PRIVACY & COOKIES

Your inspection information and privacy.

Seattle Vehicle Inspections uses the information you provide to arrange inspections, collect payment, maintain your account and deliver your report. For questions, call 206-843-7600.

Information needed for your inspection

Orders include customer name, phone and email; vehicle details; seller or dealership contact information; vehicle location; and any concerns you provide. Inspection records may include notes, measurements, photographs and video. Please obtain permission to share the seller’s details and arrange access.

Inquiry records

We keep private records of inspection inquiries so we can respond, record whether our service fits your needs, and link an inquiry to an inspection order. These may include contact details, notes, and how you tell us you found the business. Internal inquiry summaries do not send these details to advertising platforms.

Account, email, payment and hosting services

Supabase handles email sign-in, Resend delivers sign-in and report-ready emails, Square processes payments, and Sites provides website hosting and storage infrastructure. Square collects card and billing information on its checkout; this site does not store card details. Account cookies support sign-in and access to your reports. Inspection records are available to the inspector/admin and the signed-in customer account associated with that order.

Saved order progress on your device

Unfinished booking details can be saved in this browser for up to 24 hours after your last change so you can continue later. This functional storage may include the vehicle, seller and customer information you entered. It does not contain card details, sign-in codes, accepted terms or a guaranteed price. Use “Erase saved details” to remove it, especially on a shared device. After submitting an order, the browser keeps only a short-lived saved-order reminder to help you avoid creating the order twice.

Contact messages and business email

Contact-form messages include the name, email, optional phone number and message you provide. They are stored privately in our admin inbox so we can respond. Resend handles business email delivery and incoming mail. Cloudflare Turnstile checks contact submissions for abuse; a short-lived, hashed network identifier limits repeated submissions. Contact messages are not marketing subscriptions. Incoming email is displayed without remote images or active content.

Optional marketing email

Marketing email lists are kept separately from inspection-order communications. We record a subscriber’s email, any supplied name, and how permission was obtained. Resend manages marketing delivery and unsubscribe requests. Every marketing campaign includes an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop essential updates about your inspection. Placing an order or sending us a contact message does not automatically subscribe you.

Service-area ZIP lookup

If you check our coverage, we send the vehicle ZIP code you enter to Google Maps to identify its general location. For an eastern-area check, we may also request an approximate driving time between public I-5 corridor points and the ZIP area. This lookup does not send your name, email, VIN, full street address or our private base address. It provides general coverage guidance; call us if it cannot confirm your location.

Vehicle address verification

We use Google Maps to help verify the vehicle’s inspection address and plan travel, separately from optional advertising measurement. If mileage charging is enabled, driving distance from our private service base is also used to calculate the fee shown before payment. We do not send customer contact details, VINs or report findings with the route lookup. The quoted distance and any applicable charge are retained with the order for transaction records. Google’s privacy policy.

As you type a vehicle address, Google Places receives the partial address and an anonymous search-session token to suggest matching places. Selecting a suggestion retrieves the address components to fill the street, city, state and ZIP. This functional lookup does not send your name, email, phone number or inspection findings to Google. Manual address entry remains available.

Email address checks

During checkout, we check email format and look up the domain’s public mail records through Google Public DNS to help catch typos. Only the domain after @ is sent for that lookup, not your full email. This cannot verify that a particular mailbox exists or that you control it; account access still requires the secure email sign-in link or code.

VIN lookup

If you choose Decode VIN, we send the VIN to NHTSA’s vPIC service to retrieve manufacturer specifications. No customer or seller contact information is sent with that lookup. Reviewed specifications may be saved with your inspection report. VIN lookup results are not vehicle-history reports.

