Kingdom. You can ask for a copy of it, or ask us to delete it, at any time.

01Who we are

Anky is a car marketplace app for the United Kingdom. It is run by Nicholas Christoforou, a sole trader trading as "Anky", of BA 704, Nexus Connect, Front Street, Esh, Durham DH7 9QR.

For the purposes of UK data protection law we are the data controller for the information described here. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration reference ZC250633, and the data protection fee is paid. You can check that for yourself on the ICO's public register of fee payers.

You can reach us at help@ankycar.com.

02What we collect, and why

Everything below is either something you typed, something you tapped, or something a public record told us about a number plate you gave us. We do not buy data about you from anybody.

What	Examples	Why	Our lawful basis
Your account	Email address, a securely hashed password, when you signed in, and which version of the terms you agreed to when you did	To give you an account and let you back into it	Performance of our contract with you
Your profile	Display name, the colour you choose for your initials, the town or postcode you give	So other people know who they are talking to, and so we can show distances	Performance of our contract with you
Cars you list	Make, model, year, price, mileage, colour, your description and photos, the location you give, and the phone number you choose to publish	To publish your advert. Your listing is public inside the app	Performance of our contract with you
Number plates you look up	The registration you type, and the MOT record the DVSA returns for it	To fill in a listing for you and to show buyers a real MOT history. We keep a log of who looked up what, to stop the feature being abused	Performance of our contract, and our legitimate interest in preventing abuse
What you swipe	Which cars you liked or passed, and in what order	To stop showing you cars you have already judged, and to learn what you like	Performance of our contract with you
What you search for	Budget, distance, fuel, body style, saved searches	To filter the cars you are shown, and to tell you when a saved search has something new	Performance of our contract with you
Your driving details	Only if you add them: your year of birth, how many years since you passed your test, the first half of the postcode where the car would be kept (never the whole postcode), and your years of no-claims discount — and, if you choose to answer, whether you would pay monthly, whether you would have a black box fitted, and how many insurance claims you have made in the last five years. We do not ask for your full date of birth, your address, your gender, or anything about points or convictions	To estimate what insurance on each car might cost you, and to apply the insurance budget you set. Only you can see them: they are not shown to sellers or to our moderators, not sent to any insurer or comparison site, and not sent to the service that writes Anky’s recommendations. Change or remove them at any time on your profile	Performance of our contract with you
Messages and offers	What you write to a buyer or seller, any offer you make, and when each side last read the conversation	To deliver the message, and so both sides have a record of what was agreed	Performance of our contract with you
Reports and blocks	What you reported, the reason you chose, anything you wrote, and who you have blocked	To look into it, and to keep the person you blocked away from you	Our legitimate interest in keeping the app safe, and our legal obligations

What we do not collect

The Anky app on iPhone contains no advertising SDK, no analytics service, no crash-reporting service and no third-party tracking of any kind. We do not track you across other apps or websites, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not sell or rent your information to anyone. The one exception is LinkedIn's marketing cookies on this website and on the browser version of Anky at app.ankycar.com, and only if you accept them there — see section 12. We never see your payment card details — see section 5.

03Your location and your photos

Anky asks your phone for two things, and only when you use the feature that needs them. You can refuse either, and change your mind later in your phone's settings; the app keeps working without them, it is just less useful.

Location, while you are using the app. Used to show how far each car is from you and to put nearer cars first. We store the approximate point you searched from so your filters survive between sessions. We do not track your location in the background.
Your photo library. Used only so you can choose pictures to attach to a car you are selling. Anky reads the pictures you pick and nothing else; it does not ask for camera or microphone access at all.

A photograph can carry the place it was taken inside the file — on a car photographed on the driveway, that is the seller's home. Every photograph you attach is re-encoded on your phone before it is uploaded, which discards that block, so the copy we hold does not carry it. You should still only publish pictures you are happy for the public to see.

Every photograph on a live listing is checked automatically. Shortly after a car goes up, its pictures are sent to Google's Cloud Vision service, which tells us two things: whether a picture contains adult or violent content, and whether it looks like a photograph of a vehicle at all. Nothing about you goes with them — not your name, your email address or your account — only the picture itself, which is already public on the listing.

If a picture fails either test the advert comes down to a draft and a person looks at it. Nothing is deleted automatically and no account is closed by a machine. If you think we have got it wrong, email help@ankycar.com and a person will check it — see section 8 for your right to object to automated processing.

04How Anky decides what to show you

Anky learns from your swipes. Every like and pass adjusts a private profile of the sorts of car you seem to be drawn to — body shapes, ages, price bands, makes — and cars are ordered by how well they match it, with your filters and your distance applied on top. Recent swipes count for more than old ones.

