RentalGuard

Privacy

What we collect, and what we do not

Written to be read, not to be survived. If a sentence here is unclear, that is our fault — write to us and we will fix the wording.

Last updated 12 October 2026

1. Who this is about

This policy covers this website (section 2) and the RentalGuard app for iPhone (sections 3 to 9). The site collects close to nothing; the app is where your data lives, so most of this page is about the app.

RentalGuard is the name this service trades under. Until the company is registered, the controller of your data — the person responsible for it under the GDPR — is Iurii Leshin, who runs RentalGuard. Contact: privacy@rentalguard.ai. Once the company exists, its name, registered address and number will replace this paragraph.

2. This website

No cookies. Not one, including the ones most sites call "necessary" — and no other browser storage either, except the one setting below, which the site needs to remember your language. This is why you have never seen a consent banner here.

One setting, stored in your own browser. Your choice of language is kept in your browser's local storage under rg-locale. It never leaves your device and we never see it. Clearing your site data removes it.

No third-party analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no tracking pixel, no advertising network, no session recorder and no A/B testing tool on this site.

Two buttons are counted. When you press "Download on the App Store" or "Login", the site tells our own server that the button was pressed, on which page, in which language. That is the whole record: no IP address, no cookie, no identifier, nothing that could tie the press to you or to another press.

The forms are real. The Android waitlist, the iOS notification list and the "Create workspace" pilot request send what you typed — email, and if you gave them, your name, company and fleet size — to our server, where it is stored in our database with the page and language it came from. We use it for exactly one thing: to contact you about the beta or the pilot you asked about. Write to privacy@rentalguard.ai and it is deleted.

Server logs. The site is served by Spaceship, our hosting provider, whose web server records the usual things: your IP address, the page you asked for, your browser's user-agent string and the time. That is the host's log, kept under their retention policy, and we use it only to tell whether the site is up.

One thing your browser fetches from elsewhere. The page loads its styling engine from cdn.tailwindcss.com. Your browser contacts that server directly, so it sees your IP address the same way any server you visit does. We send it nothing about you and receive nothing back.

If you email us, we have your address and whatever you wrote, for as long as it takes to answer you and a reasonable while after.

3. What the app collects

  • Your account. You sign in with Apple or Google. We receive the identifier they issue for you, your email address (or the relay address Apple offers) and, the first time, your name. You can add a profile photo; it is optional.
  • Inspections. The photographs and short videos you take of the vehicle, the damage you mark on them with its type and severity, the time each was taken and, if you allow it, the place. Photographs of a vehicle can include other things — a licence plate, a bystander, a member of the rental staff. Point the camera at the vehicle; we do not analyse what you shoot to identify anyone. The one exception is automatic: in the anonymised training copies described below, number plates, VINs, faces and people are found and blurred.
  • Vehicle details you enter or scan: type, make, model, colour, plate, mileage, fuel.
  • Documents you choose to store — driving licence, insurance, rental contract, vehicle papers. You decide what goes in; nothing is collected automatically, and we never read them for any purpose of our own.
  • Device details saved with each inspection: phone model, iOS version, app version, whether the phone has a LiDAR sensor. They explain why two photos of the same scratch look different.
  • Purchases. When you unlock a rental or buy the yearly pass, Apple processes the payment; we never see your card. We receive from Apple, through RevenueCat, the product bought, the price, the transaction identifier and the dates, so the app can open what you paid for. To do that, RevenueCat itself receives your RentalGuard account identifier, your device type and iOS version, when you last opened the app, and Apple's receipt for the purchase. That record is kept for seven years, the period Hong Kong tax law requires business records to be kept.
  • Diagnostics. Our API keeps request logs — the endpoint, the time, the outcome and your account identifier — for seven days, to find out why something failed. There is no third-party crash-reporting or analytics SDK in the app.

Photos you mark as damaged are also used, anonymised, to train damage detection. This is the one use of your data that is not simply "give it back to you later", so it gets its own paragraph. When you mark damage on a photo, an anonymised copy goes to a separate training set: number plates, VINs, faces and people are blurred, the location, the exact time and the device details are removed, and the copy is not linked to your account, your inspections or your reports. It keeps only what training needs — the marks you made, the zone of the vehicle, and its type, make, model and colour. Photos without marked damage, and videos, are never sent this way. It is off until you allow it: after your first inspection in which you mark damage, the app asks once whether these copies may be used, and you can allow it or choose Not now. If you choose Not now, it may ask one more time later, and then not again. You can change your mind at any time in Settings → Privacy; turning it off stops new copies and changes nothing else about how the app works. Because an anonymised copy cannot be traced back to you, copies already made stay in the training set when you switch it off or delete your account — there is no way for us to tell which ones were yours.

