This Privacy Policy explains how CarAI Finder (“we,” “us”) collects, uses, and shares information when you use caraifinder.com and related services. It goes together with our Terms of Service.

Contact: hello@caraifinder.com.

1. Information we collect

Account

Email and a hashed password.
Passkey public keys, credential ids, and a device label you choose (Face ID, Windows Hello, and similar).
Plan, organization membership and role, session version, and whether the account is disabled.
Stripe customer and subscription ids. We do not store full card numbers. Stripe handles payment details under its own policy.
If you signed up from a share link, a referral pointer to that search (not a rewards payout).

Searches and Saved cars

Photos you upload, stored on our servers and tied to your account. Listing photos copied from dealer sites stay as published.
AI identification we produce (year, make, model, color, confidence, and similar fields).
Location text, optional coordinates from your device, search radius, notes, Watch settings, and listing snapshots (title, price, mileage, URL, phone, photo, VIN when parsed, sold status).
Share tokens and simple view/signup counts if you share.

Location

Nearby results work best with a city or coordinates. Your browser may ask for location. We reverse-geocode coordinates to a city/region (and sometimes a ZIP) using geocoding providers so we can search listings. You can type a place instead of sharing GPS. Dealers set a market center for ads. We do not show advertisers your exact lat/lng.

Alerts, chat, and advertising

In-app notifications (Watch, deals, chat).
Optional Web Push subscription endpoint and keys for your browser.
For advertisers: business name, market location, promoted inventory (including VIN, stock, photos, source URL), impression/click/save counts, and in-app messages.
Shopper-side ad events (that you saw, clicked, or saved a promoted listing), without exposing your email to the dealer.
Mute records if you mute an advertiser.
Content reports (share pages, listing photos, and ads): the URL you reported, the reason you picked, optional details, your IP address, and your account if you are signed in. We keep these to review abuse and to comply with law.

Company and Enterprise

Invite codes, allowed email domains, pooled usage counts, and (for admins) teammate emails and how many searches each used that day.

Technical

We log request metadata we need to run the Service: IP address, user agent, timestamps, and similar server logs. We use IP for rate limits, abuse, and super-admin unique-visitor metrics. Country is derived from IP (private and loopback addresses are labeled Local). We do not build a public profile from this. We do not run a third-party advertising pixel network on the product pages. Fonts may load from Google Fonts, which can see your IP when a page loads.

Vehicle facts

Year/make/model or VIN you ask about is sent to public agencies and sites (NHTSA, EPA FuelEconomy.gov, Wikipedia) so we can show recalls, ratings, and MPG. Responses may be cached so we do not hit those APIs on every tap.

2. How we use information

Provide identification, listings, Watch, Saved, compare, share, company admin, and dealer ads.
Secure accounts (including invalidating old sessions and passkeys you remove).
Bill unpaid plans and ad add-ons through Stripe, send receipts Stripe generates, and open a customer portal when you tap Manage billing.
Clone a shared search into a new account when you sign up from a share link you opened.
Measure quota, stop abuse, debug outages, and improve matching quality.
Comply with law and enforce the Terms.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with data brokers for their independent marketing. We do not use shopper photos or notes in dealer ads. We do not currently send promotional email newsletters. If that changes, we will update this policy and, where required, ask first.

We share information with processors who help us run the Service, under contracts or terms that limit use to that work:

Cloud AI providers (including Google) receive search photos and related prompts solely so the vehicle can be identified. Their systems process the image under their terms as our provider.
Stripe for checkout, cards, subscriptions, invoices, tax as configured, and the billing portal.
Geocoding providers (including OpenStreetMap Nominatim and BigDataCloud) for turning text or coordinates into a place or ZIP.
Listing sources and dealer sites when we fetch public pages or you click out. Those operators see a normal web request or your visit.
NHTSA, EPA, and similar public APIs when you open vehicle facts or VIN decode.
Browser vendors’ push services (Apple, Google, Mozilla, and others) if you enable browser alerts. They deliver the notification payload we send.
Hosting, backups, and email as needed to operate caraifinder.com and to reach you at hello@caraifinder.com.

We may disclose information if required by law, to protect rights and safety, or in a merger or sale of the operation (the buyer must honor this policy or notify you of changes).

Teammates on a Company or Enterprise org can see shared searches if the admin turns that on, plus what the admin screens already show. They do not get other members’ passwords or passkeys.

