Privacy Policy
Last updated: 25 September 2026
1. Who we are
Scrutineer is operated by Issa Zangana, a sole trader registered in Australia, ABN 55 482 265 411, of New South Wales, Australia (“we”, “us”, “our”). We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy.
Contact us about privacy at support@usescrutineer.com. We answer privacy requests by email.
2. What this policy covers
This policy covers the Scrutineer mobile app, the website at usescrutineer.com, and the feedback board inside the app. It applies wherever you use Scrutineer.
The website collects nothing. It has no analytics, no advertising, no tracking cookies and no embedded third-party scripts. Our hosting provider may keep short-lived technical logs of requests, which we do not access or use.
3. Age limits
You must be at least 16 years old in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, and at least 13 years old everywhere else, to use Scrutineer. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below these ages. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
4. What we collect
4.1 Account
When you first open the app, an account is created for you automatically so your scans can sync to your device. That account is identified by a randomly generated account ID. We do not require your name, email address or phone number to use Scrutineer.
4.2 Answers you give during onboarding
If you answer the optional onboarding questions, we store your answers as broad categories: a budget range, what you want the app for, and roughly when you are buying. These questions are skippable and the app works without them.
4.3 Scans
A scan begins when you send us images of a vehicle listing — screenshots, photos, or stills that your device extracts from a screen recording you choose.
We do not store your images. Not the originals, not compressed copies, not thumbnails, and not generated stand-ins. Images are held in memory for as long as it takes to analyse them, are sent to our analysis provider for that purpose, and are discarded when the request ends. Your images stay on the device that produced them.
A screen recording is never uploaded. Frames are extracted from it on your device, you choose which frames to send, and only those frames leave your phone. The recording itself, its length and its audio never reach us.
What we do store, as text, is the result of the analysis:
- Vehicle details read from the listing — make, model, variant, year, odometer reading and unit, asking price and currency
- Which marketplace the listing came from, and whether the seller appears to be private or a dealer
- The listing’s web address, and the location stated in the listing, which is often a suburb. Both are visible only to you and are never published
- The score, the band, our confidence in it, the reasons behind it, the questions we suggest asking the seller, and the plain-language summary
- The structured facts extracted from the listing, kept so we can re-score your scan when you answer a question without paying to analyse it again
- How many images you sent, how many photos the listing said it had, whether any image came from a screen recording, and which version of our scoring rubric produced the score
- The market price data used, and how many comparable listings it was based on
4.4 Registration plates and VINs
If a plate or VIN is visible in an image, it is read on your device. We store the outcome of the check — for example that a plate appeared consistent across images — and never the plate or VIN itself. Plate and VIN text is never transmitted to us, never written to our database, and never written to our logs.
4.5 Technical information used to prevent abuse
We record counts of how many scans an account has run within given time windows, and a count of scans per IP address per hour. The IP figure comes from the network request, is kept for two days and is then deleted, and is never linked to your account or to a scan.
4.6 Push notifications
If you allow notifications, we store the push token for that installation so we can tell you when a scan has finished. It carries no listing content and is not linked to any scan.
4.7 The feedback board
If you post on the board, we store your chosen handle, your posts and comments, your votes, any reports you make, anyone you block, and moderation records about your content. Board content is reviewed before it appears publicly. Posts and comments that are approved are visible to other users. Your handle is public; your account ID is not.
4.8 Subscription status
Purchases are made through Apple. We never see or receive your card details, billing address or Apple ID. Our subscription provider tells us whether your account has an active subscription and which plan, and gives us the transaction identifiers Apple issues.
4.9 Analytics and crash reports
We collect a short list of product analytics events — for example that a scan started, that a score was returned, that the paywall was shown, that a purchase completed, or that a rate limit was hit. These events are structural: they never carry listing content, prices, photos, plate or VIN text, or which board entry you looked at. They are linked to your account ID.
We also collect crash and error reports so we can fix faults.
We do not record your screen. Session replay is disabled in the app, and our crash reporting is configured not to attach screenshots or view hierarchies, because your screen may show a listing containing a seller’s name, phone number or suburb.
Our analytics and crash-reporting providers receive your IP address as part of each request and may derive an approximate location from it, typically to city or country level. We use that only to understand which countries our users are in, which tells us which marketplaces our price comparisons need to cover.
4.10 What we never collect
We never collect your precise location, your contacts, your camera roll beyond the images you explicitly choose, your payment details, or any special category data such as health, biometric, political or religious information.