Automatic damage suggestions (coming soon). Today every mark in an inspection is one you made yourself. A future version of the app will also suggest possible damage, using a model that runs on your phone; nothing will be sent anywhere for that. Every suggestion will be yours to confirm or reject, and no decision about you will be made automatically — a mark will exist only because you put it there.

What we do not do. We do not sell your data. We do not show advertising. We do not hand your inspections to a rental company, an insurer or anyone else for their own purposes. They reach only the providers listed below, who process them for us; the people you send a link to yourself; and anyone the law obliges us to disclose them to.

4. Why we are allowed to

Where a law such as the GDPR asks for a legal basis, this is it: your account, inspections, reports and purchases are processed to provide the service you asked for (contract). Location is attached only when you grant the permission (consent), and you can withdraw it in iOS Settings at any time. Training copies are made only with your consent, which you give in the app and can withdraw at any time in Settings → Privacy; once a copy is anonymised it can no longer be linked to you. Logs and security are our legitimate interest in keeping the service running and honest. Waitlist emails are consent, given when you type your address in.

5. Who holds it, and where

We run the service on providers who process data on our instructions and under data-processing agreements with standard contractual clauses:

  • Supabase — database, sign-in and file storage for photos, videos, PDFs and the anonymised training set. Frankfurt, Germany (EU).
  • Railway — the API the app talks to. Amsterdam, Netherlands (EU), and the United States.
  • Upstash — a short-lived job queue used to build reports. Frankfurt, Germany (EU).
  • Apple — Sign in with Apple, App Store purchases. Google — Google Sign-In, if you choose it. Each under its own privacy policy.
  • RevenueCat — purchase records from Apple. United States.
  • Spaceship — this website's hosting.

RentalGuard is operated from outside the European Union, and the company we are forming is in Hong Kong, which the EU has not recognised as offering equivalent protection. Inspection content — photos, videos, reports, documents and the training set — is stored in the EU. Some account, operational and purchase data is processed in the United States: Railway, which runs our API, carries out its main processing there, and RevenueCat keeps purchase records on servers there. These transfers rely on standard contractual clauses. If that changes, this page changes first.

6. How long

  • Inspections, reports, vehicles and documents: while your account exists, or until you delete the item.
  • Anonymised training copies: for as long as they are useful for training. They are not linked to you, so they cannot be picked out and deleted on request.
  • Account: until you delete it — from the app or as described on Delete your account. It is removed from our live systems straight away; API logs that mention your account identifier expire within seven days, and a backup copy can survive for up to 30 days.
  • Purchase records: seven years, as Hong Kong tax law requires (longer only where the law requires it), without your inspections attached.
  • API logs: seven days. Website server logs: the host's retention policy.
  • Waitlist emails: until we write to you about the beta, or until you ask.

7. What you can ask for

Write to privacy@rentalguard.ai and you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, object to a use of it, or send it to you in a file you can open. Consent you have given — location, training — you can withdraw in the app or in iOS Settings without asking us; for training, that stops new copies, since the anonymised ones cannot be traced back to you. We answer within one month, as the GDPR requires. If a request is complex we may take up to two months more, and if so we will tell you why within the first month. You do not need to give a reason, and asking will not degrade the service you get. We may ask you to confirm it is you before acting on a request.

If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to a data-protection authority — in the country where you live, where you work, or where you think the problem happened; in the EU, that country's supervisory authority. We would rather hear from you first, but that is your right, not ours to grant.

8. Keeping it safe

Everything travels over TLS. Photos are hashed on the phone and again on arrival, with the server's timestamp, which is what makes a report tamper-evident. Storage is private: files are reachable only through the app, or through a report link you created. Access to production systems is limited to the people who run them. If a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you and, where the law requires it, the authorities, without undue delay.

9. Children

The service is not built for, and not directed at, anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.

10. Changes

If this policy changes we will change the date at the top. If a change is material — new data collected, or a new reason for collecting it — we will say so in the app and on this site, not only here.

11. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@rentalguard.ai. Anything else: contact@rentalguard.ai, or the support page.