Privacy Policy

SwitchGauge (“SwitchGauge”, “we”, “us”) is a car-management service that lets you keep your vehicles, service history, running costs and reminders in one place. SwitchGauge is operated by Data Science London.

For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR we are the data controller for the personal data described in this notice. Our registered address is available on request while our company details are being finalised.

Questions, requests and complaints: admin@switchgauge.com.

We collect only what the service needs to work. In practice that is:

• Account data — your email address, display name, profile picture if you upload one, and your preferences (units, language, currency, theme). Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and are never visible to us.
• Security and session data — sign-in times, the authentication method used, IP address, browser and device description for each session. This is what powers the login-history screen and lets you revoke a session you do not recognise.
• Vehicle data — everything you record about your cars: make, model, year, registration and identification details, mileage, service visits, maintenance plans, parts and modifications, fault codes and issues, fuel and cost entries, plus any photos or documents you upload.
• Billing data — your subscription tier, trial and renewal status, and the customer and subscription identifiers issued by our payment processor. We never see or store your card number; that goes directly to Stripe.
• Location data — described separately in section 3, because it is the most sensitive thing here and it works differently from the rest.
• AI assistant and diagnosis data — if you use an AI feature, the text and vehicle context you submit is sent to the AI provider to generate a response. We log the time, model, token counts and estimated cost so you can see your usage against your plan. Chat conversations with the assistant and generated issue diagnosis advice are saved to your account so you can pick them up again on any device; you can delete any conversation at any time (which removes its messages immediately), and issue diagnosis advice is removed when its issue or your account is deleted.
• Support and email data — messages you send us, and delivery events for the reminder and notification emails we send you.
• Product analytics (page views) — Vercel Web Analytics records the pages that are viewed, including page changes inside the app. Each page view may store its time, the page address (we remove query strings and replace account, car, invitation and other identifiers with placeholders before it is sent), the referring page, the country, region and city it came from, your device’s operating system and version, browser and version, device type, and the version of the analytics script. No account identifier is sent with it and no cookies are used: Vercel recognises a visit by a hash created from the incoming request, and discards that visitor session after 24 hours.

We do not use advertising trackers or behavioural profiling for advertising, and we do not sell personal data or share it with data brokers. The product analytics above is used only to understand how the app is used and to improve it.

SwitchGauge uses two very different kinds of location, and treats them differently.

Approximate location from your IP address

When your browser loads the dashboard, our hosting provider tells our server the approximate city your connection appears to come from, derived from your IP address. We use this for one thing: showing local weather on the dashboard when precise location is unavailable. Separately, Vercel Web Analytics records the country, region and city of each page view, as described under product analytics above.

These coordinates are a city or network centroid — they identify roughly which city a connection is routed through, not where you are. They can be several kilometres out, and on mobile networks or a VPN they can name the wrong city entirely. We label anything derived this way as approximate. We do not store this location; it is used for the weather lookup and then discarded.

Precise location from your device (GPS)

Precise location is off unless you turn it on. Two independent things must both be true before we ever read it: you enable location in your SwitchGauge settings, and your browser or operating system grants permission when it asks.

With location enabled, we record a point only while the app is open, and only when both:

• at least 20 minutes have passed since the last recorded point, and
• you have moved more than 250 metres, or the accuracy of the reading has materially improved.

We never record a continuous track, never collect in the background, and stop immediately when you close the app or switch location off. A stationary session typically produces a single point. Each point stores the coordinates, an accuracy figure, the source, the time, the vehicle selected at the time, and the version of this notice you consented under.

Location history is kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. You can view your history, delete it in full at any time, and withdraw consent from Settings. Withdrawing consent stops collection immediately.

When a map is displayed, Mapbox receives the browser request for the tiles needed to draw that map. This includes your IP address and the requested map area and zoom level. It does not receive your complete location history as a separate dataset, and showing a map does not collect a new GPS point.

If you deliberately request route guidance, we send Mapbox the exact origin and destination you chose to calculate that route. That disclosure is remembered on your account so we do not ask again until you switch it off in Settings or this notice changes. We do not store the route, its geometry, or its turn list on SwitchGauge servers. The last preview stays on this device until you tap Clear route or sign out. We do keep a no-coordinate route-usage record tied to your account (your plan, whether the request found a route, and its time) for 90 days to enforce the monthly allowance and investigate aggregate service use.

Commercial Fleet Telemetry & Driver Location Disclosures

1. Decoupled Telemetry Architecture:

SwitchGauge operates two strictly segregated operational telemetry streams for commercial fleet vehicles:

• Presence Heartbeat: A lightweight heartbeat signal transmitted every 60 seconds during an active vehicle checkout session. The presence heartbeat transmits session state and operational availability only (driving vs. idle, app foreground status). Under no circumstances does the presence heartbeat capture, transmit, or store geographic coordinates, GPS readings, or location data.
• Opt-in GPS Telemetry: Real-time vehicle location coordinates, speed, and GPS accuracy are captured ONLY when BOTH:

(a) The employer organization has explicitly enabled location sharing and signed the statutory Employer Legal Acknowledgement, AND (b) The driver has affirmatively opted in to share location during that specific vehicle checkout session. Drivers maintain full visibility and control over their active location sharing status in My Work and may stop sharing at any time.

