Legal

Privacy Policy

Version 2026-09-16 · Effective 16 September 2026

Who this covers

Virtual Tour Auto ("we", "the platform") operates an interactive vehicle showroom at virtualtourauto.com. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it.

It covers two kinds of account. A subscriber is a business — a dealership, importer, rental company, or sales representative — that pays to list on the platform. A shopper is a visitor who browses, and may create a free account to save vehicles. It also covers visitors who never create an account at all.

What we collect from subscribers

When you subscribe, we ask for the details needed to create and run your account:

Business name, contact name, email address, phone number, and optionally your role at the business.
A password, which we store only as a salted scrypt hash — we cannot read it or recover it for you.
Your plan, billing period, subscription status, and trial end date if you are on a trial.
Anything you go on to publish yourself: vehicle listings and their photos and videos, business locations and their contact details and map coordinates, financing notes, logos, and posts you make in the public lobby.

What we collect from shoppers

A shopper account is optional — the showroom is fully browsable without one.

Name, email address, the country you shop in, and a language preference.
A password hash, or, if you choose to sign in with Google, an identifier from Google. We receive your name and email address from Google and nothing else.
The vehicles you save for later.
Messages you send to the AI assistant, and any lobby posts or replies you write.

What we collect automatically

We record a small set of product-analytics events so we can see which parts of the showroom get used. They never include your IP address:

Page views, and the path viewed.
Country and category selections.
Which vehicle controls you open, and on which listing.
When a contact card, location catalog, or the chat assistant is opened.

What the businesses you browse can see

While you are signed out, these events are tied only to a random identifier generated in your browser, and no business can connect them to you.

While you are signed in as a shopper, an event that involves a business's own vehicle is also recorded against your account, and that business can see it on their dashboard: your name, your email address, the country on your account, and which of their vehicles you opened and how often. Businesses on the Showroom and Enterprise plans see this; it covers their own listings only, and no business can see your activity anywhere else on the platform.

If you send a message to a business from one of their contact cards, they receive the name, email address, phone number and message you typed, whether or not you have an account. That has always been the case — it is what sending the message does.

You can stop the first of these at any time by signing out; browsing signed out is anonymous. To have activity already recorded against your account removed, write to us at the address at the end of this policy.

Payment

We do not yet take card payments through this site, and we do not currently store, transmit to a processor, or otherwise process card numbers, expiry dates, or security codes. No card details are written to our database today.

When we start collecting payments, they will be handled by a PCI-compliant payment provider, this policy will be updated before that happens, and the card details will go to that provider rather than to us.

Cookies and local storage

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not run third-party trackers. What we set is:

Session cookies that keep you signed in (separate ones for shopper, subscriber, and administrator sessions). These are signed, expire, and are strictly necessary — the site cannot keep you logged in without them.
A short-lived cookie during Google sign-in that exists only to protect the sign-in against request forgery.
Preference cookies remembering your chosen country and language, and one recording that you closed the sign-in prompt on the homepage so it is not shown to you again.
Browser local storage for your theme, sound and radio preferences, and the random analytics identifier described above. This never leaves your browser except as the analytics events listed.

How we use what we collect

We use it to:

Create and operate your account, and keep you signed in.
Publish the listings, locations, and posts you choose to publish. These are public by design — anything you put on a listing or in the lobby is visible to anyone.
Send you transactional email, such as a sign-in link. We do not send marketing email.
Screen lobby posts for abuse before they are published.
Answer questions through the AI assistant.
Understand which features are used, in aggregate, so we can improve them.
Show a business which of their own vehicles a signed-in shopper opened, and who has contacted them, as described above.
Detect and prevent fraud and abuse, and comply with our legal obligations.

Legal bases

Where the UK GDPR, EU GDPR, or a comparable law applies to you, we rely on: performance of a contract, for everything needed to run your subscription or account; legitimate interests, for security, abuse prevention, and product analytics, balanced against your rights; consent, where you have given it, such as agreeing to this policy at signup or choosing to sign in with Google; and legal obligation, where a law requires us to keep or produce something.

Where you have consented, you can withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawing it does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Businesses on the platform see the activity described in “What the businesses you browse can see” above. Beyond that, we use a small number of service providers who process data on our instructions:

Vercel — hosting, and file storage for uploaded images and videos.
Turso — the hosted database where account records and listings are stored.
Anthropic — powers the AI assistant and the lobby's abuse screening. Your messages and posts are sent to Anthropic to generate a response or a screening decision. They are not used to train models.
Resend — sends transactional email such as sign-in links.
Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.
MapLibre — the network map loads map fonts from a MapLibre-hosted endpoint, which means your browser makes a request to it and it can see your IP address. Opening directions sends you to Google Maps, at which point Google's own policy applies.

Where your information is held

Our providers operate internationally, so your information may be processed outside the country you live in, including in the United States. Where a transfer is restricted by law, we rely on the safeguards our providers offer, such as standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

Account records are kept while your account is open, and for up to 12 months after it closes so we can handle billing questions and disputes.
Listings, locations, and uploaded media are deleted when you delete them, or when your account is deleted. Deleting a listing also removes its stored images and videos.
Lobby posts remain visible while your account is open, as other people's replies depend on them.
Analytics events are kept for up to 24 months. Those recorded while you were signed out are not linked to your identity; those recorded while you were signed in are linked to your account, and are deleted with it.
Records of your agreement to this policy are kept for as long as we need to show that consent was given.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, receive a portable copy, object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw consent. If you are in California, you also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights — and, as above, we do not sell or share your personal information.

To make a request, email privacy@virtualtourauto.com. We will respond within 30 days. You can also delete most of what you publish yourself, at any time, from your dashboard. If you are in the UK or EU and are unhappy with our response, you can complain to your local data protection authority.

Security

Passwords are stored only as salted scrypt hashes. Sessions are held in signed, expiring cookies. Access to administrative tools is restricted and separately authenticated. Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information and the law requires it, we will notify you and the relevant regulator within the required timeframe.

AI features

The showroom assistant and the lobby's abuse screening are powered by Anthropic's Claude models. What you type into the assistant, and the text of any lobby post, is sent to Anthropic to produce a reply or a screening decision. Please do not put sensitive personal information into either. The assistant's answers can be wrong — treat them as a starting point, not advice.

No automated decision that produces a legal or similarly significant effect on you is made without a human being able to review it. A rejected lobby post can be edited and resubmitted.

Children

The platform is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

This policy is versioned. The current version is 2026-09-16, effective 16 September 2026. If we make a material change, we will update the version and, where the law requires it, ask you to agree again before you continue using your account.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about your information, go to privacy@virtualtourauto.com.