Privacy Policy

Rydes is a community for people who build, restore, collect and show off cars and bikes. You keep a garage of your vehicles, post photos, join communities, list parts, find events, and ask Ray — our shop assistant — for help.

This policy explains what we collect, why, who we hand it to, and what you can do about it. It covers the Rydes website at rydes.club and the Rydes mobile apps for iOS and Android. The controller of your information is Rydes LLC.

Your account

To create an account we need an email address, a username and a password. Passwords are stored only as a salted hash — nobody at Rydes can read yours, and we cannot tell it to you if you forget it.

If you sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook instead, that provider confirms your identity to us and passes along your email address and basic profile. They do not give us your password, and we do not post anything to those accounts.

Your profile

Everything else on your profile is optional and yours to fill in or leave blank: your name, a bio, a profile photo, your city, state, country and postal code, a street address, links to your own website, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram, and a phone number. If you give us an address we may store approximate coordinates for it so we can show you events and members nearby.

If you verify a phone number, we send a one-time code by SMS through our verification provider to confirm the number reaches you.

What you post

The vehicles in your garage and their photos, gallery uploads, community and forum posts, comments, direct messages, marketplace listings, event listings and RSVPs, and anything else you choose to publish or send. Photos are stored as uploaded, which means any location or camera data embedded in the file comes along with them.

Payment

Paid memberships are handled by Stripe on the web, and by the Apple App Store or Google Play (through RevenueCat) in the mobile apps. Card numbers never reach Rydes and are never stored on our servers. What we keep is the customer and subscription identifier the payment provider gives us, so we know which plan you are on and when it renews.

Usage and activity. What you do on the platform — vehicles added, images uploaded, posts made, events saved, points earned — because that is the product.

Device and log data. Our servers record ordinary web-server information: IP address, browser or app version, the pages and endpoints requested, and timestamps. We use it to keep the service running, to investigate abuse, and to debug errors.

Crash and error reports. When something breaks, an automated report goes to our error-monitoring provider. It contains the technical detail of the failure and may include the account identifier of whoever hit it, so we can tell whether a bug affects one person or everyone.

Push tokens (mobile apps only). If you turn on notifications, we store the push token Apple or Google issues for that device, along with the device identifier the operating system provides. It lets us deliver a notification; it does not let us read anything on your phone.

We do not run advertising or analytics trackers. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, and no third-party behavioral tracking on rydes.club. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Every permission below is optional. The app asks the first time a feature needs it, and you can withdraw any of them later in your device settings — only the feature that depends on it stops working.

• To run your account, your garage and everything you post.
• To show your profile and content to other members according to your privacy settings.
• To take payment for a membership and keep your plan current.
• To answer your questions through Ray and through support.
• To send you service email and notifications — password resets, receipts, replies, security notices. These are part of having an account and cannot be turned off, though you control which optional notifications you receive.
• To send product news and marketing, only if you opted in. Every such message has an unsubscribe link, and you can change it in your settings at any time.
• To keep the platform safe: preventing fraud, spam, harassment and abuse.
• To fix bugs, measure load, and improve how the product works.
• To comply with the law.

Ray answers questions about cars using a knowledge base of manuals and reference material. When you ask Ray something, your question and the relevant conversation history are sent to our AI providers to generate the answer, and your search text is converted to a numeric embedding so the right documents can be found.

Your conversations with Ray are saved to your account so you can come back to them, and we count how many questions you ask against your plan’s allowance.

Our AI providers process this on our behalf under their enterprise terms. They are not permitted to use your conversations to train their models. Ray is a helpful mechanic, not a licensed one — do not treat its answers as professional, legal, safety or medical advice, and never rely on it alone for a repair that could hurt you.

Some vehicle images on the platform are processed by our own machine-learning models to recognize the vehicle, judge photo quality, and catch images that do not belong.

Rydes is a community, so parts of your account are visible by design: your username, your profile photo, your garage and the vehicles in it, anything you post publicly, and the points you have earned.

Your email address is never shown to other members. Not on your profile, not in the members directory, not anywhere in the product.

You control the rest in your settings:

• Make your profile private, so it does not appear in member browsing.
• Hide your social links.
• Turn off direct messages.
• Turn off tagging.
• Mark individual vehicles or images private.

Bear in mind that anything you have already posted publicly may have been seen, saved or quoted by someone else, and making it private afterwards does not reach those copies.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the service providers that make the platform work, and only as far as each one needs:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, databases, and image storage and delivery.
• Stripe — payment processing for web memberships. Stripe handles your card directly under its own privacy policy.
• Apple, Google and RevenueCat — in-app purchases and subscription receipts in the mobile apps.
• Anthropic and Voyage AI — generating Ray’s answers and the search embeddings behind them.
• Twilio — sending phone verification codes.
• Sentry — crash and error monitoring.
• Our email provider — delivering transactional and opted-in email.
• Google, Apple and Facebook — only if you choose to sign in with one of them.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, to respond to a valid legal request, to enforce our Terms of Service, or to protect the rights and safety of our members and the public. If Rydes is ever involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, your information may transfer as part of that deal, and we will tell you before it changes hands.

We use the bare minimum. Your browser stores your sign-in tokens locally so you stay logged in, and we set one small cookie, rydes_session, that records only whether someone is signed in so the site can route you correctly. It is not a tracking cookie and carries nothing about who you are. We also store harmless preferences, such as your light or dark theme choice, on your own device.

There are no advertising or analytics cookies on Rydes, which is why you are not being asked to dismiss a consent banner. Clearing your browser storage signs you out.

We keep your account information for as long as your account is open. Delete your account and we remove your profile, your garage, your uploads and your Ray conversations from the live service, and purge them from our systems within 30 days, except where we have to keep something longer:

• Payment and tax records, for as long as the law requires.
• Records of abuse, fraud or safety enforcement, so a banned account cannot simply be recreated.
• Backups, which roll off on their own schedule.

Posts you made in community discussions may remain visible where removing them would break the thread for everyone else, but they will no longer be attributed to your account.

You can, at any time:

• See and correct your information in your profile settings.
• Download a copy of what we hold about you, by asking us.
• Delete your account and its content.
• Opt out of marketing email, from your settings or any unsubscribe link.
• Turn off push notifications, in the app or in your device settings.
• Restrict who sees your profile and content, in your privacy settings.

Depending on where you live — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and several other US states, or the UK and EU — you may also have the right to object to certain processing, to ask us to restrict it, or to appeal a decision we make about your request. We apply these rights to everyone, wherever you are, and we will not treat you differently for exercising them. Write to us at pitcrew@rydes.club and we will respond within the time the law allows.

Traffic to Rydes is encrypted in transit with TLS. Passwords are salted and hashed. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it, and payment card data never touches our servers at all.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your information we will notify you and the appropriate regulators as the law requires. If you believe your account has been compromised, or you have found a security problem, tell us at pitcrew@rydes.club straight away.

Rydes is not for children. You must be at least 13 to hold an account, and if you are under 18 you need a parent or guardian’s permission. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13; if we learn we have, we delete it. Parents who believe a child has given us information should contact pitcrew@rydes.club.

Rydes is operated from the United States and our servers are in the United States. If you use Rydes from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed in the US, where privacy law may differ from your own. Using the service means you understand that.

We will update this page as the product changes. The date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect, rather than quietly editing this page.

Questions about this policy, or about your information, go to pitcrew@rydes.club.

The controller of your information is Rydes LLC. Email is the contact route for privacy requests; we do not publish a mailing address.