This is automated, but it only decides the order of a list of cars. It has no effect on your rights, your money or anything outside the app, and no decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you is made automatically. You can wipe the profile at any time using Reset my swipes on your profile screen, which deletes your swipe history and clears the preferences it was built from.

Anky's pick works differently, and it does leave Anky. When you ask for a pick, a short written description of the sorts of car you have liked and passed on goes, together with the shortlist being chosen between, to Anthropic — whose model picks one and says why. Your name, your email address and your location are not part of it; the only thing it is told about where you are is whether distances are known at all. See section 5.

05Who else sees it

Other people using Anky

A car you list is public inside the app: its details, your photos, your description, the postcode area it is in — the first part only, such as CR0, never your full postcode — and the phone number if you chose to publish one. Buyers only receive a seller's phone number once the seller has replied to them.

What a buyer sees about you

On each of your adverts, anyone browsing sees your first name and your initials on the colour you picked, and can open a short card about you: how many cars you have on Anky now, how many you have sold on Anky, the postcode area you are in, and the month you joined. There is a button there to report you to us. Your full display name is shown to anyone you are in a conversation with, as it always has been.

Nobody is ever shown your exact address or what you have swiped. Your likes and passes are yours: they are used to order the cars you are shown and they are never displayed to another person, on that card or anywhere else. Your email address is never shown to another member either — with one exception, which you choose, and which is set out immediately below.

When you enquire with a dealership

Some cars on Anky belong to a dealership rather than a private seller. A dealership has no inbox in the app, so instead of messaging them you fill in a short form: your first name, your last name, your email address, a phone number if you want to give one, and your message.

We email all of that to that dealership, along with which car you are asking about. Your email address is set as the reply address, so when they answer, their reply goes straight to you and does not come back through Anky. This is the only time Anky gives your contact details to anybody else, it only happens when you press the button, and the screen says so before you do.

From that point the dealership holds your details and is responsible for them under its own privacy policy, not this one. We keep a copy of the enquiry so that we can tell whether it was delivered and send it again if it was not; it is deleted on the same schedule as the rest of your account data (section 7), and deleting your account deletes it.

You do not have to use the form. A dealership’s advert shows where the car is, and you are free to find and contact the business yourself instead.

Companies that process data for us

These are the only third parties involved, and each is bound to use the data only for what we ask.

Who	What they do	What reaches them
Supabase	Hosts the database, the accounts and the photographs	Everything in section 2. Stored in London (UK)
Stripe	Takes payment for a listing fee	Your card details go to Stripe directly and never reach us. We receive only whether the payment succeeded and Stripe's reference for it — we never see or store any part of your card number
DVSA	The UK government's MOT History service	A number plate you type in. The DVSA is a separate controller for its own records
postcodes.io	Turns a postcode or town into a map point	The postcode or town name you type. No account information
Google Cloud Vision	Checks a listing's photographs for adult or violent content, and whether they show a vehicle	The photograph, which is already public on the listing. Nothing identifying you. Google's documentation states these requests are processed in memory and not kept, and that the content is not used to train its models
Anthropic	Four things: powers Anky's pick, which chooses one car from a shortlist and explains the choice; checks new adverts for wording Anky does not allow; sorts waiting reports for the person who reads them; and, when our word filter has flagged a display name, says whether it is a real name after all	For a pick: a description of the sorts of car you have liked and passed on, and the shortlist itself. No name, no email address, no account identifier and no location — only whether distances are known. For an advert check: the advert's own words, which are already public on the listing. For a report: what the reporter wrote, and the thing reported — an advert's text and figures, or, where a conversation was reported, the last few messages in it and the display names of the people in it. For a flagged name: the name itself and nothing else, and only when our word filter has flagged it. Nobody's email address or account identifier is ever part of any of it
Resend	Sends the email that tells us a report is waiting, and sends your enquiry to a dealership when you fill in the form on one of their cars	For a report: what you wrote and the reference of the account or listing you reported — not your name or your email address. For an enquiry: your first name, your last name, your email address, your phone number if you gave one, your message, and which car it is about — because all of that is the email, and it is addressed to the dealership you chose
Expo	Hosts the small over-the-air updates we use to correct the app between App Store releases	Each time the app starts it asks Expo's server whether newer app code exists. That request carries the platform (iOS), the app's version, which release channel it is on, and a random identifier the app generates for itself the first time it runs and keeps until it is deleted — plus, as with any request to any website, your IP address. If the app crashed the last time it ran, the first 1,024 characters of that crash message go with it. Otherwise nothing you have typed into Anky, and nothing that identifies your account, is any part of it
Apple	Distributes the app	Whatever Apple collects under its own privacy policy when you download or pay through the App Store

LinkedIn, if you accept marketing cookies

LinkedIn is not in the table above because it does not work only on our instructions: if you accept marketing cookies on www.ankycar.com or at app.ankycar.com, what reaches LinkedIn is used under LinkedIn's own privacy policy. Nothing from the iPhone app is sent to it. Section 12 says exactly what is sent, and how to switch it off.

