This policy covers the Motorfile app and this website. It was last updated on 29 August 2026.

Everything you put into Motorfile — your vehicles, their history, the photographs of your V5C and insurance, your receipts and running costs, and any notes — is written to storage inside the app on your own device.

We cannot see any of it. There is no server holding a copy, no account to sign into, and no way for us to recover it if you delete the app. If you want a copy, keep one: back your phone up as you normally would.

To read a car’s official record, the number plate has to reach the Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency. It does that by way of a small lookup service we run, which exists to hold the government API credentials so that they are not sitting inside a downloadable app.

What that service receives is a number plate, and nothing else. No name, no email address, no account, no location, no device identifier that we can tie back to a person. It forwards the plate to the DVSA, passes the answer back, and does not keep the record.

We count lookups per device so that the free tier and the paid tiers can differ, and so that a single device cannot exhaust a shared government quota. That counter is a number against an anonymous device token. It is not a profile, and it cannot be turned into one.

A number plate identifies a vehicle. Under UK data protection law it can amount to personal data in the hands of someone who can connect it to a keeper — we cannot, and we hold nothing that would let us. Our lawful basis for handling it is legitimate interest: you asked for the record, and it cannot be fetched without sending the plate.

No cookies, no analytics, no tag managers, no embedded video, no fonts fetched from a third party. The typefaces are served from this site’s own files, which is why there is no cookie banner to dismiss: there is nothing to consent to.

The web server keeps ordinary access logs — the page requested, the time, and a truncated IP address — for a short period, to keep the site running and to spot abuse. They are not used to build any profile of you.

If you subscribe or buy a one-off check, the payment is taken by Apple through the App Store. We never see your card details, your billing address or your Apple account. Apple tells the app only whether a purchase is active. Apple’s own privacy policy covers what they do with that transaction.

UK GDPR gives you the right to see, correct, export and erase personal data an organisation holds about you. In practice we hold none, so there is nothing for us to show you and nothing for us to delete. Deleting the app removes everything, because everything is on the device.

Motorfile is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them — or, for that matter, from anyone.

If we ever change how any of this works, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Material changes will be called out in the app before they take effect, not slipped in quietly.

If you think we have this wrong, write to support@motorfileapp.com. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.