Google measurement

Unless you opt out, Google Analytics and Google Ads tags measure public-page visits and actions such as clicking our phone number or starting checkout. After Square verifies a completed payment, measurement may include the package, total and a transaction identifier to count purchases without counting them twice. To match a completed purchase to an ad click (Google “enhanced conversions”), the purchase confirmation page may also send the order email and phone number to Google, which Google receives in hashed form and uses only for conversion measurement. These services can receive cookie identifiers, browser/device information and network information. Google handles this information under its own privacy policies. We disable Google signals and ad personalization, and do not send customer names, vehicle identifiers, seller addresses or report findings as measurement events. Queries and sign-in tokens are excluded from measured page URLs.

Measurement tags load on public pages unless you choose “Opt out.” Opting out does not affect ordering an inspection. Use “Cookie preferences” on a public page to change your choice. Changing your choice does not delete data already received by Google. Read Google’s privacy policy.

Unless you opt out, we also count successful VIN lookups and continuation to ordering. An anonymous, short-lived lookup identifier links resulting orders and confirmed payments to the VIN tool for our private Marketing dashboard. These tracking events contain no VIN or contact details.

Unless you opt out, our private visitor dashboard counts public-page views, visits, approximate browser visitors, general device categories and broad traffic sources. Random browser and visit identifiers support these counts. It does not store IP addresses, full referring URLs or private account/report activity. Signed-in administrator visits are excluded from visitor reporting and Google measurement, including on public pages. You can opt out of measurement at any time.

Unless you opt out, the private Marketing dashboard also counts anonymous order-form progress and website-side checkout error categories. These events contain only random identifiers, step numbers, error categories and timestamps, not entered form contents. Signed-in administrators and test activity are excluded. Reports are retained for up to 90 days. Payment-card declines within Square are not captured by these website error events.

For tagged YouTube links, measurement also records the public video identifier. For up to 30 days on the same browser, we can associate an order with the most recent measured YouTube video visit. This helps our private Marketing dashboard show video visits and confirmed paid orders. It does not identify your YouTube account or send order details to YouTube. Opting out does not affect checkout.

ChatGPT Ads measurement

Unless you opt out, we may save an opaque ChatGPT ad click reference with your order and send a confirmed payment event to OpenAI. The event includes a unique event identifier, payment time, package, amount and currency. We do not send names, emails, phone numbers, VINs, seller addresses or report contents. Events opt out of future user-level personalization. Signed-in administrators and test orders are excluded. Pending events may retry for up to six days. Opting out does not affect ordering. Your choice applies when the order is placed; contact us before payment if you want to opt out for a saved order. OpenAI privacy policy.

Inspection writing and photo labels

We use OpenAI to help draft inspection summaries and label uploaded inspection photos and transcribe visible diagnostic fault codes and their on-screen descriptions, VINs, odometer readings, tire-tread measurements and paint-thickness measurements into the private report draft. Photos are processed to suggest short descriptions; our inspector reviews the report before sending it. We do not use this feature to identify people, and we instruct it not to include names, VINs, license plates or contact details in generated labels. VINs read from photos are used only in the vehicle-identification fields. These requests are sent with API response storage disabled.

Calls from Google ads

Unless you opt out, visitors arriving from an eligible Google ad may see a Google forwarding number that connects to our regular business phone. Both the displayed number and tap-to-call link are updated together. Google call reporting can process call details such as the caller’s phone number, start time, area code and duration to attribute calls to ads. We count a call lasting at least 60 seconds as a phone lead; it is not a paid inspection order. Optional call recording is turned off in our Google Ads account.

Private inspector app notifications

The inspector may opt into Apple push alerts for new business emails and confirmed paid orders. The site stores the app installation identifier and Apple device token for delivery. The signing key is encrypted on the server. Alerts contain only a generic message and an opaque record identifier; email contents and customer contact details remain inside the signed-in workspace. Apple and iPhone settings control delivery. Notifications can be disabled in iPhone Settings or the inspector’s notification settings.

Questions about your information

Call us to discuss access, corrections or deletion of your inspection information. Payment and business records may need to be retained for transaction and recordkeeping purposes.