Privacy policy

1. What we collect

When you create an account

Your name, email address and phone number. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and stored as a hash — we never see it and cannot recover it, only reset it.

When you book

Your rental dates, collection and return location, the vehicle you chose, and the price as it stood when you booked. We store the price rather than recalculating it later, so that what you agreed to cannot silently change.

Verification documents

Your driving licence and proof of insurance. These are held in a private storage bucket, are never publicly addressable, and are shown to staff only through short-lived signed links. Every document carries its own deletion date before it can be saved at all.

Payment

We do not store your card number, expiry date or security code. Card details go directly to Stripe. What we keep against your booking is Stripe’s reference for the transaction, the amount, the currency and the status. That is enough to issue a refund and not enough to charge a card anywhere else.

Your rental agreement

When you sign, we record the version of the terms you were shown, the time, your IP address and your browser’s user agent. This is the evidence federal e-signature law requires: it is what lets either of us prove years later precisely what was agreed.

Mileage

Recorded from the odometer at handover and again at return, so we can compare the distance driven against the allowance on your booking. We do not track your location. There is no live vehicle tracking in this service, and if that ever changes you will be told before it happens, not after.

Cookies

One, and it exists only to keep you signed in. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels. The cookie policy has the detail.

2. Why we hold it

Each thing we hold maps to a reason we can state plainly:

• To provide the rental — your account, booking, payment and agreement. Without these we cannot give you a car.
• To meet legal duties — verifying you are licensed and insured to drive, and keeping signed agreements for as long as the law requires.
• To protect the vehicle — the condition report and mileage readings, and reporting a theft or a collision where we are required to.
• To send you offers — only if you have asked us to. See the next section.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

3. Marketing email

If you give us your email address in exchange for a discount code, we store that address, the date and time you agreed, the exact wording you were shown, and where on the site you agreed. We store the wording itself rather than a version number, so that the record of what you consented to cannot drift away from what you actually saw.

The consent box is never pre-ticked. If you did not tick it, we do not have your consent and we do not email you offers.

Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in and takes effect immediately. Unsubscribing does not affect emails about a booking you have made — those are part of the rental, not marketing, and you will still receive them.

Marketing consent is entirely separate from having an account. You can unsubscribe and carry on booking, or book without ever subscribing.

4. Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers to run this business. They process data on our instructions and for no other purpose:

• Supabase — our database, sign-in and document storage.
• Stripe — card payments and refunds.
• Resend — sending email.
• Vercel — hosting this website.

Beyond those, we disclose personal information only where the law requires it — a court order, a subpoena, or reporting a stolen vehicle or a collision.

5. How long we keep it

Deletion is automated rather than promised. A scheduled job removes data that has reached the end of its period, and every verification document is stamped with its own deletion date at the moment it is uploaded — a document cannot be stored at all without one.

• Verification documents — deleted on the date set at upload. The file is removed from storage before the record of it is, so nothing is left orphaned in a bucket.
• Signed rental agreements — five years, as federal e-signature law requires.
• Account and booking history — seven years after your last booking, which is the window in which a claim or a tax question can still arise.
• Marketing subscriptions — until you unsubscribe. We then keep a record that you unsubscribed, so we do not email you again by accident.

6. Your rights

You can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of what we hold about you.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete your data.
• Stop sending you marketing, at any time.

We will be straight with you about one limit: we cannot delete a signed rental agreement or the payment record attached to it before its retention period ends, because we are required to keep those. Everything not under such an obligation can go, and we will tell you specifically what was kept and why rather than leaving you to guess.

To make a request, email us from the address on your account or use the contact form. A person will answer. We may need to confirm it is really you before acting on a request about someone’s data.

7. Security

Access to customer records is restricted at the database level rather than only in the application, so a bug in one page cannot expose another customer’s booking. Verification documents live in a private bucket and are reachable only through short-lived signed links. Card data never touches our servers.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach affects your data, we will tell you.

8. Contact us

Questions about this policy, or about what we hold on you — hello@ambercarrental.com, or the contact form.