In short: the app has no account and no ads, and it sends none of your vehicle data anywhere. Two things can leave the phone: a vehicle identification number, when you ask it to look one up, and, on Android only, technical data about how the text recognition ran, which Google's component sends to Google. Your photos, the text read from them and your records never do.
Who is responsible
LudoCar is published by Ludo Programming. For anything about this policy: contact@ludoprogramming.com.
What data exists, and where it stays
Everything you enter — vehicles, documents (insurance, inspection, road tax, vehicle tax), service records, refuelling, expenses, maintenance schedules, along with photos of invoices, receipts or the car — is saved to a database on your phone, in the app's private storage. There is no server, no account and no copy held by us. Nobody else can reach it, ourselves included.
Looking up a VIN
When you ask for a VIN lookup, the app sends the VIN alone to the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public service at vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov, and receives the make, model and year. Nothing else is sent: not the registration plate, not the odometer, not any device identifier. The feature is optional — if you never use it, no VIN ever leaves the phone. We keep no log of these lookups; what NHTSA does with the request is governed by their own policy.
Photos and receipt reading
The camera is used to photograph documents, invoices, fuel receipts or the car. Reading the text off them happens entirely on the phone — the recognition model ships inside the app. No image is uploaded anywhere.
On Android, the text is read by ML Kit, a Google component. ML Kit sends Google technical data about how it ran: the phone's make, model and system version, the app's name and version, how long the recognition took, and the format and size of the image and of the result. Google uses it for diagnostics and usage statistics, sends it encrypted and does not pass it on to third parties (Google's description). It never includes the photo or the text read from it. This happens every time a photo is read, and cannot be switched off from the app. On iPhone the text is read by the phone's own system (Apple's Vision), and the app sends nothing while it does.
Notifications
Expiry reminders are scheduled locally by the phone's operating system. There are no push notifications, so no server knows which vehicles you own or when anything of yours expires.
Location, only if you turn on the vignette alert
The vignette alert is optional and starts only if you switch it on in Settings; for now it exists on iPhone only. Once on, the phone gives the app its position as you travel, every few hundred metres, including while the app is closed. The app compares that position on the phone with the country borders built into it and with the vignettes you have recorded, and warns you if you are driving somewhere they do not cover. It does not use Apple's or Google's map services for this, so your coordinates are sent to no one.
To tell when you have left town, the app learns where you live from where the phone spends the night. For that it keeps the last position it received (one only, replaced each time you move) and an area of about one kilometre with the dates of the nights spent there over the last 30 days. It keeps no route and no history of where you have been. All of this stays in the app's private storage, is excluded from the iCloud backup, and is deleted when you uninstall the app. You can switch the alert off at any time, in the app or in the phone's location settings.
Export, backup and sharing
You can export your data as an archive or generate a PDF report. Both are produced on the phone and handed to you through the system share sheet. From the moment you choose where to send them — mail, Drive, a messaging app, anywhere — the data reaches that service, and what happens next is governed by its policy. The choice is yours each time; the app never sends anything on its own.
The phone's own cloud backup
The app's data is deliberately left out of it. On Android, system backup is switched off for the app; on iPhone, the database and the photo folders are marked as excluded from the iCloud backup. So your vehicle records are not copied to Google Drive or to iCloud either. The only copy that leaves the phone is the one you export yourself.
If the app closes on its own
When the app crashes, it writes the technical detail of the error to a file on the phone. The next time you open it, you are asked whether to send that report so the fault can be found. Nothing is sent automatically — say no and the file is deleted, and that is the end of it. Say yes and the report carries the app version, the phone model, the system version and the error's trace. It carries nothing about your cars, your documents or your spending, and no identifier for your phone.
Links to other sites
Some screens open official checking websites in your browser. These are third-party sites with their own privacy policies. The app only opens the address; it passes none of your data to them.
Deleting your data
Uninstalling the app deletes everything: the database and the photos go with it. Because no copy exists on any server, there is no request to send us and nothing for us to delete elsewhere. Archives you exported yourself remain wherever you put them.
Children
The app is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data about them.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date above changes with it. Should a future version of the app ever begin sending data elsewhere, it will say so here, explicitly, beforehand.