2. Trail Storage Rules & Purpose Limitation:

Where GPS telemetry is actively authorized, location points are sampled and stored only when at least 60 seconds have elapsed since the prior recorded point AND the vehicle has moved at least 50 meters, alongside explicit checkpoint entries at trip departure, pause, and return. Location tracking is strictly limited to real-time dispatching, duty safety, and transit-gap mapping. SwitchGauge does NOT perform driver safety scoring, risk profiling, speed compliance penalties, or continuous route replay in v1.

3. Data Retention & Automated Purge:

Commercial GPS telemetry records are retained for the organization's designated retention window (90 days by default, or 30/60 days where configured by the fleet administrator). Telemetry records exceeding this retention window are automatically and permanently purged daily via database retention jobs.

4. Access Controls & Security:

Telemetry trail records are protected by database Row-Level Security (RLS) and accessible exclusively to authorized organization owners and fleet managers with explicit can_view_gps_telemetry permissions.

If you email an address at switchgauge.com — for example replying to a reminder, or writing to admin@switchgauge.com — that message is delivered through our email provider and stored in our database so we can read it, reply to it and keep track of what was said. We store the sender and recipient addresses, the subject, the message itself, its technical headers, and any attachments.

This applies whether or not you have a SwitchGauge account: anyone can send us an email, and we hold what they sent. Where the sender’s address matches an account, we show that alongside the message as a possible match only — the sender address on an email is easily forged, so we treat it as a hint and never as proof of identity.

Only our administrators can read this correspondence. It is not shown to other users, and the messages you send us are not added to your account’s data in the app. Messages that fail sender-authentication checks are held separately as suspected forgeries and deleted sooner.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in answering people who contact us and in keeping a record of what we were asked — and, where you are a customer, performance of our contract with you. How long: 24 months from the date we receive a message (90 days for messages held as suspected forgeries), after which it is deleted automatically, attachments included.

You can ask us to delete correspondence you sent us at any time. If you delete your account we remove the link between your account and any messages you sent us, but we may keep the messages themselves for the period above — a conversation involves both sides, and the record of what we were asked and what we answered is not solely your data to erase. Ask us and we will tell you what we hold.

• To provide the service — your account, garage, logs, reports and reminders. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To take payment and manage subscriptions — trials, renewals, invoices and failed-payment handling. Legal basis: performance of our contract, and legal obligation for keeping financial records.
• To keep accounts secure — session records, rate limiting, abuse prevention and our administrative audit log. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting users and the service.
• To show local weather from approximate IP location. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a useful dashboard, balanced by the fact that the data is coarse, is not linked to a stored location profile, and is not retained.
• To record precise location history. Legal basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time without affecting the rest of the service.
• To operate AI assistance where you choose to use it, and to meter it against your plan. Legal basis: performance of our contract.
• To understand how the app is used and improve it — measuring which steps people complete and where they stop. We do not use this for advertising and we do not sell it. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in improving the service, balanced by the fact that the data is aggregated page-view statistics, not linked to your account. You can turn product analytics off at any time in Settings › Analytics; this stops page-view analytics from your account and from the device you use.
• To send service email — reminders you asked for, security notices, and billing notifications. Legal basis: performance of our contract and our legitimate interest in operational communication.

We use a small number of processors to run the service. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes, except where noted below as an independent controller.

• Supabase — database, authentication and file storage (SOC 2 Type 2 certified and ISO/IEC 27001 compliant). Holds your account, vehicle and location data.
• Vercel — application hosting (SOC 2 Type 2 certified and ISO/IEC 27001 compliant). Processes requests, server logs, and supplies the approximate IP-derived city described above. For Vercel Web Analytics, Vercel acts as an independent controller of the analytics data under its own terms and privacy notice, so the “on our instructions” statement above does not cover it.
• Stripe — payment processing and subscription billing (certified PCI Service Provider Level 1). Stripe is an independent controller for payment data; see their own privacy notice.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.
• Mapbox — provides the map tiles displayed in the dashboard and location-history views. Tile requests come from your browser, so Mapbox receives your IP address and the tile area and zoom level needed to render the displayed map. When you explicitly request route guidance, Mapbox also receives the exact origin and destination needed to calculate that route.
• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) — turns coordinates into a place name, and place names into coordinates, for the map. These lookups are made by our server, not your browser, so OpenStreetMap does not receive your IP address, and coordinates are rounded before they are sent.
• Open-Meteo — weather for a coordinate. Also called from our server with rounded coordinates, so the provider does not receive your IP address.
• AI providers — where you use an AI feature, your prompt and the vehicle context it needs are sent to the configured model provider to generate the response.

We may also disclose data where we are legally required to, or to establish or defend legal claims. If SwitchGauge is ever acquired, data may transfer as part of that transaction and this notice will continue to apply until you are told otherwise.

