Privacy notice

• The full route of a drive is private by default and is never included in anything you share, whoever you share it with.
• We never sell trip, location or driving-behaviour data — not to advertisers, not to insurers, not to data brokers.
• This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics, advertising or tracking scripts of any kind.
• Joining the waitlist gives us your email address and nothing else you didn’t type in. No IP address, no device fingerprint, no referrer.
• You can ask for a copy of your data, or ask us to delete it, by emailing privacy@properdrives.com.

Proper Drives (“we”, “us”) is a pre-launch iOS app and this website. For the purposes of UK data protection law we are the data controller for the information described here. Proper Drives is based in the United Kingdom and the app is aimed at people driving on UK roads.

This notice covers two things: the waitlist on this website, and the Proper Drives app itself. Where something applies to only one of them, it says so.

If you put your name down for the beta, we store the email address you gave us, anything optional you chose to add — roughly where you drive, the name of your club, whether you help organise it — and the date you signed up. That’s the entire record.

The optional answers exist for one reason: we’re opening the beta a few clubs at a time, and they decide the order. Leaving them blank costs you nothing.

What we don’t record

We don’t log your IP address, browser, device, referring page or search terms against your entry, and we don’t place a cookie or an identifier of any kind on your device. A page advertising a privacy-first product shouldn’t quietly know more about a visitor than the app knows about a member.

What we do with it

We send you one acknowledgement when you sign up, and one invitation when a place opens. There is no newsletter. Our lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw whenever you like by replying to either email or writing to privacy@properdrives.com — we’ll take you off the list and confirm it. We keep waitlist entries until the app is publicly launched or you ask us to remove yours, whichever comes first, and then delete the lot.

Because anyone can type anyone’s address into a form, the site never confirms whether a given address is already on the list, and someone who has asked to come off can’t be put back on by a stranger re-submitting their address — that takes an email from the address itself.

Our host keeps short-lived operational logs of requests to this site, which include IP addresses, in the way every web server does. They exist to keep the site up and to spot abuse, they aren’t joined to your waitlist entry or to any account, and we don’t use them to build a picture of visitors. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in running a working, secure service.

None of this applies until you create an account in the app, which nobody can do yet — the beta hasn’t opened. It’s here now because you should be able to decide whether to join the waitlist knowing what joining the app would mean.

Your account

Your email address, a username, and your password stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never hold the password itself. Optionally an avatar and a short bio.

Your garage

The vehicles you add: make, model, year, an optional nickname and build notes. If you add a car by registration plate, that plate is sent to the DVLA and DVSA to look up the vehicle’s details; we store what comes back, not the plate.

Your drives

For each drive you record: the GPS track, the distance, how long it took, when it started and finished, and anything you added yourself — a title, notes, the car you took. The track is uploaded in pieces while you drive, so a long drive survives a crash or a dead phone; the pieces are stitched together and discarded when the drive is finished.

Your privacy zones

The circles you draw around home, work or anywhere else sensitive: a label, a centre point and a radius. These are visible only to you, and are used to cut those areas out of anything you share.

Your position while driving

If — and only if — you’ve turned on live location for a club, we hold your last known position while you’re recording: one row, overwritten each time it updates. It is deliberately impossible for this to become a history of where you’ve been, because each update replaces the one before it. Inside one of your own privacy zones the row is deleted rather than frozen, so you disappear near home instead of leaving a marker at the edge of it.

Clubs and the social side

Which clubs you’re in and your role in them, which drives and plans you’ve shared with which club, your RSVPs to club runs, your comments and reactions, the challenges you’ve joined, and the badges you’ve earned. Your badges are private: there is no screen anywhere that shows anyone else’s.

Photos

Images you upload are stored with our media host. Location data embedded in a photo file is stripped on upload — a shot of your car on the drive shouldn’t quietly carry your front door with it.

This is the part that matters most, so it gets its own section.

• The full-precision track of a drive is owner-only. No feed, no club, no shared recap, no export ever includes it.
• What a shared recap shows is a simplified preview line — the shape of the drive — with everything inside your privacy zones cut out first, and with entry and exit trimmed.
• Trimming is applied when a drive is read, not when it’s shared, so a zone you draw tonight also protects a drive you shared last month.
• Shared recaps show the day a drive happened, not the clock time, and a named place or region rather than an address.
• Sharing is per club and per drive. Nothing is public: there is no public feed, and no way for someone who isn’t in a club with you to see your drives.
• Recording only ever starts because you tapped Record. The app does not watch for journeys in the background and does not ask for “always” location access.

• Consent — the waitlist, and live location sharing with a club, which is off until you turn it on and can be turned off again at any time.
• Performance of a contract — your account, your drives, your garage, your clubs. These are the service; without them there is nothing to provide.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure and working, preventing abuse, and dealing with reports about content. We’ve weighed these against your interests and kept them narrow.

We use a small number of suppliers to run the service. They process data on our instructions, under contract, and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes.

• Vercel — hosting for this website and the app’s API.
• Neon — the database everything described above is stored in.
• Cloudflare R2 — storage for photos and recap images.
• Resend — sending the handful of emails we send: waitlist acknowledgements, beta invitations, password resets.
• Apple — the App Store and TestFlight, through which the beta is distributed. Apple’s own terms apply to that relationship.
• DVLA and DVSA — UK government vehicle-data services, which receive a registration plate when you look one up and return the vehicle’s details.
• A mapping, search and routing provider — when you search for a destination or plan a route, the search text and the coordinates involved are sent to it to get an answer back. Recorded drive tracks are never sent.

We ask our suppliers to keep data in the UK or the European Economic Area wherever they offer that choice. Some of them are US companies, so some processing happens outside the UK; where it does, transfers are covered by the safeguards UK data protection law requires, such as the International Data Transfer Agreement or an adequacy decision.

• Waitlist entries — until public launch, or until you ask us to remove yours.
• Your account and your drives — for as long as your account exists. Delete your account and they go with it.
• Live position — one row, overwritten as you move and removed when you stop sharing. Never a history.
• Part-uploaded route pieces — deleted as soon as the drive they belong to is finished.
• Password reset links — the link itself is never stored, only a hash of it, and it expires within the hour.

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the data we hold about you, in a portable form;
• correct anything that’s wrong;
• delete your data, or restrict what we do with it;
• stop relying on legitimate interests where you object, and withdraw any consent you’ve given.

Email privacy@properdrives.com and we’ll deal with it within one month. There’s no charge. If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled it you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, though we’d rather you gave us the chance to put it right first.

Proper Drives is not for children. You must be 16 or over to join the waitlist or to have an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we’ll delete it.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Passwords are stored as hashes, never in a form we could read. Reset links are single-use, short-lived and stored only as hashes, so a copy of our database couldn’t be used to take over an account. Access to production data is limited to the people who need it to run the service.

When this changes we’ll update the date at the top. If a change is significant — especially anything that widens what we collect or who we share it with — we’ll tell people by email rather than hoping they re-read the page.

Data questions: privacy@properdrives.com. Anything else: hello@properdrives.com. See also our terms of service and community guidelines.