Privacy policy

Roadworthy is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the DVLA, DVSA, the Motor Insurers' Bureau, or any government body.

Your camera

The camera is optional. You can type a registration instead and refuse the permission outright — every screen that offers the camera also offers a field, so nothing in the app is behind that prompt.

If you do use it, plate recognition runs entirely on your device using Google ML Kit. Images are never uploaded, never stored, and never sent anywhere. Only the registration you confirm is used, and only to perform a lookup.

Lawful basis: consent — you grant the permission, and the app works without it.

Tax and vehicle details

When you check a vehicle, your device contacts DVLA's public Vehicle Enquiry Service (vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk) directly to retrieve tax status, make, colour and specification. That request comes from your device and your connection — it does not pass through us.

Information published there is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests — providing the check you asked for

MOT history

MOT test history comes from DVSA's MOT History API. Reaching that service requires credentials, and credentials built into an app can be extracted from it — so this one request passes through a small server we operate, which holds the credentials and forwards the lookup on your behalf.

That server receives the registration and nothing else. No photograph, no location, no account, no device identifier and no advertising identifier. It keeps no database of vehicles and builds no history of what you have looked up.

One retention point, stated plainly rather than buried: our hosting provider (Cloudflare) records the address of each incoming request so we can see the service is working, and that address contains the registration. Those records are deleted automatically after three days. They exist so we can notice a fault — for example DVSA changing something — before it affects you. They are not linked to you, your device or your advertising identifier, and are never used to build a profile.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests — providing the check you asked for, and keeping the service working

Vehicles you save

Saving a vehicle stores its full check — registration, make, model, colour, tax and MOT status, specification and MOT history — only on your device, so you can open it again without another lookup. It is not backed up to us and not synced. Deleting a vehicle, or the app, removes it.

Your recent checks

The app keeps a list of vehicles you have checked recently so you can find them again from the home screen. This list is held only on your device, is limited to the 50 most recent checks, and older entries are discarded automatically as new ones arrive.

You can clear it at any time in the app, and uninstalling removes it. Nothing in it is sent to us.

Location

Location is optional. If you allow it, your device's position is converted to a street and town so a report can be completed; you can also type the address yourself and refuse the permission entirely.

Your location is used at that moment and is not stored or transmitted to us. It is included in a report only if you submit one.

For a no-MOT report only, your coordinates are also sent from your device to two public services, to work out which police force covers that place:

• postcodes.io, to establish whether it is in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• data.police.uk, the Home Office's own service, to identify the covering force.

Both receive a latitude and longitude and nothing else — no registration, no identifier, and nothing that links the request to you or to the vehicle. Neither request happens unless you open a no-MOT report, and the app falls back to a national page if they fail. Both are free public services published under the Open Government Licence.

Lawful basis: consent — you grant the permission, and the app works without it

Reporting a vehicle

If you choose to report a vehicle, the details you have reviewed on screen go from your device to the relevant authority. Nothing is submitted without you acting, and we never submit on your behalf.

The two routes work differently, and the app tells you which one you are on:

• Untaxed goes to DVLA, submitted from the app when you tap submit.
• No MOT goes to the police, because DVLA and DVSA cannot act on a missing MOT. The app copies the details to your clipboard and opens your police force's own reporting form in your browser. You fill it in and submit it. Nothing is sent by the app.

Those submissions are governed by the receiving authority's own privacy notice, and once you are on a police website you are subject to that force's. DVLA's untaxed vehicle reports are anonymous to the vehicle keeper.

We are not told whether your report was accepted. It goes from your device to the authority, and no copy reaches us.

Insurance checks

Selecting "Check insurance" opens the Motor Insurers' Bureau's own service inside the app. We do not perform the check and do not see the result. You interact with MIB directly and their privacy notice applies. This is offered only for vehicles you have told us are yours, because MIB permit it only in that case.

Advertising

The app shows advertising supplied by Google AdMob.

Advertising is a separate purpose from vehicle checking, and asks separately for your consent. In the UK and EEA you are shown a consent form before any advertising identifier is collected. If you refuse, the app works normally without ads.

Google may collect a device advertising identifier and related data to serve and measure ads. See Google's own privacy policy for what they do with it.

Advertising never receives vehicle data. No registration, make, model, colour, location or report content is shared with advertisers or used for ad targeting. This is enforced in the code, not merely as a policy: the advertising component cannot access vehicle data, and an automated test fails the build if that separation is broken.

You can change or withdraw your choice at any time through Privacy options in the app's About screen.

Lawful basis: consent

Your rights

Roadworthy is available in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the UK, UK GDPR gives you rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction and objection. In Ireland, the EU General Data Protection Regulation gives you the same rights.

If you are unhappy with how your data is handled, you can complain to the data protection regulator: the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or the Data Protection Commission in Ireland. We would welcome the chance to put it right first, so please contact us too.

We hold no account and no profile of you, so most of these are exercised directly on your device: delete saved vehicles or clear your recent checks in the app, revoke permissions in Android settings, withdraw advertising consent through the app's privacy options, or uninstall.

The only record we hold anywhere else is the three-day request log described under MOT history. It contains a registration and no identifier for you, so we generally cannot connect it to a person in order to answer a request about it — but if you believe an entry relates to you, contact us and we will help where we can.

For data held by DVLA, DVSA or MIB, contact them directly — they are the controllers of their own records.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Children

Roadworthy is not directed at children and should not be used by anyone under 13.

Changes to this policy

If the data flows change, this page changes with them and the date above is updated.

The previous version of this page said the most likely such change would be lookups moving to a server we operate. That has now happened, for MOT history only, and is described above. Tax and vehicle details still go directly from your device to DVLA.

Contact

Happy Path Apps — happypathapps@gmail.com