Privacy

CarKnown keeps a record of what happened to a vehicle. That record is public by design. This page says plainly what goes into it, what stays out, and what we keep about you.

You do not need an account to look up a VIN, and we do not ask who you are. Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs — the request, an IP address, a timestamp — which we use to keep the service running and to spot abuse. We do not use those logs to build a profile of you, and we do not run advertising trackers on this site.

We do count pageviews, so we know which pages are read and whether the site is reaching anyone. That counting is done by our hosting provider's analytics, served from this domain. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier that can follow you to another site, and records nothing about which VIN you looked up. We use it to see totals, not people.

A vehicle record describes a vehicle, not a person. What is published is the work itself: what the technician found, the labor performed, part names and grades, the odometer or hour meter reading and its unit, trouble codes read from the vehicle, tests and measurements taken, the date, and the shop's business name. Photographs and scope captures stay with the shop; only how many there are and a fingerprint of each file is published, never the image.

Customer names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses are not part of a sealed record and never reach CarKnown. Neither are prices, costs, or vendors — what a repair cost is between the shop and its customer. Nor is the name of the individual technician: a record identifies the shop that stands behind the work, not the person who did it.

The customer's own words are not published either. A work order usually opens with what the owner reported — “it pulls left”, “ring me when it's ready” — written down by whoever took the call. That is the one place on a repair order where a person's name or number reliably ends up, and it is not a description of the work. CarKnown reads it to work out what kind of job the record describes, and shows a reader the repair instead.

All of that is enforced, not merely asked for. A submission carrying a prohibited field, or an email address or telephone number written into any text, is refused outright and nothing from it is stored — the partner is told exactly what to remove and has to send the record again without it. A record is checked at the door because a published record cannot be withdrawn.

Vehicle records are public and are intended to be found, including by search engines. A VIN is a property identifier rather than a personal one, but a vehicle can of course be associated with a person by someone who already knows the connection. That is the tradeoff the product exists to make, and it is why the personal fields above never enter the record.

Sealed records are permanent, which is the entire point: a history that can be quietly edited is worth nothing. A shop can correct its own record, and the correction is sealed alongside the original with both kept visible — nothing is rewritten or deleted.

Publication is one-way. A sealed record is never withdrawn — not by the shop, not by us, and not because someone later changes their mind about it. The one exception is a legal demand, in which case the record's contents are removed and its seal is kept so the removal is visible. That is why consent has to be settled before a record is sent, and why CarKnown refuses personal information at the door rather than promising to remove it afterwards: the honest way to keep a person out of a permanent record is not to let them in.

A shop that published a record in error — against the wrong vehicle, twice, or as test data — can mark it as published in error. The record stays sealed and visible, marked as such, and no longer counts as part of the vehicle's history.

If you believe a record is inaccurate, contains personal information, or belongs to another vehicle, write to privacy@carknown.com and we will investigate with the shop that published it. The outcome is a correction from the shop, the record being marked as published in error, or the record standing as published. Depending on where you live you may have rights to access or request deletion of personal information; contact us and we will tell you what we hold.

Partners authenticate with an API key and are responsible for having their customer's agreement to share a service record before sending it. We keep each submission exactly as it arrived, so a record can always be traced to the partner and moment it came from.

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top of this page. Questions go to privacy@carknown.com.

This policy is written to describe what CarKnown actually does, in plain language. It is not legal advice, and it has not been reviewed by counsel — if CarKnown begins operating at scale or across jurisdictions with specific requirements, have a lawyer review it. Terms of use →