Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Welcome to the AmericanAutoListings.com Privacy Policy. AmericanAutoListings.com ("AmericanAutoListings," "we," "us," or "our") is a U.S.-based vehicle listing platform that connects private sellers and dealerships with buyers. We value your privacy and want you to understand how we collect, use, and share your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect from users of our website and services ("Services"), how we use and protect that data, and what rights you have regarding your information.

By using AmericanAutoListings (either by browsing our site or creating an account and listing or saving vehicles), you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with our practices, please do not use our Services. We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time (see Section 10 on Changes), and will notify you by updating the "Last Updated" date above and/or through additional notices for significant changes. We encourage you to read this policy carefully and contact us if you have any questions.

2. Information We Collect

We collect limited personal information to provide and improve our Services. The types of information we collect fall into a few categories:

Information You Provide to Us:

• Account Registration: When you create an account, we collect your first name, email address, city, state, phone number, and a hashed password. Dealership users may also provide a dealership name, address, phone, website, and logo. We do not require a last name for private sellers' public profiles.
• Google Sign-In: If you choose to sign in with Google, we receive your email address from Google to create or log into your account. No password is stored for Google-authenticated accounts.
• Listing Details: If you list a vehicle for sale, you provide vehicle information such as make, model, year, mileage, VIN, condition, price, description, and photos or videos. Listings are public — your contact phone, first name, and general location are shown publicly.
• Saved Searches: If you save a search, we store the name you give it, the filters it uses (make, model, year range, price, mileage, and similar), the location it is centered on, and how often you want alerts (instantly, daily, or off), along with which listings have matched it so we do not alert you about the same listing twice. Saved searches are private to your account: we do not share them with dealerships or other sellers. Alerts go out by email and, if you use our mobile app, as push notifications.
• Favorites: If you favorite (save) a listing, we record which listing you saved and when. The seller of that listing can see your first name and last initial next to the listing you saved, but not your email address or phone number, as described in Section 5.
• Communications: If you contact us via support or use our in-platform messaging feature to communicate with sellers, we collect the content of those messages. Conversations may be monitored for compliance and abuse prevention.
• Payment Information: Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not store full card data. Stripe collects and secures card numbers, CVV, and billing info. We retain Stripe customer IDs, subscription IDs, payment status, and receipt records to manage your account.
• Dealer Inventory Integration Credentials: If you use our API Pull (feed) feature, the authentication credentials for your external feed URL (e.g., basic auth username/password or bearer token) are encrypted using AES-256-GCM before being stored in our database.
• Dealership API Keys: If you use our API Push feature, we generate an API key for your dealership account. This key is stored only as a salted scrypt hash and is never stored in plain text.
• Dealer Agreement Signature: When a dealership owner signs our Dealer Agreement, we record the signer's name and title, the dealership's dealer license number, the typed signature, the IP address and browser user-agent of the device used to sign, the time of signing, and a fingerprint of the exact agreement version signed. We also record the time, IP address, and user-agent when any user accepts our Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy. These records are kept as evidence of the agreement, including after the dealership or account closes.
• Safety Reports: If you use our intimate-image removal form, which does not require an account, we collect your name, email address, typed electronic signature, whether you are the person depicted or acting on their behalf, where the content is, the good-faith statement you affirm, any additional detail you provide, and the IP address and user-agent of the device you submit from. Federal law sets what this form must capture and how quickly we must act on it. If you use our child sexual abuse material report form, which also does not require an account, we collect only where the content is, any description you choose to give, an email address if you choose to give one, and a masked (network-level) form of your IP address; we act on these reports immediately and report them to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as federal law requires, and we do not send status updates.

