DecodeThis Experts privacy policy

Who we are

DecodeThis Experts is run by VIN Hunter LLC. Questions about this policy, or a request to delete your data: info@decodethis.com.

What we collect

The first time you open DecodeThis Experts it creates an anonymous guest account. You don't give us a name or an email address to use a guest account. If you sign in with Apple or Google instead of using a guest account, we also store your Apple or Google account ID, the email address that comes with it, and a name or profile picture link if the provider gives us one. With Sign in with Apple you can hide your email: Apple then gives us a private relay address that forwards to you, and that's the one we store. For Sign in with Apple we also keep a token from Apple, encrypted, so that when you delete your account we can tell Apple to end DecodeThis Experts' access. Here is what we store.

• Your account: a random account ID, whether you're on the free or pro plan, and a sign-in session. For a guest account there is also a placeholder email address at anon.carchive.org (not a real one). The session may record the IP address and the app or device identifier (user agent) of the request that created it.
• Your cars: the photos you take or pick (and photos of window and auction sheets), the VINs you scan or type, the year, make and model we look up from a VIN, listing links you paste and what we pull out of those pages (details, claims and links to the listing's photos), and your notes.
• Your call on a car: the price you enter, the kind of price (asking, hammer, sold or offer), your rating, whether you shortlisted it, your verdict, the lot number, and the mileage you record (miles or kilometers, and whether it's marked TMU (true mileage unknown) or exempt).
• Your conversations: the questions you send an expert, their replies, and the photos you attach. Each expert's take on each car is stored too, including, in Marcus's and Evelyn's takes, the recent sales it cites (price, month, auction site, a short description and a link) and Evelyn's price range.
• Your sessions: the name, kind (show, auction, dealer or private), venue and dates you give a session, which cars are in it, and the written summary an expert makes of it.
• Your reports: when you report an expert's take, reply or note, we keep a copy of the text you reported, the reason you chose, the note you add (up to 500 characters), and the model that wrote it.
• Usage records: each time you ask for an expert take, a chat reply or a session summary, we record when, which car and expert, which AI model, the number of tokens used and an estimated cost. We use these for daily limits and to see what the service costs. They don't contain your photos or messages.
• Markers for deleted cars and sessions: when you delete a car or a session, we keep its random ID and the time you deleted it, so a change still waiting on your phone, or another of your devices, can't bring it back.
• Your credits: how many you have, each time they were granted or spent (a starter gift, a purchase, a take, a reply, a refund), whether automatic takes are on, and a record of each purchase: the product, how many credits it gave, the store's transaction ID and the date. We don't receive your card or payment details: those stay with Apple or Google.
• Server logs: our host keeps standard logs of requests to our servers, such as IP addresses, which URL was asked for, and errors.

On your phone, the app keeps a copy of your cars, notes and sessions, and a queue of changes waiting to upload, so it works with a weak signal. Your sign-in token is kept in the phone's secure storage. Signing out removes your account's data and the token from the phone; your cars stay on your account. Uninstalling the app removes them from the phone, though a backup of your phone (Google or iCloud) may keep a copy of the app's data until that backup is replaced.

What we don't collect:

• No analytics, advertising or crash-reporting tools are built into the app, and it doesn't use an advertising ID.
• No location. The app never asks for your location. We don't read or use any location data embedded in photos.
• No contacts, and no audio. The app only asks for the camera. Photos are shared with the app only when you pick them.
• VIN reading from the camera happens on your phone, using Google's ML Kit text recognition. The picture of the plate doesn't leave your phone for that step. The ML Kit library may send its own technical and performance information to Google.

How we use it

• To give you expert takes and answers about your cars, and to write session summaries.
• To let experts compare a car with your other saved cars and sessions.
• To compare your price with recent sales of similar cars in Marcus's and Evelyn's takes.
• To decode VINs and look up car details.
• To keep the service running and fair: usage records enforce daily limits on expert runs and chat replies, and your saved reports enforce the daily limit on reports.
• To review reports of AI-generated content and take down anything that shouldn't be there.

