Privacy Policy

The short version

There are no accounts, so we hold no names, email addresses or passwords. We log which registrations were looked up and a one-way hash of the connection that asked, purely to stop one visitor hammering the DVSA service. We do not sell anything to anybody.

Vehicle lookups

When you check a registration we record the registration, the time, whether the answer came from our cache, and a salted SHA-256 hash of your IP address.

The hash is not reversible and is not stored alongside the raw address. It exists so we can count how many lookups have come from one connection in the last hour and apply a fair-use limit. The salt is unique to this installation, so the hashes cannot be matched against a precomputed table of every IPv4 address.

Vehicle data we cache

MOT records returned by the DVSA are stored for up to seven days so that repeat lookups do not need another call to the government service. This data is about vehicles, not people: the MOT history record contains no owner or keeper details of any kind, and we could not identify a vehicle's owner from it even if we wanted to.

Things stored in your browser

These stay on your device and are never sent to us:

• Your recent registration checks, so the "recent checks" list works. Clear your browser data to remove them.
• Whether you dismissed the install prompt, and when, so it does not ask again for a week.
• The date of your last visit, used by the same install prompt logic.

Third parties

Loading a page on this site makes requests to:

• Google Fonts and the Tailwind CDN, for the typeface and stylesheet. Both see your IP address as part of serving the file, as any host does.
• Cloudflare, which sits in front of this site and handles the connection.
• The DVSA, when a lookup is not already cached. The DVSA receives the registration. It does not receive anything about you.

The pages you click through to - DVLA, TfL, MIB, findpetrol - have their own privacy policies, which apply once you are on them.

How long we keep things

Cached vehicle records are refreshed or replaced after seven days. Lookup log entries are kept so the site can be maintained and abuse investigated; because they contain only a registration and an irreversible hash, they hold nothing that identifies a person.