Privacy and your photographs

Your photographs are resized in your own browser, which also strips the location data your camera writes into them. They are then sent to a vision model to be read, and the verdict is streamed straight back to you. This site does not store your photographs, does not keep your verdict, sets no cookies, and runs no analytics or advertising trackers.

The part that is not in this site’s hands is the model provider: once a photograph is sent for reading, that provider’s own retention policy applies to it for as long as they hold it.

Lookbeforeyoubuyacar, is the controller for the information described here. For anything on this page, including a request to delete something, write to hello@lookbeforeyoubuyacar.com.

Only what you put in, plus the minimum the server needs to work:

• the photographs and videos you attach
• the car details you type: registration or VIN, odometer reading, asking price, seller type, and your free-text notes
• your email address, if you give one so a verdict can be sent to you
• your IP address, held in the server’s memory for up to ten minutes purely to enforce the rate limit, and not written to a database
• server error logs, which record what went wrong and what a provider returned — they do not contain your photographs

There is no account to create, no password, no profile, and nothing is built up about you between visits.

Step by step, when you press send: each image is redrawn in your browser at a smaller size and re-encoded, which removes the EXIF metadata block — including GPS coordinates, camera serial and timestamps. The resized copies and your typed details are posted to this site’s server, which holds them in memory only.

The server passes them to OpenRouter, which routes the request to the model that reads them — by default Anthropic’s Claude, falling back to another provider if Claude is unavailable. The model’s answer is streamed back through the server to your browser as it is written. Nothing is saved to disk at any point on this site, and your photographs are never used to train anything by this site.

OpenRouter and the model provider process the images under their own terms and retention policies, which are outside this site’s control. If that matters to you — and on a photograph that may show a stranger’s driveway, it reasonably might — read OpenRouter’s privacy policy and that of the provider before you send anything.

Practical advice, not legalese: crop out anything you do not need read. The model needs the sill, the gap, the dipstick or the dashboard. It does not need the house number, the neighbours, or the seller.

When you tick off shots in the walkthrough, those ticks are stored in your browser under the key lbybac.shots.v1. They never leave your device, are not readable by this site’s server, and clearing your browser data removes them.

This site sets no cookies and includes no analytics, advertising or social media trackers.

Your photographs and car details are processed to perform the task you asked for — producing a verdict. Your IP address is processed in memory for the legitimate interest of keeping the service available and preventing one person from exhausting the model budget. An email address, where given, is used to send you the verdict you asked for and nothing else.

• photographs, car details and verdicts: not stored by this site at all — they exist in memory for the length of the request
• IP addresses: up to ten minutes, in memory, for rate limiting
• server error logs: for as long as the hosting provider retains them, currently 7days
• email: only where you asked for a verdict to be sent, and deleted on request

The model providers reached through OpenRouter operate outside the UK and the EEA, principally in the United States. Sending photographs for a verdict involves transferring them there, under the safeguards in those providers' terms.

You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to processing, or ask for it to be restricted. Because this site stores almost nothing, most such requests are answered quickly and in the negative — there is usually nothing to hand over.

Write to hello@lookbeforeyoubuyacar.com. If you are unhappy with the response, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or to the supervisory authority where you live.

This site is not intended for anyone under 18 and should not be used by them.

If what happens to a photograph changes — a different model provider, storage of any kind, anything at all — this page changes first, and the date at the top of it changes with it.