UK Vehicle Exporters Privacy Notice

Who we are

UK Vehicle Exporters Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described in this notice. That means we decide why and how it is used.

• Registered in England and Wales, company number 10399100
• Registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), registration number ZC269739
• Registered office: Penstraze Business Park, Chacewater, Penstraze, Truro, England, TR4 8PN
• Email: sales@vehicleexports.co.uk
• Telephone: +44 (0)1872 491409
• WhatsApp: +44 1872 491409

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer, because we are not required to. Any question about this notice or about your data should go to the address above, marked for the attention of the data protection contact.

What personal data we collect

What we hold depends on how far you get with us.

If you make an enquiry

• Your name, email address and telephone number
• The country and port you want the vehicle shipped to
• Details of the vehicle you want us to source, buy, ship or export
• Anything else you choose to tell us in the message
• If you use the contact form on this site, the IP address your enquiry was sent from and its approximate location (town, region and country)

When you send the contact form, it goes first to our website's server, run for us by our hosting provider, Vercel, in London, and from there to Zoho, which holds our enquiries. On the way, an automated check provided by Vercel looks at technical details your browser provides with the form (not what you type) to tell a person from an automated spam program. In the way we use it, the check sets no cookies.

The server also records the IP address your enquiry came from and its approximate location, which Vercel works out from the internet connection the enquiry comes through. It is not your device's own location service, and you are not asked to share your position. Both are stored with your enquiry in fields of their own. We use them to help us spot fraudulent enquiries and to see which countries and markets our enquiries come from. If the check finds something doubtful, your enquiry still reaches us with a note on it, so that we look at it with care. If a message cannot be passed on, the page tells you and gives you our email address, WhatsApp and telephone number instead. If our spam check stops your message, it is not added to our enquiry records; instead, a copy of what you entered, with the IP address, approximate location and the result of the check, is emailed to our own team mailbox (Zoho Mail, in the EU) so that a genuine enquiry is not lost.

If you message us on WhatsApp

• Your WhatsApp profile name, the user ID WhatsApp gives us for you, your WhatsApp username if you have one, and your WhatsApp number unless WhatsApp does not share it with us
• What you send us: messages, photos, videos, voice notes, documents and other files, locations, contact cards and reactions, with the time you sent each one and whether you forwarded it from another chat
• Notices WhatsApp sends us about your account, such as a change of number, and, where WhatsApp tells us, that you have opened a chat with us, even if you have not written anything

Our WhatsApp number is our office number, +44 1872 491409. Messages you send to it reach us through Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform. Meta passes each message to our website's server, run by Vercel in London. The server keeps it for a short time in a temporary store, also in London, run by Upstash. It then emails the message to our team mailbox (Zoho Mail, in the EU), with photos and files attached (up to a size limit), and, except for reactions, adds a note of it to your record in Zoho CRM. If we cannot find a record for you by your number, a new enquiry record is created with your WhatsApp name, user ID and username, and your number if WhatsApp shares it; if WhatsApp shares your number later, it may be added to that record. Once a message has been passed on, the temporary copy is deleted. Photos and files are fetched from Meta only to attach them to the email; they are not kept in the temporary store. Our server's logs record that a message was handled, but not what it said, your name or your number.

We may reply to you on WhatsApp, by email or by telephone. When we reply on WhatsApp, a member of our team writes the reply as an email from our team mailbox, and our website's server sends its text to you through Meta, without the earlier emails or the staff member's email signature. A note of each reply, with its text, is added to your record in Zoho CRM. WhatsApp lets a business reply freely only within 24 hours of your last message; a reply written later is held for up to 7 days and sent if you write to us again in that time. If you send us someone else's contact card, we receive the details on it, so please share a person's details with us only if they are happy for you to do so.

If we go on to source, buy or ship a vehicle for you

• Your full name and both your UK and destination addresses
• Identity documents where the export, customs or anti-money-laundering rules require them — typically a passport or photographic ID, and proof of address
• Vehicle documents: V5C registration details, VIN, purchase invoice, and the export and customs paperwork raised against them
• Payment details and a record of the payments made. We do not store full card numbers
• Our correspondence with you, including emails, WhatsApp messages and notes of telephone calls

If you sign up for our newsletter

• Your email address, and when you signed up and confirmed your subscription

When you sign up, your email address goes to our website's server, which runs the same automated spam check as the contact form and then passes the address to Zoho Campaigns, which holds our newsletter list. After you sign up we email you a link to confirm, and nothing more is sent unless you click it. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link. We do not track whether our newsletters are opened or which links in them are clicked. If the check stops a sign-up as possible spam, the address is not added to the list and we keep no copy of it; the page tells you, so that you can try again or contact us another way.

If you visit this website

Our hosting provider, Vercel, records standard server log information, including the IP address the request came from, the pages requested, and the date and time. This is ordinary technical logging used to keep the site running and secure.

We also use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. For each page view it records the page address, the site or link that sent you, your rough location (country, region and city), your type of device, operating system and browser, and the date and time. To count each visitor once a day, Vercel makes a coded value from your request and discards it after 24 hours. The statistics set no cookies, do not record your IP address, and are not used to identify you or for advertising. We run no other analytics, advertising or tracking software. You can turn the statistics off on our Cookie Policy page, which also explains what is stored on your device and what third-party content the site loads.

How we collect it

Almost always directly from you — by telephone, email, WhatsApp, through a form on this site, or in person. Where you ask us to buy a vehicle on your behalf, we may also receive information about you from the seller or dealer involved in that purchase, and where we arrange shipping we receive booking confirmations from the carrier that contain your details. WhatsApp messages reach us through Meta, which runs the WhatsApp service we use for our number.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for automated decision-making or profiling. The spam check on our forms only tells people from automated programs; if it ever stops a message, the page says so and gives you other ways to reach us, and a copy reaches our team mailbox so that a person can check it. We use what WhatsApp tells us about you only to deal with your messages and your enquiry, not to send you marketing.

Who we share it with

Exporting a vehicle is not something we can do alone, and the people below need your details to do their part of it. We share only what each of them needs.

• Shipping lines, ferry operators and airlines — to book the sailing or flight and issue the Bill of Lading or air waybill
• Port agents, terminals and freight forwarders at the load port and the destination port
• HM Revenue & Customs and the DVLA — export declarations and notification of permanent export
• Customs authorities and clearing agents in the destination country, where you ask us to arrange clearance, registration or delivery at the destination, or to work with an agent of your choice
• Transport and inspection contractors who collect, move or inspect the vehicle in the UK
• Couriers — UPS and DHL, who carry the original export documents to you
• Our bank, accountants and professional advisers
• Zoho, which receives and stores the enquiries sent through the contact form on this site and notes of the WhatsApp messages you send us and our replies (Zoho CRM), holds our newsletter list and sends the newsletter (Zoho Campaigns), and runs our team mailbox, which receives the copies of contact-form enquiries our spam check stops and a copy of each WhatsApp message, with photos and files attached (Zoho Mail), on our instructions only
• Vercel Inc., which hosts this website and provides our visitor statistics, and whose servers receive our contact form and newsletter sign-ups, check them for spam, work out the approximate location an enquiry was sent from and pass them to Zoho, receive the WhatsApp messages Meta passes to us, keep them briefly with Upstash, fetch any photos and files from Meta and send them on to Zoho, and send our WhatsApp replies to Meta, on our instructions only
• Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which provides the WhatsApp Business Platform we use to receive WhatsApp messages and send our replies, and handles them on our instructions. Meta may also use information about the messages, as a controller in its own right, to keep WhatsApp safe and secure
• Upstash, Inc., which runs the temporary store in London where our website keeps WhatsApp messages until they have been passed on to our team mailbox and Zoho CRM, and our replies while they are sent or held, on our instructions only
• Our other IT suppliers, who process data on our instructions only

We will also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

Sending your data outside the UK

Exporting a vehicle means sending information to the country the vehicle is going to. To land a car in, for example, Kenya or Jamaica, the carrier, the destination port agent and that country's customs authority all need the consignee's name and address. Many of those countries have no UK adequacy decision.

Where the transfer is necessary to perform the contract you have asked us to enter into, or to conclude a contract in your interest, we rely on that necessity as the basis for the transfer. Where we transfer data to a supplier for our own purposes rather than to complete your shipment, we put an International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses in place. You can ask us which applies to your shipment.

Enquiries sent through the contact form, our newsletter list, the copies of contact-form enquiries our spam check stops, and the copies and notes of WhatsApp messages in our team mailbox (Zoho Mail) and Zoho CRM, are held by Zoho in its European Union data centres. The UK recognises the EU as giving personal data adequate protection, so no further safeguard is needed for them.

Vercel Inc. is based in the United States. Our website's server, which handles our forms and WhatsApp messages, runs in London, although they may pass through Vercel's network in other countries on the way to it. Our server logs, our visitor statistics, the spam check on our forms and the location look-up for contact-form enquiries may be processed in the United States. Vercel is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which the UK recognises as giving personal data adequate protection, and its data processing terms include the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

WhatsApp messages reach us through Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which is in the EU, so no further safeguard is needed for it. Our WhatsApp number uses Meta's UK storage option: the text of your messages and any photos, videos, voice notes and files in them are stored only in the UK, although Meta may process them in its data centres in other countries for up to an hour while handling them. Locations and contact cards you send, other details about your messages, such as your number, your WhatsApp user ID and when a message was sent, and the contact list Meta may keep for our WhatsApp number may be held in Meta's data centres elsewhere, including the United States. Meta's terms require it to use transfer safeguards that meet the UK GDPR whenever it handles your data outside the UK and EU.

The temporary store for WhatsApp messages is a database in London run by Upstash, Inc., which is based in the United States and may access it from elsewhere to provide and support the service. Upstash is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and its data processing terms include the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses as a fallback.

