Privacy Policy

O J WARD LIMITED (trading as Get My Mechanic, company number 17109823, registered office 35 Royds Road, Ashford, Kent, TN24 0DP) is the data controller for the personal data described in this Policy.

1. Personal data we collect

If you're a Customer: your name, email address, phone number (optional), the service address and other details you give us for a booking, your vehicle's registration and any other vehicle details you provide, your booking history and any messages you send a Mechanic through the Service, and any review you leave.

If you're a Mechanic: your contact name, business name (if applicable), email, phone, base postcode, business address, bio and experience details, your insurance provider/policy number/expiry date, and your proof-of-identity and insurance documents.

Payment details are not collected or stored by us at all. When you pay, you enter your card or Klarna details directly with our payment provider, Mollie — we only ever receive and store Mollie's own reference for your payment, the payment method used, the amount, and its status. If you pay by Klarna, Klarna separately collects what it needs to run its own credit and affordability checks, directly with Klarna — we don't see that.

2. How we use your data, and our legal basis

• Creating and managing your account, processing your booking, matching you with a Mechanic, taking payment — performance of a contract with you.
• Vetting a Mechanic's identity and insurance before approval — performance of a contract, and our legitimate interest in platform safety.
• Login security and fraud prevention — legitimate interest.
• Responding to support requests and complaints — legitimate interest and performance of a contract.
• Complying with tax and accounting law — legal obligation.

We do not carry out any marketing by email or SMS, and we don't use your data for advertising or profiling. We have no marketing emails, no SMS, and no analytics or tracking of any kind on this site — there is nothing to opt out of.

3. Who we share your data with

Mollie processes your payment on our behalf, but for payment processing Mollie acts as an independent data controller in its own right, not as our processor — it decides how your payment data is processed, under its own privacy policy (mollie.com/legal/privacy), separately from this one. Mollie is based in the Netherlands (EEA); for anything it processes outside the EEA, it uses EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

We also share data with the following processors, each only for the purpose stated, acting on our instructions and never selling your data. Where a provider is based outside the UK, we've stated the safeguard it uses:

• Resend (sending you booking, receipt, password-reset, and account-related emails) — United States, certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension.
• Vercel (hosting the website and application) — United States, uses the 2021 EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.
• Neon (storing the data described in this Policy) — our database is hosted in the UK (London); Neon's parent company is US-headquartered.
• Vercel Blob (storing Mechanics' identity/insurance documents privately — never publicly accessible) — same provider and safeguards as Vercel above.

4. Data retention

We keep personal data only as long as necessary for the purpose it was collected for. This reflects our current retention policy and commitment, which we are working towards enforcing fully in our systems.

• Account/profile data: anonymised as soon as you delete your account (we never fully delete the underlying record — see "Account deletion" below for why).
• Mechanic ID and insurance documents: deleted when an account is closed; for an application that's rejected or abandoned, our policy is to delete these within 6 months of inactivity.
• Bookings, quotes, and related messages: kept for 6 years after the job is completed or cancelled, in case of a legal dispute.
• Payments, refunds, cancellation charges and invoices: kept for 6 years, as required by UK tax law.
• Reviews: kept indefinitely as an ongoing part of the service; the reviewer's name is anonymised if their account is later deleted.
• Login security records: our policy is to keep these for 12 months.
• Password-reset links: our policy is to delete these 90 days after use or expiry.
• Admin records of platform actions: kept for 6 years, for accountability.

What's automated today: account anonymisation on deletion, and Mechanic document deletion on account closure. What is currently a manual/periodic process, not yet automatically enforced by our systems: cleanup of login security records, unused password-reset links, and documents from rejected or abandoned Mechanic applications. We will update this Policy if and when that changes.

5. Account deletion

You can delete your Customer or Mechanic account yourself at any time (except while a booking is currently in progress, or — for Mechanics — while you're owed money that hasn't been paid out yet). When you do:

• Your name, email, phone, and address are replaced with anonymous placeholders — we do not keep a way to identify you from this record afterwards.
• Your account record itself is not deleted outright — only anonymised — because other records (invoices, past bookings, reviews) legally and legitimately need to keep working and cannot simply reference a deleted row.
• If you're a Mechanic, your ID and insurance documents are deleted outright, not just anonymised.
• Any reviews you've left remain visible, shown as "Deleted User".

6. Cookies

We only use cookies and similar technology that are strictly necessary to run the site — see our separate Cookie Policy for full detail.

7. Your rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to: access the personal data we hold about you; have inaccurate data corrected; ask us to erase your data (self-service account deletion does most of this immediately); restrict or object to certain processing; and receive your data in a portable format. We do not currently have a self-service tool for exporting your data — contact us and we'll handle this manually.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@getmymechanic.co.uk.

You also have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) — ico.org.uk, or 0303 123 1113.

8. Children

The Service is for users aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

9. Security

We take reasonable technical measures to protect your data, including password hashing, private (non-public) storage of sensitive documents, and rate-limiting on login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks.

10. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time; the current version and its effective date will always be published here.

11. Contact us

O J WARD LIMITED, 35 Royds Road, Ashford, Kent, TN24 0DP, United Kingdom. Email: hello@getmymechanic.co.uk.