Information We Collect Automatically:

• Usage Data: We track pages viewed, searches performed, filters applied, listing clicks, time on site, and similar activity. If you are logged in, this activity may be linked to your account to power dashboard analytics and personalization features.
• Listing View Tracking: When a listing is viewed, we record the viewer's user ID (if logged in) and IP address along with a timestamp. This data is used to provide listing view counts to sellers and to detect fraudulent activity.
• Daily Visitor Tracking: We log a hashed combination of IP address and user-agent string on a daily basis to count unique daily visitors. Raw IP addresses used for this purpose are not stored in identifiable form beyond the hash.
• Device and Log Info: We collect IP address, browser type, operating system, device type, referring URL, and crash or error logs for debugging and platform security purposes.
• Cookies and Session Data: See Section 4 below. We use a session cookie for your login, and persistent cookies for saved preferences and your cookie-consent choice.
• Media Fingerprints: When you upload a photo or logo (or, through our mobile app, a video), we compute a content hash (a cryptographic fingerprint of the file's bytes, from which the file cannot be recovered) and keep it in a ledger with the upload's storage name, type, and the account, listing, or dealership it came from. The ledger lets us find identical copies of content we have been legally required to remove and refuse re-uploads of it. Entries are kept after the file, listing, or account is deleted, for that reason.
• Mobile Push Registration: If you allow notifications in our mobile app, we store the device's push token, its platform (iOS or Android), the app version, and the device name so alerts can be delivered to it. The token is removed when you sign out of the app, is no longer used once the device has gone 30 days without opening the app, and is deleted with your account.
• Location Data: On your first visit, our website asks your browser for your precise location so nearby listings can be sorted by distance; your browser shares it only if you allow it. If you allow it, the coordinates are sent to Google Maps to turn them into a ZIP code or town label, and both are kept in cookies for 30 days and in your browser's local storage until you change your location or turn off functional cookies in Cookie Settings (if you have declined functional cookies, nothing is stored and they are used for that page only). Otherwise you can type a city, state, or ZIP code into the location box. The mobile app asks for location permission separately and stores your chosen location on your device. We do not derive your location from your IP address. The city and state on your account are used to pre-fill the location on listings you create.

Information from Third Parties:

• Sign-in via Google provides us your email address, which is used to create or authenticate your account.
• Vehicle VIN and license plate lookups via third-party APIs return vehicle information (make, model, year, etc.) to help populate listing details. These lookups do not transmit your personal information to the third party.
• We do not purchase personal data or receive marketing lead lists from third parties.

Sensitive Personal Info: We do not intentionally collect Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, health, or detailed financial information. Please do not submit sensitive information in listing descriptions or messages.

3. How We Use Your Information

• Providing and Improving the Service: To power core platform features including search, listings, messaging, community content, dealer inventory tools, and analytics dashboards.
• Listing Visibility and Payment: To manage listing publication status, enforce payment-gated visibility for private seller listings, and track listing expiration and renewal.
• Dealer Subscription Management: To calculate each dealership's monthly fee from the number of vehicles it has listed, enforce the listing ceiling it has set, process billing events from Stripe, and deactivate listings if a subscription lapses.
• Dealer Inventory Sync: To authenticate and process inventory data submitted via CSV upload, API push, or API pull feed, and to apply field mapping and normalization rules you configure.
• Facilitating Communication: To route buyer and seller messages, send email notifications (verification, password reset, listing reminders), and display conversation history.
• Account Management: Logging in, managing listings, showing saved favorites, tracking conversations, and sending account-related notifications.
• Payment Processing: We use your email for receipts and subscription records. Stripe handles full payment card processing and subscription lifecycle events.
• Safety and Fraud Prevention: We monitor activity and use tools to detect spam, scams, impersonation, Terms violations, and abusive API usage.
• Analytics: We track platform-wide metrics (listing views, clicks, messages, dealer analytics) to optimize the platform and provide sellers and dealers with performance insights.
• Community Content: To publish and display newsletters and community events created by our staff, and to associate content with dealerships where applicable.
• Marketing: With consent, we may email feature tips, platform updates, or seller tips. You can opt out at any time.
• Legal Compliance: To comply with laws, enforce Terms, investigate fraud, or respond to lawful requests.

