Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated: 6 October 2026

1. Acceptance of these terms

Autognoz is an online question-and-answer community for car owners, mechanics and enthusiasts, operated from Jamaica by its owner as a sole trader ("Autognoz", "we", "us"). By creating an account, posting content, or otherwise using the site, you agree to these Terms of Service and to the Privacy Policy below. If you do not agree, please do not use Autognoz.

2. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. To register you provide your full name, a display name, an email address and a password. We send a confirmation email to that address, and your account is not active until you confirm it.

You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for all activity that happens under your account. Your display name is shown publicly alongside everything you post, so choose one you are comfortable being seen. Do not impersonate another person or organisation, and do not create an account on behalf of someone else without their permission. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.

3. Your content

Questions, answers, comments, replies and tags that you post are your content, and you keep ownership of it. By posting it to Autognoz you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, display and distribute that content for the purpose of operating and promoting the site. This licence lets us do ordinary things like show your answer on a question page, include it in search results, and keep serving it after you stop using the site.

You confirm that you have the right to post what you post, and that it does not infringe anyone else's copyright, trade marks, privacy or other rights. Do not paste in workshop manuals, diagnostic software output, or other material you are not licensed to share.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Post unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful or deliberately misleading content.
• Post spam, advertising or repetitive promotional material.
• Manipulate voting — for example by using multiple accounts, coordinating with others, or automating votes — in order to inflate or suppress the score of any question, answer or comment.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to accounts, servers or data.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-download the site by automated means beyond what is permitted by our robots.txt, or use the site to train machine learning models without our written permission.
• Interfere with the operation of the site or place unreasonable load on it.

5. AI-generated answers

Some answers on Autognoz are generated automatically by a large language model provided by OpenAI, and are posted under a clearly identified system account rather than by a human member of the community. When you request an AI answer, the text of the question is sent to OpenAI for processing — see Third parties and data sharing.

AI-generated answers are provided as-is, may be incomplete or plainly wrong, and are not professional advice. Vehicle repair and maintenance can be safety-critical. Do not rely on an AI-generated answer — or, for that matter, on any answer posted by another member — for work affecting brakes, steering, airbags, fuel systems, high-voltage components or anything else where a mistake could cause injury. Verify against the manufacturer's documentation and consult a qualified technician.

6. Moderation and removal

We may edit, hide or delete any content, and suspend or close any account, at our discretion — in particular where content breaches these terms. We are not obliged to monitor content, and we do not endorse or verify anything posted by members. Content on Autognoz reflects the views of the people who wrote it.

7. Termination

You may stop using Autognoz and request deletion of your account at any time (see Your rights). We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms or if we stop operating the service. Content you posted may remain visible after your account is closed, in anonymised form where we are able to do so, so that discussion threads other members rely on stay intact.

8. Disclaimer of warranties

Autognoz is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure, or that any information on it is accurate, current or complete.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Autognoz and its owner will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, vehicles, property or goodwill, arising out of your use of the site or your reliance on any content posted on it. Our total aggregate liability in connection with the service is limited to one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we will change the "last updated" date at the top of this section, and for material changes we will give notice on the site or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use Autognoz after a change takes effect means you accept the revised terms.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Jamaica, and the courts of Jamaica have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them, except where mandatory consumer protection law in your country of residence gives you the right to bring proceedings elsewhere.

12. Contact

Questions about these terms: support@autognoz.com.

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 6 October 2026

1. Who we are and what this covers

Autognoz is operated from Jamaica by its owner, as a sole trader, who is the data controller for the personal data described here. This policy explains what we collect when you use the Autognoz website and apps, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what control you have over it. You can reach us at any time at support@autognoz.com.

2. Data we collect

Account data. When you register we collect your full name, your chosen display name, and your email address. Your password is stored only as a salted hash — we never store or have access to the password itself.

Content you post. The questions, answers, comments, replies and tags you create, including their timestamps. This content is public: anyone visiting the site, including people without an account and search engines, can read it alongside your display name.

Votes. We record which questions, answers and comments you have upvoted or downvoted, stored against your account so that we can show you your own vote and let you change or withdraw it. Individual votes are not shown publicly — only the aggregate score is.

Technical and usage data. When you view a question we record a random visitor identifier (held in a cookie), your account if you are signed in, and a one-way keyed hash of your IP address and browser user-agent — never the IP address itself. We use these only to count each visitor once per question per day rather than once per page refresh, so that view counts are meaningful, and we delete them after about 24 hours. We also collect standard server log data such as request times and browser user-agent strings.

Analytics data. We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used in aggregate — which pages are visited, roughly where visitors come from, and what devices they use. Google Analytics sets its own cookies and receives your IP address and browsing activity on this site. See Cookies and analytics below for how to opt out.

