Privacy Policy

No accounts, no personal profile

AutoTCO never asks you to sign up, log in, or provide your name, email address, or any other identifying information. Every comparison you create is tied only to an anonymous session identifier, not to you.

What we store

The cars and assumptions you enter (ownership horizon, mileage, prices, and any other cost fields you fill in) are stored so your comparison can be reloaded from its share link and so we can calculate results, and nothing more. If you use the feedback form, the message you submit is stored as you wrote it; we don't ask for contact details.

Cookies and similar technology

We use only first-party cookies: no third party can read them. The strictly necessary ones remember choices you made here (consent, language, theme, currency and distance unit) and the session id that lets you reload your past comparisons; these need no consent because they only store what you yourself chose. Analytics cookies are set only if you accept them, and are deleted the moment you withdraw that consent.

Your choices

Refusing is one click, exactly like accepting, and you can change your mind at any time. Refusal means nothing optional is collected, not merely that it is anonymised. We also honour the Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals your browser can send: if either is set, no analytics data is collected even if consent was previously given.

Cookie preferences

Cookie consent and anonymized activity logs

If you accept analytics, we keep a basic log of actions (like adding a vehicle or exporting a comparison), linked to a persistent identifier so we can see that the same visitor took several actions. If you refuse, or have not yet chosen, no action log is written at all, with one exception: a message you send through the feedback form is transmitted and stored whichever choice you made, because sending it is what you asked for. It never carries a persistent identifier unless you accepted analytics.

Separately from the above, our servers keep a short technical record of the requests they handle: the address requested, whether it succeeded or failed, how long it took, and (when the request comes from our mobile app) which version of that app sent it, so we know when an old version can be retired. This is how we notice that something is broken or slow. It contains no other information about your browser or device, carries no identifier that links one request to another or to any earlier visit, and any reference to a saved comparison is masked before it is written. We keep these records for 30 days. They are kept on the basis of our legitimate interest in operating a working service, the same basis as the access log of the web server itself, and so they do not depend on your choice above.

Technical information about your browser

With analytics consent, and once per session, we record a technical snapshot to help us support the range of devices people actually use: your browser and operating system name and version, device type, preferred languages, the theme and units you selected, the names (never the contents) of the cookies you carry, the site you arrived from, screen and window size, processor cores, device memory, connection type, supported image and video formats, and your privacy signals. Your IP address is truncated before it is stored: the last part of an IPv4 address, and everything after the first three groups of an IPv6 one, is discarded, so it identifies a network rather than a household. We never store your full IP address or your raw User-Agent string. Our mobile app records the same kind of snapshot, once per launch, with the fields a phone has instead of a browser's: device model, brand and manufacturer, operating system and build, app version, screen and window size, text scaling, device language, region, time zone and calendar, accessibility settings, total and free storage, and the advertising-consent status recorded by Google's consent tool. It carries no advertising identifier, no device serial number and no location.

How we use this data

Solely to run the comparison you asked for, to remember your preferences between visits, to keep the product working, and to understand in aggregate how it's used so we can improve it. We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Who else sees it

The AutoTCO website doesn't use any third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking services. Your data is processed on infrastructure we operate or contract directly (our hosting provider is OVH, in France), and isn't shared with any other company for their own purposes. The one exception is the mobile app's advertising, described in the next section.

In the mobile app

The AutoTCO app for Android and iOS saves and calculates comparisons exactly like the website, and is funded by advertising: it shows full-screen ads, for example when you open it. Those ads are served by Google AdMob, which acts as an independent controller: to deliver, limit and measure them, Google's software on your device receives your device's advertising identifier, your IP address and your interactions with the ads, under Google's own privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy). When you first open the app, it asks whether ads may be personalised using your data. Google's consent form may also ask for the consent its advertising requires, and on iOS Apple's tracking prompt asks as well; ads are personalised only if you agree to all of them. Saying no to personalisation in the app still shows ads, just not personalised ones; refusing in Google's form means no ad is requested at all. You can change the app's choice at any time under "Privacy choices" on its Support tab, and reset or delete your advertising identifier in your phone's settings. The rest of this page applies to the app too, except for cookies, which the app doesn't use.

How long we keep it

Technical snapshots and action logs are deleted 14 months after they are recorded, which is the maximum the French data protection authority allows for audience measurement. Saved comparisons have no automatic expiry, because their share link is how you get back to them: they are kept until you ask us to delete one, by writing to admin@autotco.net with its share link. You can erase everything stored on this device immediately using the button below.

Your rights

Because comparisons and logs aren't tied to your identity, we generally have no way to look up “your” data by name or email. You can erase everything held on this device yourself, right here. To ask about data held on our servers, write to admin@autotco.net, quoting the share link or session concerned. Without it, the anonymous design of the product means there is genuinely nothing we can search.

Children

AutoTCO isn't directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect data from anyone below the age of digital consent in their country.

Changes to this policy

We may update this page as the product changes. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date at the top.

Contact

Questions about this policy, and requests to access or delete data, can be sent to admin@autotco.net.