Safety Screening of Uploaded Media: Photos, videos, and logos uploaded to our platform, including photos received through dealer inventory tools, are checked by automated systems that look for prohibited content and, once we have access to a service for it, compare images against known child sexual abuse material (see Safety Screening in Section 5). We do this to keep content our Terms of Service prohibit off the platform and to meet our legal obligations to protect children. When our checks refuse an image as prohibited content, or content is reported:

• Images refused as prohibited content: We keep a private copy, separate from the media shown on the site and available only to the staff who review it, so that a person can review the refusal. The copy is deleted no later than 30 days after the refusal, unless its review is still open, it is reported as described below, or it is subject to a legal hold. We also record details of the upload: the IP address it came from, information about the device, browser, or app used, and the time. Those details are part of our safety records and are kept after the copy is deleted, with no set end date.
• Apparent child sexual exploitation: We report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as federal law requires. We preserve the reported content together with information about the account it came from (such as the name and email address on the account) and records about the upload (such as its date and time, the IP address it came from, and information about the device, browser, or app used) for one year from the date of the report, as federal law requires, and for longer if a law-enforcement preservation request or another legal obligation requires it.
• Records of refusals: We keep a record that an image was refused as prohibited content or as apparent child sexual exploitation, including which account it came from, when, the outcome of the check, and the IP address and device, browser, or app information of the upload, as part of our safety records. These records have no set end date: they are kept after any copy of the image is deleted, including after the 30-day deletion described above.

Other refused photos and logos, such as one refused because our checks were temporarily unavailable or because it matches content we previously removed for a reason other than child sexual exploitation (see Media Fingerprints in Section 2), are not kept. A video is handled differently: if its check cannot be completed, the video is taken off the listing, but the video file and the still frame we check are kept for up to one week while the check is retried. If the check passes, the video goes back on the listing; if it still cannot be completed, both are deleted and the seller is asked to upload the video again.

We process data based on contract fulfillment (operating the service you signed up for), legitimate interest (platform performance and safety), legal obligation (for example, reporting and preservation required by federal child-protection law), and consent (location, marketing emails).

4. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and related technologies to support site functionality, performance, analytics, and security.

Types of Cookies:

• Essential: Required for login sessions and secure navigation (the login cookie is restricted to same-site requests).
• Session Management: JWT tokens are issued upon login and tracked server-side (via Redis and our database) to support token revocation. Tokens expire 1 hour from sign-in (up to 24 hours after certain account changes refresh it). Signing out revokes the token via our blacklist, so it is rejected from that point on rather than at its natural expiry.
• Preferences: Saves your last searched location, saved search filters, and other UI preferences.
• Analytics: None. Visitor counting is done server-side and sets no cookie.
• Security: Detects repeated failed logins, protects against CSRF attacks, and enforces rate limits.
• Advertising: Currently unused. If we add advertising, we will notify users and allow opt-out.

Third-Party Cookies: Stripe and Google Maps may store cookies in connection with their integrations. These are governed by their respective privacy policies.

Your Choices: Most browsers allow you to disable or delete cookies. Blocking essential cookies may break site functionality. We honor analytics opt-outs and do not enable cross-site ad tracking.

5. How We Share Your Information

AmericanAutoListings does not sell your personal information. We only share information in the following circumstances:

