Privacy Policy

We collect what the app needs to introduce you to people going the same way, to take a payment safely, and to give both of you enough information to decide whether to share a car. We do not sell your data, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

LinkRide Technologies LTD is the data controller — company number SC872736, registered office 2/3, 48 West George Street, Glasgow, United Kingdom, G2 1BP. For anything about your data, email support@linkride.co.uk.

• Account: your email address, and either a password or the fact you signed in with Google or Apple. Apple lets you hide your real address behind a relay one, and that works fine here.
• Profile: your name, profile photo, short bio, and your LinkRide ID. These are shown to people you share a trip with.
• Phone number: verified by SMS, because a verified number is one of the few things that makes an account costly to throw away and remake.
• Date of birth: asked once at signup, because LinkRide is for over 18s. It is never shown to anyone you travel with.
• Gender: optional and self-declared. You can decline, and declining is remembered so we do not ask again.
• Travel preferences: the things you would like a shared journey to be like.
• Location: where your device is, so we can show trips near you, place your pickup point, and give turn-by-turn directions. While you are driving a trip this continues in the background so directions keep working with the screen off.
• Trips: where you travelled from and to, when, with whom, the seat contribution, and whether the trip completed.
• Messages: the chat for a trip, kept so both of you can refer back to what was agreed.
• Reputation: ratings you give and receive, and a count of late cancellations and no-shows.
• Safety contacts: your emergency contact, and anyone you choose to share a live trip with.
• Communities: which university, employer, or event you are verified with, and the address you verified it from.
• Vehicle (drivers): registration, make, model, and colour, plus what DVLA and DVSA records say about tax and MOT status.
• Payments: a Stripe customer reference and, for drivers, a Stripe account reference. We never see or store your full card number.
• Messages to support: what you write to us from inside the app, plus your account, app version and device type so we do not have to ask.
• Safety reports: if you report someone, what you told us. If someone reports you, what they told us — see Your rights for who can see which.
• Device: a push notification token, and app diagnostics such as crashes and errors.

If you are asked to verify your identity, the document and selfie go directly to Stripe and are processed by Stripe under its own privacy policy. We receive the outcome — verified or not, and the name and date of birth confirmed. We do not receive or store the image of your document.

• To perform our contract with you: your account, trips, payments, chat, and payouts. Without these the app cannot do the thing you downloaded it for.
• Legitimate interests: keeping people safe, verification badges, preventing fraud and abuse, and understanding which parts of the app work. We balance these against your privacy, and you can object — see Your rights.
• Legal obligation: keeping trip and payment records for tax and accounting, and the identity checks required before we can pay a driver.
• Consent: your gender, if you give it, and optional emails. You can withdraw either at any time without affecting anything else.

Your name, photo, bio, rating, verification badges, community badges, and any reliability note are visible to other LinkRide users looking at a trip. That is the point of them: somebody is deciding whether to get into a car.

Your email address, phone number, exact home location, payment details, and identity documents are never shown to other users. A driver sees where you want to be picked up, not where you live, unless you set one to the other.

If you share a live trip with a trusted contact, that person can see the route, the vehicle, the driver, and the trip’s progress for as long as it is running. You choose who, and you can stop it.

We do not run our own servers. These providers process data on our behalf, under contract, and only on our instructions:

• Google Firebase: sign-in, the database holding your account and trips, file storage for photos, the code that runs the backend, push notifications, and Crashlytics — which records the technical detail of a crash, along with your user ID so we can tell whether one person hit it fifty times or fifty people hit it once.
• Google Maps Platform: maps, address search, and routing. Addresses and coordinates you search are sent to Google to answer the query.
• Stripe: card payments, driver payouts, and identity verification. Stripe is a separate controller for the regulatory checks it has to perform on paying drivers.
• Resend: our email — verification links, receipts, and service notices.
• Vercel: hosts linkride.co.uk and the partner portals.
• Apple and Google: deliver push notifications to your device.

We also send a vehicle registration you enter to DVLA and DVSA services to check tax and MOT status. That query is about the vehicle, not about you.

Axiom, our own data portal, is not a processor of your data — it is a separate product, and what reaches it is described above.

