This Policy explains what Qarvis collects, how it is used and shared, how long it is kept, and what you can do about it. It is part of our Terms of Service.
We do not sell your personal information. We also never share your affordability or income information with dealers. See Section 5 and our Cookie Policy.
1. Scope
This Privacy Policy explains how Qarvis LLC ("Qarvis," "we," "us") collects, uses, shares, and retains personal information when you use the Qarvis website and services (the "Service"). It forms part of our Terms of Service.
It covers everyone who uses Qarvis — buyers, private sellers, dealership owners, and dealership staff. It does not cover what a dealership does with your information after you contact them. Once you send an inquiry, that dealership becomes an independent controller of what you sent, governed by its own privacy practices and by the restrictions we impose on it in the Dealer Terms of Service.
2. Information We Collect
2.1 Information you give us
- Account information — name, email address, and, if you choose to provide it, phone number and location.
- Business information, for dealership accounts — legal and trade name, address, phone, website, dealer license number, and tax identification number.
- Listing content — vehicle details, photographs, descriptions, pricing, and any documents you upload.
- Messages — what you send to other users through the Service, including conversations with a dealership's automated assistant.
- Assistant conversation information, if you use a dealership assistant — what you tell it about your timeline, budget, payment preference, trade-in, and what you are looking for, and, only if you separately consent, a phone number for that dealership. See Section 5A.
- What you tell the Qarvis Guide, if you use it (the buying guide on the home page and beside your search results) — how you will use a car, what matters to you, what you want to avoid, and anything else you choose to tell it, which can include a budget, a down payment, or a self-reported income or credit range. If you are signed in, it is saved to your shopping profile, which is shared with dealerships you contact only if you turn sharing on. See Section 5B.
- Affordability information, if you use the affordability tool — income, housing cost, existing debt payments, savings, and a self-reported credit standing range. See Section 5.
- Searches, saved alerts, comparisons, and preferences.
- Reviews, reports, and support requests.
2.2 Information we collect automatically
- Usage data — pages viewed, listings opened, searches run, time spent, and referring pages.
- A visitor identifier stored in your browser to distinguish repeat visits from new ones. This is how we count unique visitors; it is not linked to your identity unless you are signed in.
- Device and connection data — browser type, operating system, approximate location derived from IP address, and IP address itself.
- Consent records — what you agreed to, which version, and when. See Section 8.
2.3 Information from third parties
- Vehicle data from VIN decoding services, including the NHTSA database, and from commercial vehicle data providers.
- Inventory feeds supplied by dealerships or their syndication providers.
- Verification data from public business registries and licensing databases, used to verify dealership accounts.
- Payment confirmations from our payment processor. We never receive your full card number.
2.4 What we do not collect
We do not obtain credit reports, credit scores, or consumer reports about you, and we do not access your credit file. Qarvis is not a consumer reporting agency. Dealership assistants are prohibited from asking for your Social Security number, date of birth, income, employment details, or financial account details, and we do not store those fields. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.
3. How We Use Information
- Operate the Service — show listings, run searches, deliver messages, and maintain your account.
- Interpret your searches and rank results, including through AI systems.
- Remember what you tell the Qarvis Guide, if you are signed in, so it can personalize its questions, suggestions, and searches for you. See Section 5B.
- Generate vehicle summaries, tags, and assessments.
- Send notifications you have asked for, including saved-search alerts and reminders.
- Send service messages about billing, security, account access, and legal changes. These are not optional while you hold an account.
- Process payments, credits, subscriptions, and refunds.
- Detect and prevent fraud, spam, scraping, duplicate accounts, and abuse, and enforce our Terms.
- Verify dealership accounts.
- Produce analytics for sellers about engagement with their own listings.
- Improve the Service, including evaluating and improving our search and AI systems.
- Comply with law and respond to legal process.
Where the law requires a legal basis for processing, ours is performance of our contract with you, our legitimate interests in operating and securing the Service, your consent where we have asked for it, and compliance with legal obligations.