• With Other Users (Public Listing Information): If you are a seller, your listing content (vehicle details, contact phone, first name, city/state) is public. We do not display your email address. Buyer messages reveal the contact information you include in your message.
• With Sellers When You Favorite or Message Their Listings: If you favorite (save) a listing, the seller of that listing — a dealership or a private seller — can see your first name and last initial next to the listing you saved in their seller analytics, and can start a conversation with you from there through our messaging. Your email address and phone number are not shown to them. If you message a seller, they see your name and what you write; your email address and phone number are not shown unless you include them in a message. We do not share your saved searches, your other favorites, or your browsing activity with any seller. Dealerships are contractually required under our Dealer Agreement to use information about you only to respond to your interest in their vehicles, and may not sell it, add you to unrelated marketing lists, or share it with third parties; private sellers are bound by our Terms of Service, which prohibit spam and unsolicited advertising. If you do not want a seller to see that you saved their listing, do not favorite it; you can also remove a favorite at any time, which takes you off that seller's list.
• Service Providers: Trusted vendors help us operate the platform:
  • Hosting and Database: Microsoft Azure hosts our PostgreSQL database and application servers.
  • Session Caching: Redis (hosted on Azure) manages session tokens, JWT blacklists, and upload progress state.
  • File and Media Storage: Google Cloud Storage (GCS) stores listing images, videos, community content images, and dealership logos.
  • Video Processing: Google Cloud Video Transcoder API encodes uploaded listing videos into a web-optimized format. Only the video file itself is sent.
  • Safety Screening (Microsoft): Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety checks uploaded images for content our Terms of Service prohibit; it receives the image itself. Microsoft PhotoDNA compares uploaded images against known child sexual abuse material; for that check we compute a mathematical fingerprint of the image on our own servers and send only the fingerprint, never the image. In neither case do we send your name, email address, or any other account details.
  • Mobile Push Notifications: Expo Push Service, Apple Push Notification service (APNs), and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) deliver notifications to our mobile app. To deliver one, we send your device's push token and the notification's title and text through Expo to Apple or Google. That text may include the name of the person who messaged you, the title of a listing, or the name of one of your saved searches. Your account details are not sent.
  • Instagram (Meta Platforms): We promote selected live listings on our own Instagram account. When a listing is published there, its photos and a caption built from the listing — year, make, model and trim, price, mileage, city and state, whether it is a featured listing, and, for dealership listings, the dealership name — are sent to Instagram through Meta's Graph API, where they are public and subject to Meta's terms. A listing placed through our Heroes Program is captioned as a Heroes Program listing. Seller names, phone numbers, and email addresses are not included. Posts are removed by our staff, not automatically when a listing sells or expires; contact us if you do not want a listing shared this way or want a post taken down.
  • Operations Assistant (Anthropic): Our staff use an internal, read-only assistant built on Anthropic's Claude to answer questions about how the platform is running. It works from aggregate figures and dealership business records (dealership name, city and state, subscription status, and listing counts), not from user accounts, and it cannot read buyer-seller messages, passwords, or payment details or change anything on the platform. On request it can return short excerpts (up to 500 characters each) of messages sent to our support and contact forms, so text you send to our support team may be transmitted to Anthropic when our staff use it to answer a question.
  • Payments: Stripe securely processes all transactions, manages subscriptions, and stores billing information.
  • Email Delivery: Mailgun handles transactional emails including email verification, password reset, and listing reminders sent from noreply@americanautolistings.com.
  • Maps: Google Maps API receives location queries (address strings or coordinates) to display listing locations and calculate distances. Your personal identity is not sent to Google Maps.
  • VIN / Plate Lookup: A third-party VIN and license plate decoding API (via RapidAPI) receives VIN or plate numbers submitted during listing creation to return vehicle details. No user account data is shared with this service.
• Business Transfers: If we are acquired, merged, or reorganized, your data may transfer to the successor entity, which must honor this policy.
• Legal Compliance: We may disclose data to comply with legal obligations, enforce our Terms, or protect user safety (e.g., fraud investigations or lawful subpoenas). When federal law requires it, we report apparent child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, including the content and information about the account it came from; NCMEC may make these reports available to law enforcement.
• With Your Consent: If you explicitly authorize us to share your data (e.g., with a dealership integration partner), we will do so only as instructed.

We may share aggregated or de-identified data (e.g., average listing prices by region, platform traffic trends) that cannot be used to identify individual users.

6. Data Security

We take security seriously and use reasonable safeguards to protect your personal data:

• Encryption in Transit: All communication with our platform uses HTTPS with TLS encryption. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Dealer feed credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage, and dealer API keys are stored as scrypt hashes.
• Token Security: JWT authentication tokens are short-lived (1 hour from sign-in; up to 24 hours after certain account changes refresh it) and are tracked in our database. Tokens can be revoked server-side — for example when an account or dealership is deleted — via our blacklist. Signing out revokes your token the same way and removes it from your browser or device.
• Access Controls: Role-based access controls restrict which users can view, edit, or manage different parts of the platform (buyer, private seller, dealer, community staff, admin).
• Hosting Security: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud provide infrastructure-level firewalls, DDoS protection, and backup systems.
• Rate Limiting: Login attempts and API endpoints are rate-limited to prevent abuse.
• Security Headers: We use Helmet.js to enforce strict HTTP security headers including Content Security Policy, HSTS, and XSS protections.