Some of these process data outside the UK. Where they do, they are contractually required to protect it to the UK GDPR standard, through the UK addendum to the Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision.

The website collects less than the app, and some of it before you have an account at all.

• Waitlist: the email address you submit, whether you are interested in riding or driving, whether you opted in to news, and when you signed up. Used to tell you when testing or launch opens, and you can remove yourself at linkride.co.uk/unsubscribe.
• Community and partner requests: the organisation name, contact name, and email you submit, so we can follow up — and, if the partnership goes ahead, to run the partner dashboard.
• Feedback: your message, plus your name and email if you choose to give them.
• Hosting logs: our host records IP address and browser type for security and performance, as nearly every website does.

We place no advertising or tracking cookies, and no cookies at all. Local storage is used for two things: keeping a partner signed in between visits, and remembering your light or dark mode. We use Vercel Web Analytics for visitor counts, which sets no identifier that follows you between visits or across other sites.

A university, employer or organiser running a LinkRide community has a partner console for it. The people they have made admins there can see who is verified into their community — your name, your rating, and the fact of your membership — along with the totals for the community as a whole.

They cannot see your email address, your phone number, your payment details, your location, your messages, or which particular trips you took. The list answers "who is in our scheme", not "where has this person been".

This is the same name and rating any LinkRide user sees on a trip with you, shown to the organisation whose scheme you joined. If you would rather they did not, leave the community in Settings — you keep your account and carry on at the standard booking fee.

Axiom is a separate product of the same company, LinkRide Technologies LTD. It is a data portal that businesses use for their own data, and it has nothing to do with you unless the university, employer or organiser running your LinkRide community is also an Axiom client.

Where they are, their Axiom portal shows the trips completed within their community: the date, where the trip started and ended, how many seats were filled, the distance, and the amounts contributed. They also see totals — trips, miles, money shared, CO₂ saved — which are the same figures you see in the app.

The lawful basis is our legitimate interest, and theirs, in knowing whether a travel scheme they are running is working. Leaving the community stops your trips being counted in it, as above.

Location is the most sensitive thing the app asks for, so it is worth being exact. We use it while the app is open to show trips near you and to set pickup points. During a trip you are driving, we use it in the background so navigation continues with your phone locked — that is the only time background location is used, and it stops when the trip ends.

Your position is shared with passengers on your trip while it is running, and with anyone you have shared the trip with. It is not broadcast to other LinkRide users, and we do not build a history of where you go outside the trips you take.

You can withdraw location permission in your device settings at any time. Most of the app will then stop working, because it is a map of who is going where.

• Your account and profile: until you delete the account.
• Trips and messages: for the life of the account, so you can refer back to a journey you took.
• Payment and payout records: six years after the tax year they fall in, because HMRC requires it. This survives account deletion and we cannot waive it.
• Identity verification outcomes: five years after our relationship ends, under money-laundering rules.
• Safety reports and suspension records: kept for as long as needed to protect other users, which may be after your account has gone.
• Waitlist entries: until launch, or until you unsubscribe.
• Partner and community requests, and feedback: while we are following them up, and a reasonable period after for context.
• Diagnostics and logs: normally 30 to 90 days.

Settings, then Delete account. Your profile stops being visible to other people straight away, your photo and trip history go, and your saved card is deleted at Stripe — everything except the records listed above that we are legally required to keep.

Messages you sent to other people stay in their copy of the conversation, shown against a deleted account rather than your name. We cannot reach into someone else’s record of a conversation they took part in.

Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw any consent you have given. Email support@linkride.co.uk and we will respond within one month.

For a copy, you do not need to ask: Settings, then Delete account, then "Email me a copy of my data" sends the lot to the address on your account as a file you can open or take elsewhere.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means alone that have a legal or similarly significant effect. Fraud and abuse signals may flag an account, but a person reviews it before it is suspended, and you can ask for that decision to be looked at again.

LinkRide is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data about children. If you believe a child has an account, tell us at support@linkride.co.uk and we will remove it.

When this policy changes we update the date at the top. If a change materially affects what we do with your data, we will tell you in the app rather than hope you check.