We don't show ads, and we don't use your data for advertising.

Who handles your data

To run DecodeThis Experts we send data to the service providers below. Each one gets only what it needs for its job. They are the only third parties we send your content to. We don't send your account ID or email address to Anthropic or DecodeThis. Cloudflare R2 and Render store your account ID, because photo files and database records are filed under it.

• Anthropic (Claude), the AI behind the experts. It receives what you add to a car or ask about: photos, the VIN, text read from sheets, text from listing pages along with the listing's link and the links to its photos, your notes, your call on the car, the takes already written for it, and your questions along with the earlier messages in that conversation. For a session summary it receives the session's name, venue and dates, and its cars with your calls, the experts' headlines and the questions you asked, and the other sessions each of those cars was in. So experts can compare, they also get a short summary of your other saved cars and sessions: for each car, its year, make, model and trim, your call on it, the experts' headlines on it, its latest note, and the names and dates of the sessions it was in. A take or a reply starts with the cars of the same make and model and the cars in the same session, and the expert can also search the rest of your Garage for other cars to compare while it works. Web research for a take, and the recent-sales search for Marcus's and Evelyn's takes, send only the car's year, make, model and trim; the sales search looks on classic.com and other auction and market sites through Anthropic's web search. Anthropic also receives an internal ID for each car it is shown, and your plan (free or pro). Opening a new car can start your default expert's take automatically, so this can happen without you asking a question; where the app has the setting "Run my expert automatically on new cars", it happens only when that's on. Anthropic handles that data under its own terms and privacy policy.
• DecodeThis (decodethis.com), the lookup service for VINs and parts codes. It receives the VIN to decode and check for recalls; the year, make and model series to list engines; and RPO option codes with a VIN or a year, make and model to check them. Our server calls it with our own key, and it doesn't receive your account ID.
• Cloudflare R2, where your photos are stored. Your phone uploads photos and loads them straight from R2 using short-lived private links that only your account can get. Photos are filed under your account ID.
• Render, our host. It runs our servers and holds our database (your account, cars, conversations and the other records above, but not the photo files) and a cache.
• Listing sites. If you paste a link to a listing, our server fetches that page. The site sees our server, not you.
• Apple and Google, if you sign in with them. They tell us your account ID with them and the email address (or, with Apple, a private relay address). Signing in with Google uses Google's sign-in library in the app. Apple and Google handle that data under their own terms and privacy policies.
• RevenueCat, which handles purchases of credits for us. It receives your account ID and the purchase records the App Store or Google Play send it (the product, its price, the store's transaction ID and dates), and tells our server what you bought. Your payment details stay with Apple or Google: neither we nor RevenueCat see them. RevenueCat handles that data under its own terms and privacy policy.

If the law requires it, we may have to share information about your account. We'll limit it to what is required.

AI-generated content

The experts' takes, replies and saved notes are written by AI, not by people. They can be wrong, out of date or incomplete, and they are not professional advice. Check a car's identity, history, condition and price yourself, or with someone qualified, before you buy.

You can report any take, reply or expert-saved note from inside the app. Choose a reason (offensive or harmful, inaccurate or misleading, or other) and add a note if you like. We keep a copy of the reported text, so a report still makes sense after the car or the text changes.

Shared cars

When you share a car, it gets a page at a decodethis.net link. Anyone with the link can see it, and it isn't listed in search engines. The page never names you. It always shows the car (year, make, model, and the experts' headline and key facts), and only what else you choose:

• Your verdict and stars.
• The price, mileage and lot you saw.
• The experts' takes: their headlines and top findings, with the sources they cite.
• The full VIN. Otherwise it's hidden after its first eight characters, everywhere on the page.
• The photos you pick. They're copies with their location and camera details removed, and we serve them ourselves.

Stopping sharing, removing a photo, or deleting the car takes it off the page at once (within a minute, as pages are cached), and we delete the photo copies within two days. We can't recall previews that other apps already made: a link sent in a message may still show its cover photo, name and headline there.

