Auto Minder
Privacy
Auto Minder keeps your fuel and maintenance records on your phone. Signing in is optional, and this page says plainly what happens either way.
Last updated 27 September 2026
- Your records live on your phone. Without signing in, nothing about your vehicles leaves it.
- If you sign in, your records are copied to your own private cloud account so your devices agree and you can share a vehicle with someone you choose.
- Photographs of pumps and odometers are read on your phone and then deleted. They are never uploaded.
- There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing is ever sold or shared with data brokers.
- Comparing your vehicles with other owners is off until you switch it on, and shares four labels and four rounded numbers with no way back to you.
What is stored on your phone
Everything the app is for: your vehicles, fill-ups, service records, reminders, reward card nicknames and the settings you choose. This is the real copy of your data. It stays on the device, works offline, and is removed when you uninstall the app.
What happens if you sign in
Signing in (with Google, Apple, or an email address and password) creates an account held by Google Firebase on our behalf. Your records are then copied to a private area of that account so a second device, the website, and anyone you deliberately share a vehicle with can see the same thing.
| What is copied | Why |
|---|---|
| Vehicles, fill-ups, service records and reminders | So your phone, an iPhone and the website show the same records |
| Your settings | So a new phone behaves like the old one |
| Your email address | To identify the account and to let someone share a vehicle with you |
| A vehicle's photograph, if you added one and left photo sync on | So the people a vehicle is shared with see the same picture |
Only you and the people you have shared a particular vehicle with can read it. This is enforced by security rules on the database, not only by the app.
What is never collected
- No advertising identifiers, no ad networks, no third-party trackers.
- No analytics or crash reporting. The app contains no analytics library at all — we do not know which screens you open or how often you use it.
- No contacts, no messages, no browsing history, no call logs.
- No full card numbers, ever. See below.
- No continuous location. See below.
Photographs
Photographs of a pump display, an odometer or a receipt are read on the device — the text recognition runs on your phone and makes no network request. Once the numbers have been read, the app's own copy of a fill-up photograph is deleted. Photographs in your gallery are never deleted or modified by Auto Minder.
Two photographs are kept because they are useful later: a service receipt, which stays on the phone that took it, and a vehicle's own picture, which is kept and — if photo sync is on — copied to the people that vehicle is shared with.
Reward cards
Auto Minder stores a nickname and a percentage so it can tell you which card pays best at the pump. It can also store the last four digits so it can recognise which card a receipt was paid with. The full card number is never stored, never typed in, and never leaves your possession.
Those four digits are encrypted on the device with a key held in the phone's hardware-backed keystore. They are left out of the settings backup entirely, and if you choose to share your cards with someone, the digits are separately encrypted for that person alone.
Location
The app asks for location only when you tap "Use my location" while entering a fill-up, and only to work out which petrol station you are at. It first checks stations you have used before, on the device. If it finds none and the nearby-station setting is on, it asks OpenStreetMap for fuel stations within about a mile — that request contains an approximate position and nothing else: no account, no vehicle, no records.
Auto Minder never tracks your location in the background, and never records where you have driven.
Comparing with other owners (off by default)
If you switch this on, each road vehicle you own contributes eight values and nothing else: make, model, year, vehicle type, average MPG, fuel cost per mile, maintenance cost per mile, and miles per year — each already rounded.
What is not sent, by construction: your name, your email, the vehicle's nickname, its VIN, its plate, its photograph, any date or time, any place, and any individual record. Your contribution can be read only by your own account; nobody else can read it, signed in or not.
What other people see is a summary written by a server, not by anyone's phone, and only for a group of five or more vehicles: the group's name, how many vehicles are in it, and for each number a median and a middle-half range. Below five vehicles the summary is deleted rather than published. Switch the setting off, or delete your account, and your contributions are removed.
Buying Auto Minder Plus
Auto Minder Plus is sold by Google Play on Android and by the App Store on iPhone. They take the payment; Auto Minder never sees your card, your billing address or your payment details.
Plus belongs to your Auto Minder account, so buying it needs you to be signed in. When you buy or restore it, the app sends the store's reference for that purchase to Auto Minder's server, which asks the store whether it is genuine and still current. The server keeps that reference, which product it was (monthly, yearly or lifetime), when it runs out and whether it renews — nothing else — so that your other devices and autominder.app know you have Plus, and so a renewal or a refund can be matched to your account. Google Play is also given a one-way code made from your account number (not the number itself) so a purchase can't be claimed by a different account. Delete your account and these records go with it.
When the app uses the internet
| Who | When | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase | Only while signed in | Your account and the records described above |
| NHTSA (US government vehicle database) | When you look up a VIN | The VIN alone |
| OpenStreetMap | When you ask for nearby stations | An approximate position |
| Google Play or the App Store | When you buy or restore Auto Minder Plus | What the store needs to sell it to you; handled by the store |
Used without signing in, and without those two features, the app makes no network requests at all.
How long it is kept, and how to delete it
- On the phone: until you delete a record or uninstall the app.
- In the cloud: until you delete it. Deleting a record deletes it everywhere it was shared. In the app, Settings → Account & sync → delete your account removes your cloud records, your shared card data and any comparison contributions.
- Deleting your account does not touch the copy on your phone — that stays yours.
- Step-by-step: delete your account or delete some of your data.
Children
Auto Minder is a tool for vehicle owners and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything that alters what leaves your phone will be called out in the app's release notes rather than quietly amended here.
Contact
Questions, or a request to delete something: support@autominder.app.