Some of our providers process data outside the UK and EEA, including in the United States. Where they do, transfers are covered by appropriate safeguards — the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or the provider’s certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for details of the safeguards applying to a specific provider.

• Account and vehicle data — while your account is open. When you delete your account we delete it within 30 days, except where we must keep records for the reasons below.
• Commercial fleet records — maintenance, safety inspections, mileage logs, fuel entries, defect reports, and vehicle checkout sessions created on fleet vehicles belong to the fleet organisation and are retained (with driver account linkage removed and an author display name snapshot preserved) to satisfy statutory employer safety and commercial transport compliance duties (such as DVSA 15-month commercial vehicle maintenance requirements). Personal vehicle records are deleted in full with your account.
• Commercial fleet GPS telemetry — 90 days by default (or 30 or 60 days where configured by the fleet organisation), after which records are permanently deleted by automated daily database retention jobs.
• Location history — 90 days, deleted automatically on a scheduled job, or immediately when you delete it yourself.
• Route-preview usage records — 90 days, then deleted automatically. These contain your account, plan, request outcome and time, but never route coordinates, geometry or directions.
• Product analytics — we can see it for 1 month, our plan’s reporting window. Vercel guarantees storage only for that window and may keep it longer under its own privacy notice. Visitor hashes are discarded after 24 hours.
• Session and login history — 12 months, then deleted automatically.
• Billing and tax records — six years after the transaction, as UK tax law requires.
• AI usage logs — retained for the life of the account for quota, billing and abuse-prevention purposes.
• AI chat conversations and diagnosis advice — chat conversations are kept until you delete them, so a conversation is there when you come back to it. Deleting a conversation removes it and its messages immediately. Generated issue diagnosis advice is saved to the relevant issue and kept until that issue or your account is deleted. Deleting your account removes all of them.
• API request records — if you use the developer API, we keep a record of each request (the method, the route, the response status and the calling IP address, but never the query or the body) for 90 days, then delete it automatically.
• Security and audit records — kept indefinitely. This covers occasions when a member of our staff accessed or changed an account, and operations through the developer API that deleted data. We keep these for as long as the service exists because they are the only record of who did what, and a trail that expires is not a trail. They are never edited or removed, including by us. See below for how this interacts with deletion.
• Email suppression list — if an email we send you bounces permanently, or you mark it as spam, we record that so we stop emailing that address. We store it as a one-way salted hash of the address — never the address itself — and keep it for as long as the service exists, including if you later delete your account: a bounce or complaint is a property of the address, not the account, and forgetting it would mean resuming mail that harms delivery for everyone else. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the deliverability of our email, and it is the minimum needed to honour a “stop emailing me” signal. You can ask us to remove an entry by contacting us.
• Email you send us — 24 months from the date we receive it, then deleted automatically along with any attachments. Messages held as suspected forgeries (they failed sender-authentication checks) are deleted after 90 days. See Email you send us above.
• Backups — deleted data may persist in encrypted backups for a short period before those backups rotate.

You can, free of charge:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• correct anything inaccurate — most of it you can edit yourself in the app;
• delete your account and its data;
• ask us to restrict or stop a particular use;
• receive your data in a portable format;
• object to processing we base on legitimate interests;
• withdraw consent for location history, and for sending origin and destination to Mapbox for a route preview, at any time from Settings.

One limit on deletion, stated plainly: when you delete your account, the API request and API deletion records tied to your user are removed with it, but our record of administrative actions is not. Those entries identify the member of staff who acted, and may name the account they acted on. We keep them under our legitimate interest in being able to show who accessed an account, and because a security trail a subject could erase would not be worth keeping. Everything else is deleted as described above. For the same reason of a different lifecycle, our email suppression record — a one-way salted hash of an address that bounced or complained, never the address itself — is also kept past deletion: it belongs to the address, not the account, and protects email deliverability for everyone else.

Email admin@switchgauge.com and we will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with how we handled it, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or to your local supervisory authority in the EEA.

We use only what the service needs to function, so there is no consent banner to click through:

• Authentication cookies — keep you signed in and are set by our authentication provider. Strictly necessary.
• Local storage — remembers your theme, which car you had selected, and (if you asked for a route preview) the last destination and preview on this device until you tap Clear route or sign out. This stays in your browser; it is not stored on SwitchGauge servers.

We set no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and Vercel Web Analytics sets no cookies.

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256). Our primary cloud infrastructure providers (Supabase and Vercel) are SOC 2 Type 2 certified and ISO/IEC 27001 compliant. Payment processing via Stripe is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1 (the highest standard in the payments industry). Every database table enforces row-level security, so one account’s data is not reachable from another’s session. Administrative actions are recorded in an audit log. API routes validate their input and are rate limited. No system is perfect: if a breach ever affects your rights, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

SwitchGauge is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account. If we learn we have collected data from a child, we will delete it.

If we change how we use your data we will update this page and its version number. For material changes — particularly anything affecting location — we will tell you in the app or by email before the change takes effect, and where the change relies on consent we will ask again rather than assume the old answer still stands.