5. Affordability Information
The affordability tool is optional. If you use it, this is what happens to what you enter.
- It is stored on your account so the tool remembers your estimate between visits.
- It produces a budget range shown only to you.
- That range is used as one soft input among many when ordering your search results. It never removes vehicles from your results and never applies a hard price ceiling — you will still see vehicles above your range.
- It is never disclosed to dealerships, private sellers, lenders, insurers, or data brokers. A seller may learn that you used the tool in connection with their listing; they do not receive what you entered or what it produced.
- You can delete it at any time from your profile, which removes it from ranking immediately.
This is not a credit application and produces nothing resembling a credit report. We do not verify what you enter, we do not access your credit file, and nothing produced by this tool may be used by anyone to decide your eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing.
5A. Dealership Automated Assistants
Some dealerships use an automated assistant to answer messages about their listings. Section 12A of the Terms describes what it does; this describes what happens to your information.
5A.1 What is shared with the dealership
What you tell an assistant goes to that dealership. That includes your messages, and the structured summary the assistant assembles from them — your timeline, whether you expect to pay cash or finance, a budget or monthly figure you mention, a trade-in you describe, features that matter to you, and how far you would travel.
It is what you said, unverified. We do not check it and it is not a credit assessment. Nothing you tell an assistant is used to evaluate your eligibility for credit, and none of it reaches a lender through us.
5A.2 What is never shared
Your affordability tool figures are never disclosed to a dealership, including through an assistant. Section 5 applies without exception. Assistants are prohibited from asking for a Social Security number, date of birth, income, employment details, or financial account details, and refuse to record them if volunteered.
5A.3 Engagement signals behind assistant-initiated contact
Where a dealership has enabled it, we use your activity on their listings — how long you spent, how many photographs you opened, which tools you used, whether you returned on other days, whether you saved it — to decide whether a conversation is worth opening. We keep a record of the specific signals behind any assistant that contacted you, and you can ask us for it at privacy@qarvis.com. Casual browsing does not meet the threshold.
5A.4 Your phone number
A number is shared only if you enter it into a consent form naming one dealership and tick the box, and only with that dealership, for that inquiry. It is not shared with any other dealership, is not used by Qarvis to call or text you, and is not sold. You can withdraw it from the conversation at any time; we record the withdrawal, remove the number from the lead record the dealership sees, and notify them that they must stop contacting you.
5A.5 Turning it off
Notification settings contain a switch that stops every dealership assistant from contacting you first. It applies across all dealerships and does not affect conversations you start.
5B. The Qarvis Guide and Your Shopping Profile
The Qarvis Guide is our own AI buying guide. It works for you, not for any seller. This describes what happens to what you tell it.
5B.1 If you are not signed in
Your conversation is sent to our servers and our AI provider to produce each reply, and is kept only in your browser. We do not store it. (If you build a buyer brief and choose to save it, it waits in your browser for up to 24 hours until you sign in.)
5B.2 If you are signed in: your shopping profile
What you tell the guide is saved to a shopping profile on your account, so the guide does not have to ask you again. It holds what you are looking for, the needs and preferences you mentioned, and short notes summarizing what you told it. It can also hold a budget, a down payment, or an income or credit range — but only if you chose to tell the guide. We do not store full conversation transcripts.
It is used only to personalize the guide's questions, suggestions, and searches for you. It is not used to decide your eligibility for credit or anything else (Section 6.1).
5B.3 Private unless you choose to share it
Your shopping profile is private by default. It is shared with a dealership only if you turn on "Share my shopping profile with dealers I contact," and then only with dealerships you contact by message, email, call, test drive request, or offer — never with dealerships you have not contacted, private sellers, lenders, insurers, or data brokers, and it is not sold.
What a dealership receives is described in Section 4.2, and you can see exactly what that is, before anything is sent, under Profile → Shopping Profile. Your budget and down payment stay private unless you switch them on. An income or credit range you give the guide, your driving record, and the guide's notes about you are never shared, with sharing on or off. An income or credit range is treated like affordability information under Section 5.