If your name is flagged

Anky keeps a list of offensive words and checks your display name against it. That check is crude — it can only ask whether your name contains one of those strings, so it catches real surnames like Wogan, Shitov and Spaziano along with the words it is looking for. It never refuses a name. Your name is saved and shown exactly as you typed it; the match only puts it on a list for a person to look at.

To keep that list short, and to keep you off it, the name on its own — nothing else about you — is sent to Anthropic, which says whether it is a plausible name for a person or a business. A yes takes your name straight off the list. Any other answer changes nothing at all: your name stays as it is and a person reads it. The only thing that answer can do is clear you, never refuse you. The one name Anky does refuse is one that claims to be Anky itself.

Anyone else

We will disclose information if the law requires it — a court order, a police request made properly, or a regulator — and we may share what is necessary to investigate a report, to deal with fraud, or to defend a legal claim. If Anky is ever sold or transferred, your information would move with it, and we would tell you before that happened.

06Where it is kept

Anky's database, its accounts and its photographs are stored in the United Kingdom, in Supabase's London region. Some of our suppliers are companies based outside the UK, and their staff may access data from elsewhere for support and maintenance. Where that happens, the transfer is covered by the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum or by an adequacy decision, so your information keeps the same protection it has here.

07How long we keep it

What	How long
Your account and profile	Until you delete it. Deletion is immediate and is done from inside the app; encrypted backups are overwritten within 30 days
Listings	While live, and for 12 months after the car is sold or withdrawn, so a dispute can be looked into. If you are still talking to someone about it, the advert is kept until that conversation goes too
Messages and offers	12 months after the last message. Deleting a conversation removes it from your inbox at once; the other person keeps their copy
Swipes and the taste profile	Until you reset them or delete your account
Driving details	Until you remove them from your profile, which is immediate, or delete your account
Number-plate lookups	An MOT record older than 7 days is fetched again rather than reused; the log of who looked up what is kept for 12 months
Reports and blocks	Reports for 2 years. A block lasts until you remove it
Payment records	6 years, because HMRC requires it
Your cookie choice	About six months, in your browser, then we ask again — separately on www.ankycar.com and at app.ankycar.com. LinkedIn's cookies, if you accept them, last as long as LinkedIn publishes: li_fat_id 30 days, li_giant 7 days and li_sugr 90 days — see section 12

⚠️ These are the limits we work to, not an automatic timer. Deleting your account removes what this table says it removes, straight away. Everything else is removed when we review it against the periods above. If you want something gone sooner than that, email help@ankycar.com and we will do it.

08Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

See what we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
Correct it if it is wrong — most of it you can edit in the app yourself;
Have it deleted, and to delete your account — there is a Delete my account button on your profile screen and it works straight away, without asking us;
Take it elsewhere, in a machine-readable form;
Object to, or ask us to restrict, processing we do on the basis of our legitimate interests;
Withdraw consent where we relied on it — turning off location permission, for instance, or rejecting marketing cookies under Cookie settings on this website or at app.ankycar.com.

Email help@ankycar.com and we will answer within one month. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm you are the account holder before we act.

Deleting your account does not delete your conversations. Your listings go, and so do your profile, your swipes and everything Anky has learned about what you like. The conversations stay in the other person's inbox so they can read back what was said: your name is replaced with Deleted Account, your phone number is removed from the conversation, and nobody can reply to you. What you wrote stays readable to the person you wrote it to, with nothing left linking it to you. The app says so before it does it.

Some things survive a deletion request. We keep payment records for six years because tax law requires it. If you have been reported, the report itself stays on our record of complaints and what was done about them, with your name and account removed from it — the law asks us to keep that record, and removing the link to you is what makes it no longer about you.

If you think we have got something wrong, please tell us first — but you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or 0303 123 1113.

09Other people's information

If you write about somebody else in a listing, a message or a report, you are giving us their information too. Please only include what is relevant, and do not post anyone else's personal details — their address, their phone number, their photograph — without their agreement.

A number plate is information about a vehicle, but it can point to a person. Only look up a plate for a car you are selling or genuinely considering buying.

Reporting a conversation

When a conversation is reported, the last few messages in it — and the display names of the people taking part — are sent to Anthropic, which writes one line saying how likely the report looks to be justified. It decides nothing. Nothing is taken down, put back or closed because of what it says; a person reads every report either way, and that line is only the first thing they see. We do this so that reports that matter are read first. If you would rather a conversation were not sent, email us at help@ankycar.com and tell us about it that way instead.

10Children

Anky is for people aged 18 and over and is not intended for children. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18. If you believe a child has an account, email help@ankycar.com and we will remove it.

