Legal
Retention & deletion policy
Last updated: Draft — pending owner sign-off
This page explains what happens to your data while your account is active, what happens when you delete a vehicle, document or your account, and how long copies can remain in backups.
While your account is active
Your vehicles, documents, MOT lookups, extracted data, corrections, reminders, activity records and (where applicable) billing records are kept for as long as your account exists, so your archive stays complete.
Deleting a document or vehicle
Deleting a document or vehicle removes its active product records immediately. Associated files are also removed from private storage. If an individual file cannot be removed at once, it is recorded for cleanup. Deletions of this kind are recorded in workspace activity so admins can see what changed and by whom.
Deleting your account
You can permanently delete your account from Settings → Delete account. This requires you to type your email address and a confirmation phrase, and removes your vehicles, documents and uploaded files, MOT history, service records, parts, costs, advisories, reminders, timeline entries and preferences. You are signed out immediately and cannot sign back in with that account. The action itself (not its contents) is recorded in an audit trail: an actor reference, target, timestamp, result and correlation ID, with no personal content stored in that record.
Our intended policy is to disable access promptly after a valid deletion request and remove account, vehicle, user-visible product activity, uploaded documents and extracted document content from active systems within 30 days, unless the law requires retention. The self-service process normally removes active database records immediately.
Publication blocker
The intended maximum for necessary security and audit evidence is 12 months after closure, followed by deletion or irreversible anonymisation. This limit is not yet enforced for every audit, rate-limit and platform-log source. Account-level storage failures also lack a durable automatic retry. The 30-day and 12-month commitments must not be treated as operationally guaranteed until those controls are completed and verified.
Backups
Our database provider takes routine backups for disaster recovery. Deleted information may remain inaccessible within rotating backups until those backups expire.
Publication blocker
Maximum backup retention period: unconfirmed. It must be verified against the actual database and storage backup behaviour before this page is published.
Billing records
Where a workspace has billing history, subscription and payment records are kept for as long as required by applicable UK law for accounting and legal obligations. Payments are currently processed in Stripe test mode only.
DVSA MOT data
MOT history is fetched from DVSA at the time you look it up and stored against your vehicle so it is available offline in your archive; it is not a live, continuously syncing feed.
Contact
To request deletion assistance beyond the self-service option, or to ask about retention, use Support & contact or email privacy@autoarchive.uk. This shared mailbox remains pending operational verification.