A dealership keeps the copy it received when you contacted it, as it keeps your messages (Section 9.3). Turning sharing off stops it from being sent to dealerships you contact afterward. We keep a record of when you turned sharing on or off, as we keep other consent records (Section 8).
5B.4 Your control
You can see everything in your shopping profile, and edit, remove, or clear any of it, under Profile → Shopping Profile. Removing something you told the guide in a conversation also removes it from your profile. Clearing it deletes it, and it is deleted when you close your account. Buyer briefs you choose to save are stored on your account until you delete them.
6. Automated Processing and Profiling
Several parts of the Service run automatically. In the interest of being specific rather than general:
- Search interpretation — a language model parses your query into structured criteria.
- The Qarvis Guide — a language model asks you questions, comments on your search results, and may rewrite your search when you ask it to change your results. If you are signed in, what it learns is saved to your shopping profile. See Section 5B.
- Ranking — results are ordered by relevance, distance, listing attributes, paid promotion, and, where you have saved one, your affordability estimate.
- Content generation — vehicle summaries, condition and price assessments, and descriptive tags are produced by AI systems, not written by people.
- Trust and safety — listings, messages, and account behavior are scanned to detect fraud, spam, off-platform solicitation, and policy violations. These systems can restrict features, hide content, or flag an account for human review.
- Lead assessment — when you contact a seller, an automated system characterizes your inquiry, including an estimate of your stage of interest and the topics you raised, and shares that characterization with that seller.
- Engagement scoring — where a dealership has enabled an assistant, your activity on their listings is scored to decide whether to open a conversation with you. This decides whether you are contacted; it decides nothing else about you. See Section 5A.
6.1 What these systems are not used for
We do not use automated processing to make decisions about your eligibility for credit, lending, financial services, insurance, housing, employment, or education, and we do not use it for behavioral advertising.
6.2 Human review
Where an automated system restricts your account, you can ask a person to review it by contacting support@qarvis.com. Automated assessments are frequently wrong, and we treat them accordingly.
7. Your Choices
7.1 Email
Every notification email carries a link to manage your preferences. Service messages about billing, security, account access, and legal changes continue regardless, because they concern your account rather than marketing.
7.2 Text messages
We text you only where you separately checked a box authorizing it and confirmed your number with a one-time code we texted to it. With that consent we send two kinds of message: the alerts and reminders you set up, and notices about your account — billing and payment, and listing status such as a listing approaching expiry. Consent to texts is never a condition of using Qarvis or of any purchase. Reply STOP to any message to stop all texts, or HELP for help. You can also remove your number from your alerts at any time. We honor opt-outs promptly, and we keep a record that consent was given and later withdrawn — see Section 8.
Stopping texts does not stop the equivalent email. Account notices about money, access, and listing status continue by email regardless, because they concern your account rather than marketing — see Section 7.1.
We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes. Mobile numbers and text-messaging consent collected for our text program are used only for the messages described above, and are disclosed only to the messaging carriers and our messaging vendor as needed to deliver them. SMS opt-in data and consent are never shared with dealerships or any other third party. Separately, where you explicitly ask us to pass your number to a named dealership so it can contact you, that is a distinct choice made through its own form, applies only to that dealership, and does not include your text-message opt-in or consent records.
Message frequency varies and depends on how many alerts and reminders you set, on marketplace activity, and on your account and listing status. Message and data rates may apply depending on your mobile plan.
7.3 Cookies and analytics
You can accept or decline non-essential cookies through our cookie banner and change that choice at any time in our Cookie Policy. Essential storage needed to sign you in and keep the Service working cannot be switched off.
7.4 Affordability and profile data
You can edit or delete your affordability information, shopping profile, saved buyer briefs, saved searches, alerts, and comparisons from your profile, and turn sharing of your shopping profile with dealerships on or off there at any time.
7.5 Closing your account
You can close your account from your profile. See Section 8 for what is retained afterward and why. If you close a dealership account, we may contact you afterward about returning to Qarvis — see Section 8.
