Privacy Policy

The Car Meet Ltd ("we", "us", "our") is an independent used car dealership registered in England & Wales under company number 15205163. We are the data controller responsible for your personal information when you use this website or contact us about a vehicle.

We collect the following personal data when you choose to provide it:

• Contact and enquiry forms: your name, email address and telephone number, together with any message you write and the details of any vehicle you enquire about.
• Part-exchange and vehicle sourcing: your name, email address and telephone number, your vehicle's registration number and mileage, any notes you give us about its condition or service history, and up to eight photographs you upload of your vehicle.
• Customer reviews: the display name you provide, your star rating and the text of your review. Reviews are not published automatically; they are held as pending until a member of staff approves them.
• Staff portal: if you are a member of staff, your email address and password (stored securely and never in plain text) and your login activity.

We do not collect more personal information than is necessary for the purposes set out in this policy. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us so we can delete it.

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

• To respond to your enquiry, arrange a viewing or test drive, or provide a part-exchange valuation. Our lawful basis is taking steps at your request before entering into a contract (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
• To send you a reply where you have asked us to contact you. Our lawful basis is your consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), which you may withdraw at any time.
• To review, moderate and publish customer reviews. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in maintaining an honest and useful reviews section (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).
• To administer and protect the staff portal. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in securing our systems and business data (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers that help us run this website and respond to your enquiries. The providers we currently use are:

• Cloud hosting and authentication: the platform that hosts our database, user accounts and uploaded photographs.
• Email delivery: the service we use to send enquiry notifications to our team.
• Customer relationship management: on the part-exchange form only, your name, contact details, vehicle details, notes and the first photograph you upload are also sent to our CRM so we can follow up your request.

Each provider acts as a processor on our behalf and only processes your data to deliver the service to us. We may also disclose your information where required to do so by law.

Our hosting and email providers may process or store personal data in the European Economic Area or other regions outside the UK. Where this happens, the transfer is protected by appropriate safeguards, such as the International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or standard contractual clauses adopted under UK GDPR Article 46, together with any supplementary measures required to keep your data secure.

We keep your personal information only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this policy and to meet our legal obligations.

• Enquiries and part-exchange requests: we retain enquiry records for 12 months after your last contact with us, so we can respond to any follow-up and keep a record of our dealings. After that period we delete the enquiry record unless we are legally required to keep it for longer.
• Photographs: photographs uploaded as part of a part-exchange request are stored securely and removed when they are no longer needed for that valuation, and in any case no later than 12 months after your last contact with us.
• Reviews: approved reviews are kept while they remain published on the website; rejected or removed reviews are deleted.

Under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to:

• be informed about how we use your data;
• access a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate personal data corrected;
• request that we erase your personal data, in certain circumstances;
• restrict or object to how we process your data;
• receive a copy of your data in a portable format; and
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on it.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details below. If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk or by calling 0303 123 1113.

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information against unauthorised access, loss or misuse. Passwords are never stored in plain text, access to staff and customer data is restricted to authorised users, and our database is protected by row-level security policies. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, but we work to keep your data safe.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your personal data, please contact us:

• Email: enquiries@thecarmeet.co.uk
• Phone: 07307 479816
• Address: The Car Meet Ltd, Unit 1 Bright Road, Eccles, Manchester, M30 0WG