4. Dealer ads and shopper privacy

Advertisers never receive your email, notes, Watch filters, password, exact GPS, or numeric account id. Shopper lists use opaque tokens, interest labels from cars you searched or saved (titles only, not your notes), coarse distance bands, and last-active time. Demand drill-down uses city labels and radius rings. If a cell has fewer than three distinct shoppers, we hide or coarsen it rather than show a pinpoint map of people.

If a dealer messages you in-app, they still do not see your email unless you type it into the thread yourself. Do not share government ids in chat. You can mute or report ads where the product offers it.

Advertisers see their own inventory stats (impressions, clicks, saves). Those events are stored so we can bill and attribute promotions. After you close an account we drop the link from events back to you where the product already supports it.

If you create a share link, anyone with it can see the photo, identification pills, location/radius line, and a few listing cards. They cannot see your notes, Watch settings, or email. Opening a share link may set a first-party cookie (cf_ref) for 30 days so a later sign-up can copy that search into the new account. Social apps that unfurl links may cache the preview image. Stop sharing to retire the token. Media URLs without a valid token stay private. Anyone can report a share page or listing. That creates an in-app alert for operators and stores the URL, reason, optional details, your IP, and your account if you are signed in.

6. Cookies and similar tech

We use first-party cookies that are needed for the product. We do not use them to follow you around third-party sites.

caraifinder_session: signed-in session, HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, about 30 days.
caraifinder_wa: short-lived passkey challenge (about 5 minutes).
cf_ref: share referral token, HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, 30 days, set when you open /s/… (skipped for obvious crawlers when we can tell).
cf_vid: anonymous visitor id so we can count unique visitors per UTC day (super admin metrics). HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, about 1 year. It is not a login and is not used to advertise on other sites.

The Service can be installed to the Home Screen. A service worker caches shell files for offline use. LocalStorage stores small UI flags (for example, whether you dismissed an install or share hint). You can clear cookies and site data in your browser. Doing so signs you out.

7. Retention

We keep account and search data until you close the account or delete a given search, unless we must keep a subset longer for billing, security, or law. Closing the account from Settings deletes stored search photos, saved listings, passkeys, push subscriptions we hold, and the user row, and cancels Stripe subscriptions we can cancel. Aggregated stats that no longer identify you (for example a count of searches in a region, or daily visitor and share totals) may remain. Unique-visitor rows (anonymous cookie id, IP, derived country, first path, and UTC day) are dropped after about two weeks. Server logs typically rotate on a shorter operational cycle. Cached vehicle-facts payloads are keyed by year-make-model or VIN, not by your name. Share preview images on disk are removed or become unreachable when sharing stops and files are cleaned up.

8. Your choices

Edit notes, delete searches, remove saved cars, stop sharing, turn Watch off, and disable browser alerts in the product.
Deny location in the browser and type a city instead.
Remove passkeys in Settings.
Cancel paid billing from Account (Manage billing) or by closing the account.
Close the account permanently from Settings (Cancel account). Type your email to confirm.
Email hello@caraifinder.com to access, correct, or delete personal information we hold if you cannot do it in-app. We will need to verify it is you.

If you are in a US state with consumer privacy laws (including California), you can request to know, delete, or correct personal information, and to opt out of sale or sharing as those statutes define those words. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We will not discriminate against you for exercising those rights. Authorized agents may email us with proof of authority. We do not currently honor each browser’s “Do Not Track” signal because it is not consistently defined, but we also do not run a third-party ad-tracking stack on the Service.

If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland and still use the Service, we process personal data to provide the contract, to pursue legitimate interests in running a secure product, and to meet legal duties. You may have rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict, object, or port data, and to complain to a supervisory authority. We are a US-based service. Data is processed in the United States.

9. Children

The Service is not for children under 13, and you must be 18 to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we learn we did, we will delete it.

10. Security

We hash passwords, sign cookies, use HTTPS, restrict media routes, and limit what share tokens expose. No method is perfectly secure. Use a unique password or a passkey. Tell us at hello@caraifinder.com if you think someone accessed your account.

11. Changes

We may update this policy. The “Last updated” date will change. If a change is material, we will provide a more prominent notice when we reasonably can. Keep using the Service after an update means you accept the new policy. If you do not, close the account.

12. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: hello@caraifinder.com.