8. Retention
We keep personal information for as long as your account is open and afterward only as long as we have a reason to.
- Account and profile data — deleted or de-identified after you close your account, subject to the exceptions below.
- Shopping profile — kept until you clear it or close your account. Conversations with the guide are not stored as transcripts.
- Listings — removed from the marketplace when delisted or when your account closes.
- Messages — retained while both accounts exist, and afterward where needed to resolve a dispute or investigate abuse.
- Analytics — retained in aggregate. Aggregate figures are not deleted when an account closes, because they are no longer about you.
- Payment and tax records — retained as long as tax and accounting law requires.
- Trust and safety records — retained where deletion would let a banned account return, which is the entire point of the record.
- Consent records — retained for at least 3 years, or 1 year after your account closes, whichever is longer.
- Dealership contacts we reach out to about listing on Qarvis — the email address, name, and dealership name we wrote to, and when; and, if we call or meet with you, the business contact details you or your dealership give us (such as phone number, role, and website) and our notes of those conversations. Kept for up to 24 months after our last contact unless you create an account or use a code we sent, then de-identified or deleted. You can ask us to delete it sooner at privacy@qarvis.com. If you ask us not to contact you, we stop, and our do-not-email list holds only a one-way fingerprint of your address — not the address itself — so we can honor that request.
- Closed dealership accounts — when a dealership owner closes their account, we keep the business and contact details they gave us (dealership name, contact name, email, phone numbers, address, website, dealer license number, and inventory provider) so we can follow up about the closure and invite them back. We keep these until the follow-up is no longer needed, and never use them to text you without your consent. You can ask us not to contact you, or to delete these details, at any time at privacy@qarvis.com.
8.1 Why consent records outlive your account
A record showing you agreed to our Terms, or consented to texts and later withdrew that consent, is retained even after you close your account. Deleting it would destroy the evidence of what was agreed and when — including the evidence that you withdrew consent, which is the record that protects you. California law separately requires that proof of consent to automatic renewal be kept. These records hold the minimum needed to serve that purpose.
9. Your Rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:
- Know what personal information we hold about you and how we use and share it.
- Access a copy of it.
- Correct it where it is inaccurate.
- Delete it, subject to the retention exceptions in Section 8.
- Opt out of sale or sharing — though as stated in Section 4.1, we do neither.
- Limit use of sensitive personal information.
- Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. Exercising them will not change your pricing, your service, or your access.
9.1 How to exercise them
Email privacy@qarvis.com or use the controls in your profile. We will verify your identity by confirming control of the email on the account, and will respond within the period the applicable law requires — generally 45 days, extendable once where the request is complex. An authorized agent may act for you with written permission.
9.2 Appeals
If we decline a request and you live somewhere that provides an appeal right, reply to our decision and a different person will review it.
9.3 Dealerships
If you have contacted a dealership through Qarvis, that dealership holds a copy of what you sent. We require dealers to act on deletion and correction requests we pass to them within 30 days. If you want a dealership to delete your information, tell us and we will pass it on, but you may also contact them directly.
10. Security
We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information we hold, including encryption in transit, access controls, and row-level restrictions that keep one account's data out of another's reach.
No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that information will never be accessed without authorization. Use a strong, unique password, and tell us at support@qarvis.com if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.
11. Children
The Service is for adults. You must be 18 or older to hold an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and if we learn we have, we delete it. If you believe a child has given us information, contact privacy@qarvis.com.
12. Where Your Information Is Processed
Qarvis operates in the United States and information is processed there. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in a country whose data protection laws may differ from those of your own.
13. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Policy. The version and effective date at the top of this page always reflect the current one. For material changes we give notice by email or in-product at least 30 days before they take effect. Changes never apply retroactively to information already collected under a prior version in a way that would be inconsistent with what we told you at the time.
14. Contact Us
Privacy questions and rights requests: privacy@qarvis.com
General support: support@qarvis.com · Legal: legal@qarvis.com · Accessibility: accessibility@qarvis.com
By mail:
California residents may also contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or (800) 952-5210.