Privacy Policy

The Car Expert is part of Immediate Network Ltd  (Company Number 03919624) of Timber Cottage, Woodend, Leatherhead, Surrey, KT22 8LP, United Kingdom.

This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you when you use this website.

Principles

We will do our very best to protect your privacy by using security technology appropriately. This means:

  • we make sure that we have appropriate security measures to protect your information; and
  • if we ask another organisation to provide a service for us, we make sure they have appropriate security measures.

We will respect your privacy. However, we may need to email you occasionally regarding your newsletter subscription or posts on our site (for example, with reminders or warnings).

We will collect and use individual user details only if we have your permission or we have legitimate business reasons for doing so.

We will be clear in our dealings with you as to what information about you we will collect and how we will use it.

We will use personal information only for the purposes for which it was originally collected and we will make sure we delete it securely.

Our site is accessible via the internet. This means that people around the world who access our site can see anything you post on the site (for example, comments on an article or posts on our forum).

If we or our service providers transfer any information out of the European Economic Area (EEA), it will only be done with the relevant protection (stated under UK law) being in place.

What information do we collect about you?

If you leave comments on our site (either on the forum or individual articles), we collect the data shown in the comments form, your email address (required) and a name (optional), and also your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you complete customer surveys or participate in competitions that we may conduct from time to time, we may collect additional contact information (such as your address to verify your eligibility).

Website usage information is collected using cookies (see below).

How will we use the information about you?

We collect information about you for four main reasons:

  1. To provide personalised services unique to individual users, such as replying to questions or comments you post on our site.
  2. To help us to monitor and improve the services we offer.
  3. To email you our newsletters and other communications, if you have subscribed to our newsletter mailing list. We can also see how often you have opened our newsletters and clicked on any articles.
  4. To analyse how users interact with our website and newsletters.

We do not share your details with any third parties, nor do we sell our mailing lists to anybody.

All comments are checked through an automated spam detection service.

Marketing

We do not currently run any marketing campaigns using your personal information.

If we choose to engage in such marketing campaigns in the future, we will ask for your consent before sending you any marketing information.

If you give us consent to receive marketing information about products and services of ours and other companies in our group, you can always opt out again at any time.

You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes or giving your information to other businesses owned by Immediate Network.

Access to your information and correction

You have the right to request a copy of the information we hold about you. If you would like a copy of some or all of your personal information, please email or write to us at the address below.

We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate.

Cookies

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information. This information is used to track visitor use of the website and to compile statistical reports on website activity.

For more information, read our Cookies Policy at thecarexpert.co.uk/cookies-policy/

You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the two websites below tell you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, in a few cases, some of our website features may not function as a result.

For more information about cookies, visit aboutcookies.org or allaboutcookies.org.

The AI Expert chatbot

In addition to our main website, we provide an AI-powered chat assistant at ai.thecarexpert.co.uk that answers car-related questions using our expert reviews and ratings. This section explains how the AI Expert handles your data.

How the AI Expert works

The AI Expert is a free service. It does not require you to log in or to provide any personal information. When you type a question and submit it, your message and the recent conversation history are sent to a third-party AI service (see below) which generates a response based on our knowledge of expert reviews and ratings, and the response is sent back to your browser. We do not capture your name, email address, or any other directly identifying information from your use of the AI Expert. Your IP address is used briefly by our rate-limiting system to prevent automated abuse; these counters are short-lived and are not associated with the content of your messages.

Third-party services we use to operate the AI Expert

To provide the AI Expert, we share data with the following sub-processors:

Google (Gemini API) — generates the chatbot’s responses. The messages you type and the recent conversation history are sent to Google’s servers for processing. We operate the AI Expert on Google’s paid-tier plan, which means Google does not use your messages, or the responses produced, to train or improve their AI products. For more information, see Google’s Gemini API Terms and Gemini API data policy.

Vercel — hosts the AI Expert and provides cookieless page-speed and traffic analytics for it. Vercel acts as a data processor on our behalf.

Upstash — provides short-lived in-memory storage for rate-limit counters that help prevent automated abuse. No message content is stored at Upstash.

Langfuse — provides quality-monitoring traces of AI Expert conversations. We use this to review and improve the assistant’s accuracy.

Quality review

We (The Car Expert team) may review messages submitted to the AI Expert and the responses produced, for the purpose of monitoring accuracy and improving the service. We do not share these reviews with third parties beyond the sub-processors named above, and the data is not used for marketing.

Please do not share sensitive information

The AI Expert is a discovery and pre-research tool, not personal advice. Please do not enter sensitive personal information into it — such as your full name, postal address, payment details, National Insurance number, or any data about other people. Responses are AI-generated and may be inaccurate; please do not rely on them for safety-critical decisions.

Retention and your rights

Quality-review logs are retained for up to 90 days for the purpose of service improvement, after which they are deleted. Because the AI Expert does not require login or capture identity, we cannot associate specific conversations with specific users; this means we cannot retrieve or delete individual users’ conversations on request. If you do not want your conversations to be processed as described, please do not use the AI Expert — choosing not to use it has no effect on your use of the rest of our site.

Other websites

Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to this website so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page.

This privacy policy was last updated on 12 May 2026.

How to contact us

Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy policy or information we hold about you: