Privacy Notice
Version 2026-08-19-v1 · Launch draft
Our principle
We register cars, not people. FastFords.org is designed to collect the minimum personal information required to operate a trustworthy vehicle registry.
Account information
Member accounts require a display name and email address. Your email address is not displayed publicly. We do not require a legal name, home address or phone number for ordinary membership.
Protected vehicle identifiers
Full VIN/chassis numbers, engine numbers and registration numbers are protected data. Where matching is required, the service uses keyed fingerprints. Reversible protected values are encrypted and are not part of public vehicle queries.
Locations
Public records use broad location information such as country, province/state or region, and optionally city. Exact GPS and home-address information are not part of the public registry.
For sighting submissions, you may allow the browser to provide the device's current coordinates. If an uploaded photograph contains usable GPS metadata, that photo location takes priority because it is evidence of where the photograph was taken. Coordinates are used transiently to determine broad location fields and are not stored in the sighting or media record.
Before reverse geocoding, coordinates are rounded to reduce precision. The configured reverse-geocoding service receives only that reduced-precision coordinate. The initial deployment uses the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service with caching and rate limiting; the provider can be replaced without changing registry records.
Photographs
Uploaded photographs are treated as untrusted input. Where supported, location metadata is read from the original upload before privacy processing solely to derive broad sighting location. Accepted images are then decoded and re-encoded, removing embedded metadata such as GPS/EXIF/device information from the stored review image. Images remain private until privacy review. Images containing visible registration plates or other sensitive information must not be published until appropriately obscured or rejected.
Anonymous sightings
You may submit a structured sighting without an account. Accountless submissions are treated as low-trust leads and require moderation. A photograph is required for a sighting to enter the current workflow. Short-lived keyed security fingerprints may be derived from request metadata for abuse prevention; raw request metadata is not intentionally added to the public registry record.
Owner contact
If a vehicle owner opts in, verified members may send one of a small set of predefined registry requests. There is no custom message body and the service does not expose either member's email address, phone number or other contact details.
Access and correction
Owners and other affected people may request review or correction of personal information and vehicle records. Personal-data rights do not automatically require deletion of accurate non-personal historical vehicle facts.
Retention and security
Security metadata is retained only as long as operationally necessary. Verification evidence is kept in protected storage and deleted when no longer needed. Administrative access to sensitive data is limited and auditable.
Pre-launch review
This notice is a technical/product launch draft and should receive formal POPIA/privacy-law review before broad public launch or processing at significant scale.