Privacy policy

There are two organisations involved and they owe you different things.

The repair shop is the business you dealt with. They collected your details, they decided what to collect, and they remain accountable for it. If you want to see what is held about you, correct it, or complain, the shop is who to ask first.

Teardown is the software the shop uses. We store and process the information on the shop's behalf and under their instruction. We do not decide what the shop collects, we do not use it for our own purposes, and we do not sell it or share it with anybody for advertising. Teardown is built and owned by Varun Pratap Singh.

Write to info@teardownauto.com for anything about the software itself.

Only what a repair needs. In practice that is:

• Your name, phone number, email address and postal address.
• Your vehicle: year, make, model, VIN, plate, colour, paint code and mileage.
• Photographs of the vehicle, taken during teardown, repair and delivery. These sometimes show a driveway, a garage or the inside of a car.
• If an insurer is paying: the claim number, the policy number, the date of loss, the deductible, and the adjuster's name and phone number.
• The repair itself: the estimate, the parts, the dates, the invoice and what was paid.
• Notes shop staff wrote about the job.

Nothing else. There is no tracking of you across other websites, no advertising identifiers, and no analytics that follow an individual.

To do the repair and to run the business around it: writing the estimate, ordering the parts, telling you when the car is ready, invoicing whoever is paying, and keeping the record afterwards. A shop also has to keep records for tax and for warranty on the work.

Giving your details to the shop is how a repair gets written up, so consent for these purposes is part of asking for the work. If you would rather something was not recorded, say so to the shop: some fields are genuinely optional and the software does not require them.

Staff at the shop that holds the record, and nobody else. Another shop using Teardown cannot see your record, and this is enforced by the database rather than by the screens: every request is filtered by which shop the person belongs to, so a fault in the application cannot show one shop another shop's customers.

Within a shop, the owner decides what their staff can see. Some figures, such as what the shop pays for a part, can be restricted to the owner.

We cannot read a shop's records as a matter of course. Support access has to be granted by the shop's owner, expires on its own, can be withdrawn at any time, and every access made under it is logged where the owner can see it.

Information is shared outside the shop only where the repair requires it: with the insurer or fleet paying for the work, and with parts suppliers, who receive what is needed to supply a part and not your personal details. It is never sold.

Records are stored on servers in the United States: the database in Ohio, and photographs and documents with Cloudflare, which stores them in its own network.

This is worth stating plainly. Information held in another country is subject to that country's laws, and a court or a government agency there may be able to compel access to it, whatever Canadian law says and wherever you live. That is true of most software a Canadian business uses, and it is true here.

Backups are taken nightly and are held in the same way.

Indefinitely, unless a shop asks for a record to be removed.

This is deliberate rather than an oversight. A repair record is something a shop, an insurer or a customer may need to point at years later: a warranty claim on paintwork, a dispute about what was done, a car being sold with its history. When something is deleted in the software it is marked as deleted and stops appearing, rather than being erased, so a mistake can be undone.

If you want a record erased rather than hidden, ask the shop. They can ask us and we can do it. It cannot be undone afterwards, and a shop may have its own legal reasons to keep some of it, such as tax records.

• Everything travels encrypted, and is stored encrypted.
• Each shop's records are separated in the database itself, not merely on screen.
• Photographs have no public address. They are reachable only through a link that is generated for one signed in person and expires shortly after.
• Every change to a record is logged with who made it and when, and the log cannot be edited.
• There is no public sign up. An account exists only because a shop owner or we created it.

Under PIPEDA you can:

• Ask what is held about you, and be given a copy.
• Ask for anything wrong to be corrected.
• Ask what it has been used for and who it has been given to.
• Withdraw consent, subject to what the law or a contract requires.
• Complain, and be told what came of the complaint.

Ask the shop first, because the record is theirs and they can answer faster. If you cannot reach them, or the request is about the software rather than the repair, write to info@teardownauto.com and we will respond within thirty days.

If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.

One, and only for people who sign in to the software. It keeps you signed in between pages. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and there is nothing here that follows a visitor to another site.

If this changes in a way that affects what is done with your information, the date at the top changes and shops are told. The previous wording is kept.