Last updated 12 September 2026
The short version: your cars live on your phone. We hold an email address so you can sign in, and your photos are sent to Google to work out what the car is. Nothing else, and no advertising or tracking of any kind.
whatmodel! is made by Yacine Rabehi, who is the data controller for the information described here. If you want anything explained, corrected or deleted, write to support@whatmodel.fun.
Your account. When you sign in with Apple or Google we receive your email address and, if the provider sends it, your name. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address Apple invents for you — we never see your real one. This is stored so that your account exists and can be signed back into. Signing in is only asked for when you add a car to your collection; you can take photographs and see what a car is without an account.
Your Spotter ID. A public handle such as
@yacineqa_s7lp, made from the part of your email address before the
@ plus four random characters. It exists so that other collectors can find you
when friends and leaderboards arrive.
Photographs. To identify a car, the photo you take is sent to Google's Gemini API, which replies with the make and model. We do not keep your photos on our servers — they are held on your phone, inside the app. Google processes the image under its own terms, on a paid tier, which means your photo is not used to train Google's models.
Where you found it. If you allow location access, the place a car was caught is saved on your phone, so the map can show where you have been. The place name comes from Apple's own service. These coordinates are never sent to us.
A device identifier. Each identification carries an identifier for your installation of the app, so we can count how many identifications an installation makes in a day and stop the service being abused. It is stored with a daily count and nothing else, and it is not linked to your account or your name.
Under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, the reasons are:
Our database and sign-in run in the United States, and Google's identification service may process a photograph outside the country you are in. Where information leaves the UK or the European Economic Area, it is transferred under the safeguards those rules require — in practice the standard contractual clauses our providers publish.
Your account details — the email address and Spotter ID — are kept until you delete your account, and go the moment you do. Identification counts are stored against the day they happened, are never read again after that day, and are deleted once they are no longer any use for spotting abuse. Everything else — your cars, your photographs, your notes and your locations — stays on your phone for as long as you keep the app, and nowhere else.
Everything the app sends travels over an encrypted connection (HTTPS/TLS). The database will only ever hand a row to the account it belongs to, which is enforced by the database itself rather than by the app asking nicely. The Google key that pays for identification lives on our server and has never been inside the app, so it cannot be pulled out of a download.
No service can promise perfect security, and this one does not either. What it can say is that there is very little here to lose: no photographs, no locations, and no payment details.
Settings → Account → Delete account removes your account, your Spotter ID and your email address from our servers for good. If you signed in with Apple, the app's access to your Apple ID is withdrawn at the same time. Settings → Delete my data removes the cars, photographs and places held on your phone. Deleting the app removes those too.
whatmodel! is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has given us their details, write to support@whatmodel.fun and it will be deleted.
Depending on where you live, the GDPR (UK and EU) or the CCPA/CPRA (California) and laws like them give you the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to receive a copy of it, and to object to how it is used. Deleting is the one you can do yourself, in the app, in about five seconds.
For everything else write to support@whatmodel.fun and we will answer within 30 days. We have never sold anyone's information and have nothing to sell, so the opt-out those laws provide is not a thing you need here.
whatmodel.fun is a handful of static pages served by Cloudflare. There are no analytics, no cookies and no trackers on it. Cloudflare keeps short-lived technical logs of requests for security and reliability, as any host does; we do not read them, and there is no account or profile behind them.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything significant will be said inside the app rather than quietly published here.