No internet service is 100% secure. If we detect a breach, we will notify affected users and authorities as required by law.

7. Data Retention

We retain personal data only as long as necessary for business, legal, or operational needs:

• Account Info: Retained while your account is active. Upon account deletion, personal identifiers are removed unless required for legal compliance (e.g., fraud records, transaction history).
• Private Seller Listings: Active listings expire 30 days after payment. Expired listings are removed from public search. Listing data may be archived in anonymized form for analytics.
• Dealer Listings: Active while the dealership's subscription is in good standing. Listings are deactivated (not deleted) if a subscription lapses and can be reactivated upon renewal.
• Messages and Conversations: Kept until you or the other participant deletes the message or the conversation; there is no automatic time limit. When you delete a message or a conversation, it is deleted from our database; we do not keep an archive or audit copy of deleted messages. A conversation is a single record shared by both participants, so deleting it removes it for the other participant as well. If you delete your account, your conversations stay available to the other participant, shown under "Deleted user" instead of your name.
• Authentication Tokens: JWT tokens expire 1 hour from sign-in (up to 24 hours after certain account changes refresh it). Revoked tokens are retained in our blacklist until their natural expiry.
• Email and Password Reset Tokens: Expire within a defined short window (minutes to hours) and are purged after use or expiration.
• Listing View Logs: Each listing view is kept as a row so that view counts stay accurate. The viewer's IP address is cleared from rows older than 13 months by a weekly sweep, and from all of your rows immediately when you delete your account; the rest of the row is retained.
• Analytics and Logs: Aggregated or anonymized analytics are retained indefinitely. Daily-visitor hashes are deleted after 13 months by the same weekly sweep.
• Push Tokens: Deleted when you sign out of the mobile app or delete your account; a token is no longer used once its device has gone 30 days without opening the app.
• Media Fingerprints: The content-hash ledger described in Section 2 is retained after the file, listing, or account it came from is deleted, because its purpose is to recognize content that has already been removed.
• Refused and Reported Media: A private copy of an image our automated checks refuse as prohibited content is deleted no later than 30 days after the refusal, unless its review is still open, it is reported, or it is subject to a legal hold. Content reported to NCMEC, with the related account and upload information, is preserved for one year from the report, or longer under a legal hold or other legal obligation. Records that an image was refused as prohibited content or as apparent child sexual exploitation, including the IP address, device, browser, or app information, and time of the upload, are kept as safety records with no set end date, after any copy of the image is deleted. See Safety Screening of Uploaded Media in Section 3.
• Safety and Agreement Records: Intimate-image removal requests and Dealer Agreement signature records are retained as legal evidence, including after the related listing, dealership, or account closes.
• Payment Records: Billing records and subscription histories are retained as required by financial and tax regulations.

8. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on your location and applicable law, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access and Portability: You can download a copy of the personal information linked to your account at any time, without contacting us: on the web, open Account Settings → Your Data → Download my data; in the mobile app, open Account Settings → Your Data. The download is a machine-readable JSON file covering your profile, listings, favorites, saved searches, conversations, notifications and preferences, consent and agreement records, dealership memberships, billing identifiers and activity logs. It never contains your password, sign-in or device tokens, or another person's contact details. You may download it up to three times a day; each download is recorded on your account. You can also request a copy by contacting us (Section 11).
• Correction: You can update your profile information from your account settings. Contact us if you cannot update something directly.
• Deletion: You can request account deletion from your Account Settings page or by contacting us; Delete Your Account gives the steps in the app and on the web, how to ask us without signing in, and exactly what is deleted and what is kept. We will remove personal identifiers unless retention is required for legal or operational reasons. Information we are legally required to preserve is kept until that requirement ends, even if you delete your account. While information connected to an account or dealership must be preserved by law, or a safety review involving it is still open, we may be unable to complete a deletion request until that requirement ends or the review is closed; contact us and we will tell you what we can.
• Withdraw Consent: You may opt out of marketing emails at any time using the unsubscribe link in any email we send.
• Opt-Out of Sale: We do not sell your personal information. If that ever changes, we will provide a clear opt-out mechanism and update this policy.
• Non-Discrimination: You will not be denied service or penalized for exercising your privacy rights.