5. Other people’s information
Listings often contain a seller’s name, phone number or suburb. When you send us a listing, you may be sending us someone else’s personal information.
We limit this deliberately: images are discarded after analysis, the extraction keeps vehicle facts rather than seller contact details, and what we publish to the board never includes the listing’s address, exact price, odometer reading, suburb or seller detail. Please do not send us more of a listing than you need analysed, and do not post another person’s contact details on the board.
6. Why we use your information, and our legal basis
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, our legal bases are:
| What we do | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Create an account, run scans, store and sync your results | To provide the service you asked for | Performance of a contract |
| Take payment and recognise your subscription | To provide the paid service | Performance of a contract |
| Enforce rate limits, prevent abuse and control cost | To keep the service available and affordable | Legitimate interests |
| Operate and moderate the board | To run a usable community space and comply with platform rules | Legitimate interests; performance of a contract |
| Product analytics and crash reporting | To fix faults and understand which features are used | Legitimate interests |
| Send you a notification when a scan finishes | Because you asked for it | Consent, which you can withdraw in system settings |
| Keep records we are legally required to keep | To meet legal obligations | Legal obligation |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered your rights and limited the data accordingly — which is why analytics carry no listing content, and why abuse counters are not linked to your scans.
7. Who we share it with
We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for advertising or cross-context behavioural advertising. We have never done either.
We use these service providers:
| Provider | What they do | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic PBC (United States) | Analyses your listing images and writes the summary; runs the web search that finds comparable prices | Your images, transiently, and the vehicle details used as search terms. Not your account ID |
| Supabase | Hosts our database and server functions | Everything described in section 4 that we store |
| RevenueCat (United States) | Manages subscription state | Your account ID and Apple’s transaction identifiers |
| Apple | Processes purchases and distributes the app | Your payment details, which go to Apple and never to us |
| Sentry (United States) | Crash and error reporting | Crash data, device and app version, your account ID, your IP address |
| PostHog | Product analytics | The analytics events listed in section 4.9, your account ID, your IP address |
| Expo | Delivers push notifications | Your push token and the notification text |
We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or to establish or defend legal claims.
8. International transfers
We operate from Australia and our providers are largely in the United States. If you are in the EEA or the UK, your information will be transferred outside your country. Where required, these transfers rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK Addendum, or the provider’s certification under an approved transfer mechanism, together with the contractual terms we have with each provider.
9. How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Your images | Not retained. Discarded when the analysis request ends |
| Screen recordings | Never received |
| Plate and VIN text | Never received |
| Scans and their results | Until you delete the scan or your account |
| Onboarding answers | Until you delete your account |
| IP-based abuse counters | Two days |
| Push tokens | Until the installation is removed or you disable notifications |
| Board posts and comments | Until you delete them or your account; moderation records are kept longer where needed to enforce our rules |
| Moderation audit records | Retained after an account is deleted, with the account no longer identified |
| Analytics events and crash reports | Up to 12 months |
| Subscription records | As long as required for tax and accounting law, currently five years in Australia |
10. Your choices
- Delete a scan at any time from History.
- Delete your account from Settings. This removes your scans, your profile, your board content and your push tokens. Counters used to prevent abuse of free scans are kept in a form not tied to your identity, and moderation records of content you posted publicly may be retained.
- Turn off notifications in your device settings.
- Turn off analytics and crash reporting in the app’s privacy settings.
- Stop using the board without affecting your scans.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to object to or restrict how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent.
If you are in the EEA or the UK, you may also lodge a complaint with your national data protection authority.
If you are in Australia, the Australian Privacy Principles apply to how we handle your information, and you may complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.
If you are in California, you have rights to know, delete, and correct, and a right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we do not process sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics.
To exercise any right, email support@usescrutineer.com. We will respond within 30 days. We may need to verify that the request relates to your account, which for an anonymous account usually means making the request from the device holding it.
12. Security
Access to our database is restricted at the row level so that one account cannot read another’s scans. Server-side functions verify your subscription before any paid work is done, and our analysis provider’s key is held only on the server and never in the app. We keep no listing photos, which means a breach of our systems cannot expose them.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information and is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as required by law.
13. Changes
We will post any change to this policy here and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.
14. Contact
Issa Zangana, ABN 55 482 265 411, New South Wales, Australia — support@usescrutineer.com