"Show this car on decodethis.net" is off unless you turn it on. When it's on, the car is also listed on the page of the event you saw it at (from your session, or the one you choose), and it can be picked as Featured Car of the Week. Turning it off takes it off those pages within five minutes.

To pick Featured Car of the Week, DecodeThis Experts' AI (Anthropic's Claude) reads what the listed cars' pages show, never your notes, sessions, verdict, price or full VIN, and suggests a car and a short write-up. A person at DecodeThis Experts approves it before it appears.

Anyone can report a shared page. We keep the reason and any note they add, not who sent it: to limit reports, we count them by a code that changes every day, and never store an address.

Keeping and deleting your data

Your data stays on your account until you delete it. What you can delete in the app, and what that does:

• Delete a car: removes the car from our database along with its photos, VINs, listing links, notes, takes, and your conversations about that car. Its photo files are then deleted from storage.
• Delete a photo or sheet: removes it and its file. The car's VIN and links stay.
• Delete a note: removes it.
• Delete a session: removes its name, venue, dates, summary, list of cars and any notes that belong only to the session from our servers. The cars themselves stay in your Garage, and so do notes that are also about a car. We keep only a marker with the time you deleted it, so your other devices don't bring it back.
• Delete a conversation on the Ask tab: removes its messages and the photos you sent in it from our servers and storage. Conversations about a car are removed when you delete that car.

If a photo file can't be deleted from storage at that moment, it stays private to your account until we remove it, and you can ask us to at info@decodethis.com.

What stays until your account is deleted:

• Reports you send. We keep them so we can review them.
• Usage records. They are kept as a history even after you delete the car they were for.
• Markers for deleted cars and sessions.
• Your credits and their history.

Cached lookups. To save repeat work we remember the public details for a VIN (for 30 days, or 1 day when the VIN wasn't found or didn't check out), the web research for a make and model (30 days, or 1 day when nothing was found), and recent sales for a car's year, make, model and trim (14 days, or 1 day when none were found). These hold public vehicle information, not your content, and aren't tied to your account.

Deleting your account. In the app, go to the Me tab and choose Delete account (or Delete my data, for a guest). Your account and everything in it are deleted at once, and every phone signed in to it is signed out. Its photos are removed from storage within the hour. If you signed in with Apple, we tell Apple to end DecodeThis Experts' access; if with Google, the app does the same with Google. If you no longer have the app, email info@decodethis.com with your account ID (in the app: Me tab, under Privacy; press and hold to copy) and we'll delete it for you and confirm by email. If you can't find your account ID, email us anyway and tell us what you remember, such as a VIN you added. Guest accounts have no other identifier, so we may not be able to find your data. You can also email us to ask what we hold on your account, and we'll send you a copy.

When your account is deleted, any credits it hasn't spent are written off; they aren't refunded. We keep the record of credits granted, spent and bought, without anything that links it to you or your cars (only counts, dates, product IDs and the store's transaction IDs), because we need it for our accounts. We also keep a scrambled code (a keyed hash) for each Apple or Google sign-in that received the free starter credits, so they're given once per sign-in. It can't be turned back into your sign-in.

Deleted data can remain in our host's database backups until those backups expire.

A guest account you stop using isn't deleted automatically. We keep its data until you ask us to delete it. If we ever start deleting unused guest accounts, we'll say how long we wait here first.

Security

The app talks to our servers over an encrypted (TLS) connection. Every request to our servers for your data needs your account's session, and the database only shows each account its own rows. Photos upload and load through private links that only your account is given and that expire within an hour. Photo files are private, stored under your account ID. Nothing is perfectly secure, and people who run the service can read the database to keep it working and to review reports.

Children

DecodeThis Experts is for adults (18 and over) and isn't meant for children. If you think a child has made an account, email us and we'll delete it.

Changes to this policy

This policy took effect on October 8, 2026. When it changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

VIN Hunter LLC: info@decodethis.com