How long we keep it

• Enquiries that do not become a booking: up to 2 years from your last contact with us, so we can pick up the conversation if you come back to us. The IP address and location recorded with an enquiry, and any spam-check note on it, are kept with it, for the same time as the enquiry itself.
• Completed exports: at least 6 years from the end of the relevant tax year, because HMRC requires us to keep customs and accounting records for that long. Export documents may be kept longer where a shipment could still be the subject of a claim.
• Identity and anti-money-laundering records: 5 years from the end of the business relationship, as the regulations require.
• Website visitor statistics: the daily visitor code is discarded after 24 hours. The page view figures, which do not identify you, are kept by Vercel for at least 12 months so we can compare trends. Vercel may keep them longer.
• Newsletter sign-ups: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only your email address, marked as unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again by mistake.
• Copies of contact-form enquiries our spam check stopped: we delete those that are spam once we have checked them; a genuine one is kept like any other enquiry (above).
• WhatsApp messages: the copies in our team mailbox and the notes in Zoho CRM are kept like our other enquiries and correspondence (above): up to 2 years if no booking follows, or with the records of a completed export. The temporary copy in our website's store is deleted once the message has been passed on, and otherwise after 14 days (21 days at most if WhatsApp delivers the same message to us more than once). The store also keeps a few small working records under coded (hashed) versions of your WhatsApp user ID, your number and WhatsApp's IDs for your messages, which are still personal data. Each is deleted within a set time of its last update: which Zoho CRM record your messages go to (90 days); counts of the emails your messages have produced that hour and day, used to stop our mailbox being flooded (2 days); and markers, and a list of any messages held back to be grouped into one email, used to stop a message being passed on twice or our mailbox being flooded (14 days). The time you last wrote to us, kept so that we know whether WhatsApp still lets us reply to you, is removed when the next message from anyone reaches our number after it is 30 days old. Our WhatsApp replies are kept in our team mailbox and Zoho CRM like the rest of our correspondence with you. For each reply email, the store keeps a working record (who sent it, its subject, which shows your WhatsApp name and number, and whether it was sent) for 10 days; the text of a reply is kept there only while it waits to be sent or is held (up to 7 days), and for 3 days after it is sent, so that we can tell the sender if WhatsApp later reports it was not delivered. Meta keeps the messages it handles for us for up to 30 days, apart from anything it keeps for its own purposes to keep WhatsApp safe and secure, and may keep your number and user ID in the contact list for our WhatsApp number until we remove them.

Keeping it secure

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your data, including restricting access to the people who need it, using reputable suppliers, and serving this website over an encrypted connection. No transfer over the internet can be guaranteed completely secure, so please do not send us identity or payment documents by unencrypted email unless you are content to do so.

WhatsApp messages are encrypted on their way to Meta, but they are not end-to-end encrypted to us: Meta's platform decrypts them for us so that they can be copied to our team mailbox and Zoho CRM, where our staff read them. Please do not send identity documents, payment card numbers or bank details by WhatsApp. We will give you a secure way to send them.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Be told what we hold about you, and get a copy of it
• Have inaccurate data corrected
• Have data erased, where we have no continuing reason to keep it
• Restrict how we use it while a question about it is resolved
• Object to processing we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interests
• Receive data you gave us in a portable format, where we hold it by consent or under a contract
• Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is what we relied on

Some of these rights are qualified — we cannot, for instance, delete a customs record we are legally required to keep. To exercise any of them, contact us at sales@vehicleexports.co.uk. We will respond within one month. The next section explains how to ask us to delete your data, including your WhatsApp messages.

Deleting your data

You can ask us at any time to delete the personal data we hold about you, including the WhatsApp messages, photos and files you have sent us. You can ask in any of these ways:

• Email sales@vehicleexports.co.uk with the subject "Delete my data", saying which email address, WhatsApp number or WhatsApp username you used with us
• Send "Please delete my data" on WhatsApp to +44 1872 491409 from the account you used to message us; we will reply to you there
• Write to us at our registered office, shown under "Who we are" above

A request from the same WhatsApp account or email address is usually enough for us to know it comes from you; if not, we may ask you to confirm who you are. We will then delete your enquiries and our correspondence with you, including your WhatsApp messages, their photos and files, and our replies in our team mailbox, your record and its notes in Zoho CRM, anything still held about you in our website's temporary store, and your entry, if there is one, in the contact list Meta keeps for our WhatsApp number. We will tell you within one month what we have deleted. If you are or have been our customer, the law requires us to keep some records, such as customs, tax and anti-money-laundering records, for the periods set out under "How long we keep it", and we may need to keep others in case of a legal claim. If you were on our newsletter list, we keep only your email address, marked as unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again by mistake. We will tell you what we keep and why.

Deleting a chat in your own WhatsApp app removes it from your phone only; it does not delete the copies we hold, so please ask us as above. Meta deletes the messages it handles for us within 30 days, apart from anything it keeps for its own purposes to keep WhatsApp safe and secure. What WhatsApp holds about your own account is covered by WhatsApp's privacy policy.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this notice

We update this notice when what we do with personal data changes. The date at the top shows when it was last revised. Where a change is significant, we will say so on this page.