Privacy
policy

Who we are

EngineCreep is an independent site publishing engine reliability scores, known faults and repair costs. It is the controller of the small amount of personal data described on this page, and you can reach it at contact@enginecreep.com.

There are no accounts, logins or subscriptions, and we never ask for payment details. We do not sell personal information, and nothing you send us is used for advertising.

When you write to us

The site has two forms, and they are the only places it asks you for anything:

• The contact form takes your name, your email address, a topic, optionally an engine, and your message. Your email address is used only to reply to you.
• “Something wrong here?” at the foot of an engine report takes only your message and which engine page you sent it from.

Both arrive as an email in our inbox, sent through Cloudflare’s email service. They are not saved in a database on the site. We keep them for as long as it takes to reply or correct the data, and delete them within 12 months.

If you tick “You can quote me anonymously”, we may quote your message on the relevant engine page, without your name or email address. If you don’t tick it, we won’t.

To stop spam, each submission is checked against a short limit of three messages a minute per IP address. The address is used only for that check and is not stored with your message.

Hosting and security

The site runs on Cloudflare. To deliver pages and filter out bots and malicious traffic, Cloudflare processes technical details of each request, such as your IP address, browser and device headers, and the page asked for. We keep request logs for a few days to diagnose errors, and we do not use them to identify visitors or combine them with any other data. Cloudflare’s own handling is described in its privacy policy.

Cookies and advertising

EngineCreep’s own code sets no cookies. Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie (such as __cf_bm or cf_clearance) when it needs to check that a visitor is not a bot.

Some pages carry advertisements served by Google AdSense:

• Google and other third-party vendors use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this site and to other websites.
• Google’s advertising cookies let it and its partners show you personalised ads based on those visits. See how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
• You can turn off personalised advertising in Google Ads Settings, and opt out of other vendors’ cookies at aboutads.info or, in Europe, youronlinechoices.eu.

If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, Google’s consent message asks for your choice before any advertising cookies are set, and you can change it later from the same message. If you decline, you may still see non-personalised ads, which Google uses cookies for only to limit repeats, count views and prevent fraud.

What your browser stores

The buying checklist on an engine report remembers which items you have ticked. That is kept in your own browser’s local storage, never sent to us, and disappears if you clear site data. Nothing else on the site stores anything about you locally.

Engine data and owner reports

Engine reports are built from public owner discussions on Reddit and marque forums, the NHTSA complaint database and DVSA MOT records. Nothing on a report is about the people browsing the site. How it is weighed is set out in our methodology.

We do not save or publish usernames, profiles or anything else personal about the people who wrote those posts. All we keep is the car, the engine, the kilometres it had done, what broke and what the repair cost. Reports show our own summary of what owners describe, never their posts or their names.

Links to other sites

Reports and articles link to forum threads, official databases such as NHTSA, and our social profiles. Those sites have their own privacy practices, and we are not responsible for them or their content.

Legal basis and transfers

Under UK and EU data protection law we rely on:

• Legitimate interests for keeping the site secure and running, replying to your messages and correcting the data you flag.
• Consent for advertising cookies in the UK, EEA and Switzerland, and for quoting your message on an engine page.

Cloudflare and Google may process data outside the UK and EEA, including in the United States. Both rely on recognised safeguards for those transfers, such as the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of any personal data we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to how we use it, or withdraw a consent you gave. Email contact@enginecreep.com and we will reply within a month. As we hold very little, it will usually be a single email thread.

Children

EngineCreep is written for car buyers and owners, not children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us their details, email us and we will delete them.

Changes and contact

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Questions about it, or about your data, go to contact@enginecreep.com or through the contact form.