Who we are
Car Cost Guide (carcostguide.co.uk) is a free website with calculators, comparisons and guides to help UK drivers understand the real cost of running, financing and charging a car.
Car Cost Guide is responsible for the personal data described in this policy, as its controller under UK data protection law. For anything in this policy, email info@carcostguide.co.uk.
The short version
- We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used, but only if you accept analytics cookies. We do not use advertising cookies.
- You do not need an account. Our calculators work in your browser, and what you type into them is not sent to us.
- If you contact us through the form or by email, we use what you send only to reply to you.
- We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or make automated decisions about you.
What we collect and why
If you use the contact form: your name, email address, the subject (if you give one) and your message. We use them to read and reply to your enquiry. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: answering the questions people send us. The form also records a one-way, salted hash of your IP address so that we can limit abuse of the form; your IP address itself is not stored. Messages are stored for us by our database provider and are deleted automatically 24 months after they were sent, together with the hashed IP address.
If you email us: your email address and anything you include in your message. We use them to reply and to keep a record of the conversation, on the basis of legitimate interests. They are held by our email provider and kept for as long as reasonably necessary to respond, deal with any follow-up and meet any legal obligations.
When you visit any page: like every website, our hosting provider receives technical information needed to deliver the page securely, such as your IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time. This is kept in the provider's server logs only for as long as needed for security and to prevent abuse, on the basis of legitimate interests.
We do not collect financial information, passwords or special category data, and the calculators do not send the figures you enter to us or to anyone else.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4, provided by Google, to understand how people use the site so we can improve it. It runs only if you accept analytics cookies in the banner shown on your first visit. If you reject them, or make no choice, Google Analytics is not loaded and no analytics cookies are set. Our lawful basis is your consent.
If you accept, Google Analytics collects:
- the pages you visit (without anything after a "?" in the address), the page you came from, and the time
- general information about your device and browser, and an approximate location that Google works out from your IP address
- what you do on the site, recorded as events: which calculator you used, whether it gave a result, which fields needed correcting (by field name), which of our pages or other websites you followed a link to, and how far you scrolled
It never receives the figures you enter into our calculators, or anything you type into the contact form.
Google Analytics uses cookies called _ga and _ga_ followed by our property code to recognise your browser between visits; they expire after 13 months. Separately from the cookies, Google Analytics keeps the detailed event data it collects for 14 months. We have turned off Google's advertising features: Google signals and advertising personalisation are off, and advertising storage is denied.
You can change your mind at any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page. If you withdraw consent, Google Analytics stops collecting data and its cookies are deleted from your browser.
Who receives your data
Only the service providers that run parts of the site for us: our hosting provider, our database provider for contact form messages, our email provider and, if you accept analytics cookies, Google for Google Analytics. We do not share your data with anyone else for their own purposes.
Transfers outside the UK
Some of our service providers, including Google, may process personal data outside the UK, for example in the United States. Where they do, the transfer is protected by safeguards recognised under UK data protection law: the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (the "UK-US data bridge"), or standard contractual clauses with the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:
- give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you
- correct data that is wrong
- delete your data
- restrict or object to how we use it
- give you your data in a portable form
Email info@carcostguide.co.uk. We will reply within one month.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first so we can try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Links to other websites
Our pages link to official and other third-party sources. When you visit them, their own privacy policies apply.
Changes to this policy
We update this policy when the site changes, and show the date it was last updated at the top of the page.