What we collect, and why

When you ask for an estimate

The form takes your name, a phone number or email, roughly where you are, your vehicle, and what it's doing. That goes into our job system so we can price it and get back to you. Your postal code or neighbourhood is used to work out the travel fee. If you enter a VIN we send it to the public United States NHTSA vehicle database to look up the year, make, model and engine. That lookup is anonymous: the VIN goes, nothing about you does.

When you rent a trailer

A rental needs more, because a trailer is worth more than a brake job. As well as your contact details and the dates, we ask for:

• A photo of your driver's licence, to confirm you are licensed to tow it.
• Your insurance, because your policy is what covers the trailer on the road.
• Your signature on the rental agreement, stored with the date, the version of the agreement you signed, and the network address it was signed from. That last part is what makes an electronic signature stand up if it is ever questioned.
• Photos of the trailer, taken by you on your own booking page at pickup and again at return, so we both have a record of how it looked. They are of the trailer, not of you, and they stay with the booking.

Those documents are held so that only a signed-in Peakline account can see them. They are never on a public web address, they are not sent to anyone else, and they do not appear in any log.

The licence and the insurance slip are deleted automatically 365 days after the trailer comes back. Not on request, and not when somebody remembers: the site does it, it only ever touches bookings that are finished, and it writes the deletion into that booking's own history so we can show you when each one went. Government ID that is kept past the point of being useful is only a liability. If your rental is finished and settled and you want them gone sooner than that, ask and we'll delete them the same day.

The signed agreement itself is not on that clock. It has to survive for as long as any claim arising from the rental could, which is the same reason an invoice does.

The trackers on the trailers

Every trailer carries a GPS tracker. It is there because a trailer is a valuable thing that leaves our driveway with somebody we have usually just met, and it is how we find one that does not come back.

You should know exactly what that means while you have it. The tracker reports where the trailer is, every few minutes when it is moving. We turn those reports into journeys: where one started, where it ended, roughly how far it went, the route between the two, and the fastest stretch. A journey that falls inside your rental dates is filed against your booking, so for the days you have the trailer we can see where it went.

We use it for three things: knowing a trailer is where it should be, working out when it is due for servicing, and settling the rare argument about when something came back. We do not watch it while you are out with it, we do not sell any of it, and none of it goes on the website. The distance it works out is a rough figure from straight lines between fixes, and it is never what you are billed on. Your bill comes from a reading taken off the trailer itself.

The tracking is of the trailer, and it runs whoever is towing it, including us. When the trailer is back it is our trailer again and the journeys from your rental stay with your booking.

Photographs of the work

We photograph jobs, and some of those photos go on this website and on our social accounts. What they show is the work: a brake rotor, a spring, a hub, the truck at somebody's curb. If your vehicle or your driveway is in one and you would rather it wasn't, tell us and it comes down. You don't have to give a reason.

Visits to this website

We count visits so we know whether the site is doing its job. There are no cookies for this, and no analytics company is involved: the counting happens on our own server. Your network address is never stored. It is combined with your browser's description and turned into a one-way code that changes every day, which lets us tell "one person read three pages" from "three people read one page each" without knowing who you are. We also collect anonymous timing figures (how fast pages load) so we can tell whether the site is getting slow.

Two of the cookies on this site are for Peakline staff, and neither is ever set on your browser unless you sign in to the admin: one keeps that sign-in, and the other is a flag we switch on for our own laptops and phones so that reading our own website doesn't get counted as a visit. The third is the shop's cart: it is set only when you add something to your cart in our merch shop, it holds nothing but which items and how many, it is only ever sent to the shop's own pages, and it goes when you place the order or after seven days. None of the three holds anything that identifies a person.

Who else sees any of it

Nobody buys it, because it isn't for sale. In practice your information reaches:

• Our job system, which is where estimate requests land.
• Our hosting provider, which runs the server and the database.
• A payment processor, if you choose to pay by card. Card numbers are entered on their page, not ours: we never see or store a card number.
• The company that supplies the trackers, which is where the trailers' position reports come from before they reach us.
• AI assistants that help us run the business, which can read our customer list, bookings and estimate requests to help with follow-ups and marketing. Today that is Grokbot, part of Grok from SpaceX AI. Through our website they can only read: they can't change anything or message you from it, and we can cut one off at any time.

Not Google Fonts, and this page used to say otherwise. The two typefaces are served from our own server now, so nothing about your visit leaves it to fetch them.

We will hand something over if the law requires it. Otherwise, no.

Texts and calls

If you give us a phone number we may text you about your job or your rental. Reply STOP and we stop, and that gets recorded so nobody accidentally texts you again.

Asking to see it, or to have it deleted

Email info@peaklineauto.ca or call 343-429-8991 and ask. We'll tell you what we hold and delete what we're allowed to delete. Some things we have to keep: an invoice is a business record, and a signed rental agreement has to survive as long as any claim arising from it could.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date below changes with it.

Last updated 30 September 2026. Questions to info@peaklineauto.ca.