Privacy notice
Idle Autos is operated by Alex Maxey in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We follow Canadian privacy law, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). This page explains what we collect, what we do with it, and what your rights are.
What we collect
- Account data. Email address you sign in with. Optional display name, city, profile photo, and short bio. We do not request birth date, government ID, or address as part of normal signup.
- Listing data. Photos, descriptions, mileage, modifications, price, and contact preferences you choose to publish when you list a vehicle or part.
- Activity data. Listing views, saves, comments, group memberships, group tag selections, Founder badge status, sent and received messages, vendor inquiries.
- Vendor data. If you are a verified vendor, we additionally store your business name, shop address, public contact email, optional Stripe Connect identifiers, and tier (Free, Spotlight, Featured Partner).
- Archive data. Where we have lawfully migrated content from the operator's prior community spaces (a 21,600-member Facebook group), that content is k-anonymized, tagged with a persistent historical_archive disclosure banner, and never tied back to an identifiable individual.
What we do with it
- Operate the marketplace and community surfaces (listings, search, Q&A threads, groups, messaging).
- Communicate with you, including transactional emails (sign-in links, listing approvals, vendor invoices) and the weekly Sunday Issue editorial newsletter that you can unsubscribe from at any time.
- Display your chosen public profile fields (display name, Founder badge, group tags) on content you participate in.
- Improve the platform through anonymized usage analytics. We do not sell personal data to third parties.
What we never do
- We do not sell or rent personal data to advertisers or third parties.
- We do not target ads to identifiable individuals without explicit opt-in consent.
- We do not retain financial card data. Payments are processed by Stripe under Stripe's own PCI-compliant infrastructure.
- We do not create synthetic user profiles, AI-generated reviews, or undisclosed staff postings. Editorial content under the "Idle Editorial" byline is staff-authored and discloses staff authorship on every piece.
Your rights under PIPEDA
- Access. You can request a copy of personal data we hold about you.
- Correction. You can request correction of inaccurate data.
- Deletion. You can request deletion of your account and associated personal data. Public listings and comments will be soft-deleted (replaced with a "removed by user" placeholder) within 14 days.
- Withdrawal of consent. You can withdraw consent for marketing emails at any time via the unsubscribe link.
Send privacy requests to privacy@idle.autos. We aim to respond within 30 days.
Cookies and analytics
We use first-party session cookies for authentication. We use privacy-respecting analytics that count page views without persistent device fingerprinting. We do not run third-party advertising trackers.
Updates to this notice
This notice may be updated as the platform evolves. Material changes will be announced at the top of the page and in the Sunday Issue. The current effective date is below.