11Security

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted, and data is encrypted at rest. Access to your rows in the database is enforced by the database itself rather than only by the app, so a modified copy of the app cannot read another person's messages or account. Passwords are hashed, never stored in a form we could read, and are checked against known breached-password lists when you choose one.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever puts you at risk we will tell you, and the ICO, as the law requires.

12Cookies on ankycar.com

This section is about two places: this website, www.ankycar.com, and the browser version of Anky at app.ankycar.com. The Anky app on iPhone uses no advertising or tracking cookies, and none of this is part of it.

Each place asks you separately, and a choice made on one does not count on the other. If you press Accept on its cookie bar, it loads LinkedIn's Insight Tag, a small piece of code from LinkedIn. It tells us whether our adverts on LinkedIn bring people to Anky, and it lets us show Anky's adverts on LinkedIn to people who have visited. If you press Reject, or make no choice at all, it never loads there and nothing is sent to LinkedIn.

What reaches LinkedIn, if you accept

On this website, LinkedIn's tag runs on the page itself. It sends LinkedIn the address and title of each page you open, and which links and buttons you press: their wording (for example “Get started”) and where they sit on the page. It does not send what you type into a form.

At app.ankycar.com, the tag runs in a separate, empty page that the app opens out of sight once you accept. From there it cannot see the app's screens, what you tap or what you type. LinkedIn learns that Anky was opened in your browser and, if you create a dealership account, the sign-up signal described below.

In both places LinkedIn also receives your IP address, details of your browser and device, and its cookies, and, if you arrived from a LinkedIn advert, that advert's click reference. If you are signed in to LinkedIn in the same browser, LinkedIn can connect this to your LinkedIn account. LinkedIn gives us reports about groups of visitors, not about you. It uses the information under its own privacy policy and cookie policy, and lists its cookies, with how long each lasts, in its cookie table.

If you create a dealership account at app.ankycar.com

If you have accepted marketing cookies at app.ankycar.com, then once your dealership account has been created we tell LinkedIn that a dealership signed up — one signal, sent once, so that we can see whether our LinkedIn adverts lead to dealerships joining. We do not add your name, company name, email address, postcode or registration form answers to this event. LinkedIn also receives the technical and cookie information described above and may associate the event with your LinkedIn account. If you have not accepted marketing cookies, no LinkedIn tracking is loaded. Regular account registrations do not trigger the dealership sign-up event. If you have accepted marketing cookies, the general website tracking described above still applies. Rejecting afterwards stops anything further, but cannot recall a signal already sent.

What is stored in your browser

Name	Set by	What it is for	How long
anky_marketing	Anky, on www.ankycar.com	A cookie that remembers whether you accepted or rejected marketing cookies on this website, so you are not asked on every page. It holds nothing else	About six months, then we ask again
anky_app_marketing	Anky, at app.ankycar.com	The same, for the browser version of Anky	About six months, then we ask again
anky_li_dealer_signups	Anky, at app.ankycar.com	Only if you accepted, and only once a dealership account has been created: a note in your browser's storage (not a cookie) of which dealership sign-up has already been reported, so it is never reported twice. It is never sent anywhere	Until you clear your browser's data
li_fat_id	LinkedIn, on ankycar.com: one cookie, shared by www.ankycar.com and app.ankycar.com	Only if you accept, and only if you arrived from a LinkedIn advert: that advert's click reference, so a visit or a dealership sign-up can be matched to it	30 days
li_giant	LinkedIn, on ankycar.com, the same way	The same, for a LinkedIn advert link that carries a reference to a group of LinkedIn members instead. Only if you accept	7 days
li_sugr	LinkedIn, on linkedin.com	Only if you accept, and only if your browser lets linkedin.com keep cookies while you are on another site: LinkedIn uses it to try to match your browser to a person	90 days

LinkedIn may also read cookies it has already set on linkedin.com, for example because you are signed in there. Those, and how long each lasts, are in LinkedIn's cookie table.

Our lawful basis

Your consent, which is why nothing from LinkedIn loads, and no sign-up is reported, until you give it.

Changing your mind

On this website, use Cookie settings at the foot of any page. At app.ankycar.com, use Cookie settings on the sign-in screen or under Here to help on your profile, or Cookies at the foot of the sidebar on a larger screen. If you reject after accepting, the tag stops straight away and we remove LinkedIn's cookies from that site. LinkedIn also keeps cookies on its own site, linkedin.com, which we cannot reach; you can control those, and how LinkedIn uses advertising data, in your LinkedIn settings.

13Changes to this policy

If we change how Anky uses your information we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

14How to contact us

Email help@ankycar.com, or write to Nicholas Christoforou, BA 704, Nexus Connect, Front Street, Esh, Durham DH7 9QR. A person reads every message.