Privacy Policy — VIN Decoder: VIN Scanner
Effective date: July 10, 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how VIN Decoder: VIN Scanner ("the app", "we", "us") collects, uses, stores, and deletes information when you use the app on iOS.
No account, no login
The app does not have a login screen and does not use Sign in with Apple or any other identity provider. Instead, the app identifies your purchases and report history using an anonymous app account token generated by Apple's StoreKit 2 on your device. This token is not tied to your name, email address, or Apple ID, and we cannot use it on its own to identify you personally.
Information we collect
We collect only what is required to sell and deliver VIN decoding reports and to support purchases:
- Anonymous app account token — the StoreKit 2 identifier described above.
- Apple transaction identifiers — the transaction and original transaction identifiers Apple assigns to each purchase, used to verify purchases server-side and to prevent duplicate crediting.
- Purchase history — which consumable report packs or auto-renewable Pro subscription you bought, the product identifier, purchase date, and status (including refund/revocation status when Apple reports it to us).
- Credit ledger — how many report credits you purchased, reserved, spent, or have remaining, and your Pro subscription entitlement status.
- Report history — records of the VIN reports you have generated: decoded make, model, and model year, the decoded specification data returned by NHTSA vPIC, and any recall campaign data returned by NHTSA for that make/model/year.
- The VIN you scan or enter — see "How we handle your VIN" below for exactly how this is stored.
- Basic technical signals for abuse prevention — our backend and hosting infrastructure may transiently process signals such as IP address and device-level request signals to apply per-account, per-device, and per-IP rate limits and fair-use limits and to prevent automated scraping or credit fraud. These signals are used for that operational purpose and are not compiled into a marketing or advertising profile.
- Crash reports — if you have enabled diagnostics sharing at the iOS level, Apple may share crash reports with us; we do not operate our own separate crash-reporting SDK for the purpose of this policy beyond what iOS itself provides.
We do not require or collect your name, email address, phone number, or physical address to use the app. There is no advertising in the app and we do not use advertising SDKs.
How we handle your VIN
Protecting the VIN you scan is a core design constraint of this app, not an afterthought:
- The VIN is validated on your device before anything is sent to our servers.
- The VIN is never sent to any third-party analytics service, in any form.
- When a report is generated, our server does not store your VIN as plain text. It stores a one-way HMAC-SHA256 cryptographic hash of the VIN (used to detect duplicate lookups) and a separately encrypted copy of the VIN, protected with an encryption key that is kept outside of the database and is accessible only to backend systems that need it to reconstruct your report or assist you with support, with an internal audit trail of that access.
- Any VIN that appears in our support tools or error/diagnostic logs is redacted to a partial form (for example,
1HG**********4352) or represented only by its hash — never logged in full. - A saved report is also cached locally in the app's on-device storage so you can view it without a network connection; deleting the app or using the in-app deletion controls described below removes this local copy.
Why we process this information
We process the information above for the following purposes, which serve as our legal basis for processing:
- Performance of our contract with you — to sell and deliver the report you purchased, to track your remaining credits or subscription status, to let you restore purchases on a new device, and to provide customer support related to a purchase.
- Legitimate interests — to prevent fraud and abuse of the fair-use limits on report generation, to keep the service reliable, and to maintain the minimal financial records needed for accounting integrity.
- Legal obligation — to keep transaction and accounting records that Apple's in-app purchase terms and applicable tax/accounting law require us to retain.
Because there is no advertising and no marketing profile built from your data, we do not process personal data on the basis of interest-based advertising.
Where your data is processed
Report generation, the purchase ledger, and subscription entitlement are checked and recorded server-side; the app itself never writes directly to these records. Our backend runs on Supabase (Postgres database and Edge Functions), which acts as our hosting and data processor. Apple verifies and reports on in-app purchases and subscription status through its App Store Server systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) vPIC and recalls services are queried by our backend, after your purchase is confirmed, solely to obtain the factory specification decode and any recall campaigns matched to the decoded make, model, and model year. To perform the decode, our backend sends the VIN itself to NHTSA's public vPIC decoding service over an encrypted connection — that is what a VIN decode is; the separate recalls service receives only the decoded make, model, and model year, never the VIN. NHTSA is a public U.S. government data source we query — it is not a partner, sponsor, or endorser of this app, and it does not receive your purchase or account information from us.
Data retention
We keep report content, credit ledger entries, and purchase/subscription records for as long as your app account is active and for the period afterward needed to support Apple purchase disputes, refund handling, and applicable accounting/tax obligations. If you delete a report or your data through the controls below, we remove or cryptographically erase the corresponding VIN and report content promptly, while retaining only the minimal transaction and ledger entries described in "Your deletion rights."
Your deletion rights
The app gives you two deletion controls in Settings:
- Delete saved reports clears your local report history on this device and deletes the corresponding report records tied to your app account token on our server (including the encrypted VIN and report payload for those reports). It does not delete the minimal purchase transaction and credit ledger records needed to support Restore Purchases, refunds, and fraud prevention.
- Delete my data performs everything in "Delete saved reports" and additionally anonymizes support and audit information linked to your account that is not required for financial integrity. It still leaves in place the minimal transaction and ledger records necessary to preserve your purchase history, handle refunds, and restore your entitlement if you reinstall the app or move to a new device.
Both actions show a confirmation screen before anything is deleted, explaining what is removed and what minimal financial record is retained. You can request additional assistance with your data at the contact address below.
Third parties we share information with
- Apple processes your payment and subscription and provides us with transaction verification data; Apple's own privacy policy governs its handling of your payment details, which we never see directly.
- Supabase hosts our database and backend functions as our data processor and does not use your data for its own purposes.
- NHTSA receives the VIN when our backend queries its public vPIC decoding service after your purchase (this is required to decode the VIN), and only the decoded make, model, and model year when our backend queries its recalls service. NHTSA never receives your purchase or account information from us.
We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertising networks.
Children's privacy
This app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us at the address below so we can delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we make a material change to this policy — for example, if we add a new data source or feature that changes what we collect — we will update the effective date above and, where required, provide notice in the app.
Contact us
For privacy questions, deletion requests, or support related to your data, contact us at: [email protected]