DRAFT — this policy is a plain-English first draft and is pending review by a qualified adviser. It describes how Bivetica Cars is built to handle data today; wording may change once that review is complete.
Privacy
The short version
You can search cars and send an enquiry without an account. If you list a car you create an account and we verify your email and phone. We pass your enquiry or your listing’s contact details to the other side of a sale, and nothing else. We don’t sell your data, and we don’t run advertising or analytics trackers.
What we collect and why
If you browse or enquire (no account)
- Enquiry details — the name, email, optional phone and message you type into an enquiry form. We store this and pass it to the seller or dealer for that listing so they can reply to you. It is not shown publicly.
- “Reveal phone” — choosing to reveal a seller’s or dealer’s phone number is a local action in your browser; we record that an enquiry form was used, not each reveal.
- Technical data — your IP address is recorded with an enquiry and with sign-in attempts, for security and abuse prevention, and standard web server logs.
If you create a seller account
- Account data — your email address and a hashed password.
- Verification — your phone number, and short-lived one-time codes/links used to confirm your email and phone. Codes and links are stored hashed and expire.
- Your listing — the vehicle details you enter, your description, your asking price, and your town and postcode. Your town is shown to buyers; your full postcode is not — it is kept for our records only.
- Photos — images you upload for a listing. See “Where data is stored” below.
- Favourites and saved searches — the listings you save and the search filters you save, linked to your account so you can see them again.
Dealer data
Dealer stock on Bivetica Cars is imported automatically from each dealer’s published stock feed on Bivetica Motors (a separate Bivetica product). We cache the make, model, specification, price, advert text, photos and the dealer’s name, town and contact details from that feed. We treat it as read-only — we don’t edit it, and a dealer removing a car from Motors removes it here on the next refresh (about every 15 minutes).
Where data is stored
- Accounts, listings, enquiries, favourites and saved searches — in a PostgreSQL database on our server, hosted in Germany (Contabo).
- Seller photos — in a Backblaze B2 object storage bucket in the EU (
eu-centralregion). Photos on a published listing are publicly reachable by URL, the same as any image on a public web page. - Payments — Bivetica Cars does not process card payments. When paid “featuring” is switched on, payment is handled by Bivetica Invoice on a hosted payment page; we never see or store card details.
Who we share it with
- The other party to a potential sale — a buyer’s enquiry goes to the relevant seller or dealer; a private seller’s contact details are shown on their own live listing.
- Infrastructure providers acting on our instructions — our server host (Contabo), object storage (Backblaze), and our DNS/CDN provider (Cloudflare).
- Bivetica Invoice — only when you choose to pay to feature a listing, and only the information needed to raise that one charge.
We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising.
How long we keep it
- Draft and live listings: while your account is open. Listings auto-expire 60 days after publishing and can be re-listed for free.
- A removed listing’s photos are deleted from storage when it is taken down.
- Enquiries: retained for a reasonable period to support replies and resolve disputes, then deleted.
- Account, favourites and saved searches: until you delete them or ask us to close your account.
Your rights
You can ask us to show you the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or restrict how we use it, and you can object to processing. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk). To make a request, email[email protected].
Children
Bivetica Cars is not intended for people under 18 and we don’t knowingly collect their data.
Changes
We’ll update this page when our data handling changes and move the “last updated” date. This draft will be revised once a qualified adviser has reviewed it.