Communications. If you email us, or use a contact or support form, we keep that correspondence.

3. How we use your data

• To create and maintain your account, and to authenticate you when you sign in.
• To publish your content and attribute it to your display name.
• To send you service email: account confirmation and password reset messages.
• To generate AI answers when you request one (see below).
• To count question views and produce aggregate statistics about how the site is used, including through Google Analytics.
• To moderate content, prevent abuse and vote manipulation, and keep the service secure.
• To comply with legal obligations and respond to lawful requests.

Our legal bases for processing are: performance of our contract with you (running your account and publishing your content), your consent (where you have given it, for example to optional email), our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention, understanding how the site is used) and compliance with legal obligations.

4. Third parties and data sharing

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers we need to run Autognoz:

OpenAI. When an AI answer is generated, the text of the question — including anything you have written in it — is transmitted to OpenAI's API for processing, and the generated answer is returned and posted to the site. Please do not include personal information, registration or VIN numbers, addresses, or anything else you would not want processed by a third party in the text of a question. OpenAI processes this data under its own terms and privacy policy, and their servers may be located outside your country. See openai.com/policies/privacy-policy.

Google. Two Google services process your data. Account confirmation and password reset emails are sent through a Google (Gmail) SMTP relay, so your email address and the contents of those messages pass through Google. Separately, Google Analytics receives your IP address and your browsing activity on this site. Google processes this data under its own terms, on servers that may be located outside Jamaica. See policies.google.com/privacy.

Hosting and infrastructure. Our application and our database are hosted by Microsoft on its Azure cloud platform (Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database), on servers in the United States (Central US region). Microsoft processes this data on our behalf under a data processing agreement. See privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement. Because our application runs in the United States, your data is transferred outside Jamaica to be processed there.

We may also disclose data where required by law, to enforce our Terms of Service, to protect the rights or safety of our users or the public, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets (in which case we will notify you before your data becomes subject to a different privacy policy).

5. Cookies and analytics

Strictly necessary cookies. An authentication cookie keeps you signed in between page loads, and a session cookie holds short-lived state while you use the site. These are required for Autognoz to function and cannot be turned off without breaking sign-in.

View-counting cookie. When you open a question we set a cookie holding a random identifier, kept for up to a year, so that refreshing a page or coming back later the same day does not inflate its view count. It contains nothing about you and is not used for anything else. If you block it, views are de-duplicated using the hashed value described in What we collect instead.

Analytics cookies. Google Analytics sets cookies to recognise returning visitors and measure how the site is used. These are not strictly necessary, and you can decline them. You can opt out across all sites using Google's browser opt-out add-on, or block cookies in your browser settings.

We do not use advertising or cross-site retargeting cookies, and we do not sell your data to advertisers.

You can clear or block cookies in your browser settings at any time, but you will not be able to stay signed in if you block the necessary ones.

6. Data retention

We keep your account data for as long as your account is open. If you close or delete your account, we delete or anonymise your account data within 30 days, except where we must keep something longer to comply with a legal obligation or to resolve a dispute. Content you posted publicly may remain on the site in anonymised form so that discussion threads stay readable. Server logs are kept for 90 days.

7. Your rights

Wherever you live, we will honour the rights below. They are given force by the Data Protection Act, 2020 in Jamaica, by the GDPR in the UK and EEA, and by the CCPA/CPRA in California. You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy of it.
• Correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Delete your account and your personal data.
• Receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format.
• Object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent where processing is based on it.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of these, email support@autognoz.com. We will respond within the period required by the law that applies to you (one month under the GDPR, 45 days under the CCPA). If you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Information Commissioner in Jamaica, or to your local data protection authority if you are in the UK or EEA.

8. Children's privacy

Autognoz is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child under 16 has given us personal data, contact us at support@autognoz.com and we will delete it.

9. Security

We serve the site over HTTPS, store passwords only as salted hashes, and restrict internal access to personal data to people who need it. No system is completely secure, though, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your personal data and poses a risk to you, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as required by law.

10. International transfers

Autognoz is operated from Jamaica, and your data is processed there and in other countries — notably by OpenAI, by Google (email delivery and analytics), and by our hosting provider, whose servers are largely in the United States and Europe. Where data belonging to users in the UK or EEA is transferred out of those regions, we rely on the safeguards our providers have in place, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The "last updated" date at the top of this section always reflects the current version, and we will give notice on the site or by email before material changes take effect.

12. Contact us about privacy

Privacy questions, data requests and complaints: support@autognoz.com.

Autognoz is run by a single operator and has not appointed a Data Protection Officer or an EU/UK representative. Every request sent to the address above reaches the data controller directly.