State-Specific Rights

• California (CCPA/CPRA): You can request details on data collection, usage, and disclosure over the past 12 months, as well as deletion or correction. The 12-month disclosure — the categories of personal information we collected, the sources, the business purposes, and the categories of third parties it was disclosed to — is included in the data download described under Access and Portability above, and can also be requested by contacting us. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising or third-party marketing.
• Other U.S. States: Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and others provide similar privacy rights. We will honor reasonable requests and support appeals if a request is denied.

International Users

AmericanAutoListings is U.S.-based. Data is processed and stored in the United States. We do not actively target users outside the U.S. If you use our service, you consent to data transfer to the U.S.

9. Children's Privacy

Accounts on AmericanAutoListings are only for people 18 or older. Our platform is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 through account registration or listings. If we learn that an account holder is under 18, we close the account. If you are a parent and believe your child has submitted information to us, contact us immediately and we will promptly delete it, except for anything we are legally required to preserve.

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes in practices, regulations, or platform features. When we do, we'll revise the "Last Updated" date and may provide additional notice for significant changes (e.g., email alerts, a banner on the site, or asking you to review and accept the updated policy when you next sign in).

Continued use of the site after an update constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop using the site and request deletion of your account.

11. Contact Us

For any questions, concerns, or privacy-related requests, reach out to us at:

• Email: support@americanautolistings.com
• Mail: Privacy Officer, American Auto Listings LLC, 407 E Main St, Ste 17, PO Box 14, Port Jefferson, NY 11777
• Phone: (631) 802-2576 (weekdays during business hours)

Please include enough detail for us to verify your identity and understand your request. We aim to respond within 30 days or faster where required by law.

Thank you for trusting AmericanAutoListings. We're committed to your privacy and a transparent user experience.

12. Revision History

Each entry below records the date a revised version of this Privacy Policy was published and what changed. This history is provided for convenience; the version in effect is the one whose date appears at the top of this page, and we retain every earlier version in our records.

• October 16, 2026 — Added this Revision History, and the date at the top of the policy is now stated as the effective date of the version. No change to the substance of the policy.
• October 6, 2026 — Messages and conversations are kept until you or the other participant deletes them, with no automatic time limit (Section 7); the business phone number corrected (Section 11).
• October 5, 2026 — The steps to delete an account in the app and on the website linked from the Delete Your Account page (Section 8).
• October 3, 2026 — Safety screening of uploaded photos, videos and logos disclosed: Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety and Microsoft PhotoDNA (which receives only a fingerprint computed on our server), the private copy we keep of a refused image, reporting of apparent child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children with preservation of the related records, the record kept of each refusal, and the retention periods for refused and reported media (Sections 3, 5 and 7).
• October 1, 2026 — The child sexual abuse material report form described alongside the intimate-image removal form, including what each collects (Section 2).
• September 16, 2026 — The seller of a listing you favorite sees your first name and last initial, not your contact details (Sections 2 and 5).
• September 10, 2026 — Collection and processors disclosed as the platform works: saved searches, favorites, Dealer Agreement signature records, safety reports, media fingerprints, mobile push registration and browser-permitted precise location (Section 2); dealer API keys stored only as salted hashes, and signing out revokes the session token (Sections 2, 4 and 6); a self-service download of your account data (Section 8); deleted messages are deleted (Section 7); the operator’s legal name, mailing address and phone number (Section 11).
• August 29, 2026 — Dealer subscription management described for per-vehicle pricing and the listing ceiling (Section 3).
• July 3, 2026 — Policy rewritten for AmericanAutoListings.com ahead of launch.
• April 9, 2025 — First version published.