Privacy policy

What we collect

Five things:

• The VIN or production number you type in. That is how BMW identifies your order, so it is how we do too.
• A random device identifier. Created the first time the app talks to our server. It is not your Apple or Google account, not your phone’s serial number, and not an advertising identifier — it is a fresh random value that means nothing outside our own database, and it exists so we know which watched car belongs to which phone.
• Your device’s push-notification token, if you allow notifications. Apple or Google issues it, depending on your phone; we store it so we can send you a push when your car moves.
• The vehicle status BMW returns for that car — the build stages, dates, colour, options and images BMW publishes for it.
• A few facts about your phone. Its model and operating-system version, and whether notifications, battery optimisation (Android), Background App Refresh and Low Power Mode (iPhone) are switched on for the app. We use these for one thing: working out why an update did not reach a phone — a battery manager that stops the app running in the background looks, from our side, exactly like a phone that is switched off. None of it identifies you: millions of phones share the same model and version, and the rest are on/off switches about our own app.

We do not ask for and do not have your name, your email address, a password, an account, your phone number, your location, your contacts, or your photos. There is no sign-up screen in the app, because there is nothing to sign up for.

Where it lives

On our server, hosted with Microsoft Azure in the United States. It has to live there rather than only on your phone for one reason: so we can keep checking your car while the app is closed and your phone is in your pocket, and send you a notification when the answer changes. A phone that only checks when you open it cannot tell you anything you didn’t already know.

Where the vehicle data comes from

BMW’s own public order-tracking service — the same one your production number works on. We ask it about your car on a schedule and relay what it says. We do not add to it, correct it, or guess at it, and when BMW publishes no date for a stage, the app shows no date for that stage.

Purchases

The one-time tracking unlock is sold and processed entirely by Apple through the App Store on iPhone, and by Google through Google Play on Android. Apple or Google tells our app whether the unlock has been bought; that is the whole of what we learn. We never see your payment details — no card number, no billing address, no name on the card — and none of that ever touches our server.

What we don’t do

• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
• No analytics or crash-reporting SDKs, no third-party trackers, no fingerprinting.
• No selling, renting, trading or sharing of your data with anyone. There is no marketing list to be added to, because there is no email address to add.
• No profile of you. Your production number is a key to a car, not to a person, and we have no other identifier to join it against.

The only parties who ever see anything are the ones who have to for the app to work: Microsoft Azure, which hosts the server; Apple and Google, which deliver push notifications and handle purchases on their own platforms; and BMW’s public tracking service, which we query about the car.

The fleet statistics are not your car

The aggregate production statistics — in the app’s Stats tab and on this site’s fleet pages — are built almost entirely from BMW’s public inventory listings, which we collect independently of any user. A car someone tracks can end up counted in those aggregates too — a tally of paint colours has no way to exclude it — but the aggregates are counts of cars, not of people: nothing in them identifies you, your device, or even the fact that a particular car was being tracked.

Deleting your data

• Stop tracking a car in the app and the watch is deleted from our server. The car’s status is no longer fetched or stored for you.
• Delete the app and its local copy goes with it. The push token left on our server is then orphaned: it stops working, and it is discarded once Apple or Google reports it as dead.
• Email us at info@bimmertracker.com and we will remove your device’s records ourselves. Since we hold nothing that identifies you personally, please include the production number or VIN you were tracking so we can find the right record.

Children

Bimmer Tracker is a tool for people waiting on a car they have ordered. It is not directed at children, and we knowingly collect nothing from them — nor could we, since we collect nothing that identifies anybody.

This website

bimmertracker.com is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies and has no logins, no forms and no comment section. We count page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless script that tells us which pages get read and roughly where visitors come from — it does not identify you, follow you to other sites, or store anything on your device. That beacon is now the only request these pages make to another company: the type is your own device’s system font, the images and the stylesheet are served from this site, and the webfont we used to load from Google Fonts is gone. Our host keeps ordinary web-server logs, as every web server does.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update it here and move the effective date at the top. Material changes will also be called out in the app’s release notes rather than slipped in quietly.

Contact

Questions, deletion requests, or a sentence on this page you think is wrong: info@bimmertracker.com. A person reads it.