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. There is no advertising network, no analytics service and no tracking of you across other apps or websites — none of that is built into Anky at all. 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 used-car marketplace app for the United Kingdom. It is run by [FULL LEGAL NAME], a sole trader trading as "Anky", of [POSTAL ADDRESS].

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 number [ICO REGISTRATION NUMBER].

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, profile picture if you add one, 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
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

Anky 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. 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.

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.

05Who else sees it

Other people using Anky

A car you list is public inside the app: its details, your photos, your description, the town it is in, and the phone number if you chose to publish one. Your display name is shown to anyone you are in a conversation with. Buyers only receive a seller's phone number once the seller has replied to them. Nobody is ever shown your email address, your exact address, or what you have swiped.

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 payment details go to Stripe directly. We receive a confirmation and the last four digits — we never see or store your full 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
Apple	Distributes the app	Whatever Apple collects under its own privacy policy when you download or pay through the App Store

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
Messages and offers	12 months after the conversation ends. 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
Number-plate lookups	The MOT record is cached for 7 days; 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

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.

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 deletes more than your own rows. Your listings go, and so do the conversations you are part of — which means they leave the other person's inbox as well, because a conversation is one record shared by two people. 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, and we keep a minimal record of a serious report or a ban so the same person cannot simply sign up again. We will tell you if that applies to 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.

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.

12Changes 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.

13How to contact us

Email help@ankycar.com, or write to [FULL LEGAL NAME], [POSTAL ADDRESS]. A person reads every message.