Privacy notice

1. Who we are

MotorInstructor is a marketplace for booking driving lessons. When you use it, the data controller for your personal data is MotorInstructor Ltd (company number 17356315), registered at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA. Our entry on the Information Commissioner’s register of data controllers is ZC208350.

For anything in this notice, including any of the requests described in section 9, contact us at privacy@motorinstructor.com.

2. What we collect

Everyone with an account

• Your first and last name, email address and password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see it).
• Your mobile number, if you add one. We send a code by SMS to confirm it is yours.
• A profile photo, if you upload one.
• The country and region you sign up in, which decides the rules and prices that apply to you.
• Sign-in activity, so you can see and end your active sessions, and two-factor secrets if you switch that on.

Learners

• Your address, and the coordinates it resolves to, so pick-ups and instructor coverage can be worked out.
• Your date of birth, and your provisional licence number if you choose to add it.
• A photograph of your provisional licence, if you upload one as proof. It is checked by a member of our team and is never shown publicly.
• Your lessons: bookings, times, places, cancellations and attendance.
• Your learning record — progress against the syllabus, lesson logs, private practice hours, mock test results and your theory and practical test dates.
• Payments and refunds, and any lesson credit or wallet balance.
• Messages with your instructor or school, reviews you write, and any dispute you raise.
• A pass photo, only if you choose to share one — see section 6.

Instructors and driving schools

• Your public listing: name, photo, car photo, bio, languages, prices, availability and the area you cover.
• Your gender, only if you choose to publish it. Leaving it blank is a real choice and shows nothing.
• Professional credentials we check before you appear publicly, including your instructor badge and its expiry, insurance provider and expiry, and licence expiry.
• Photographs of the documents behind those credentials — your ADI badge, your insurance certificate and your vehicle's paperwork. A member of our team reviews each one, records the decision, and can ask you for a clearer copy. They are never shown publicly.
• Your date of birth and business contact details.
• Your bank and identity details for payouts — these go directly to Stripe and are held by them, not by us.
• Clips you add to your Dashcam wall — the link, title, author name and thumbnail from the platform you posted on.

Everyone who visits, whether signed in or not

• The location you search near, including precise coordinates if you allow your browser to share them. We record the search area so instructors can see demand where they teach.
• Cookies your browser stores — all of them ours, all listed in the cookie notice.
• Ordinary technical information such as your IP address, needed to serve the site securely.

3. Why we use it, and our lawful basis

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our reasons against your rights, and you can object — see section 9.

4. Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal data, and we never have. We share it with the companies that make the service work, each of which handles it under contract and only on our instructions:

We will also disclose personal data where the law requires it, to establish or defend legal claims, or to a buyer if the business is ever sold — in which case this notice would continue to apply until you were told otherwise.

5. Where your data is held

Our servers, database and file storage are in the United Kingdom (AWS London). Some of the companies in section 4 are based outside the UK, or support their service from outside it. Where personal data is transferred abroad, it is protected by the UK Government’s adequacy decisions or by the International Data Transfer Agreement, together with the safeguards those require.

6. What other people can see

This is the part most people actually want to know, so it has its own section.

• Your name is shortened in public. On pages anyone can view — listings, reviews and profiles — a person appears as a first name and last initial, for example “Sarah W.”. Your full name is shown to the other side of a confirmed booking, on receipts, and to our staff.
• Instructor listings are public by design. Name, photo, car, bio, prices, availability and coverage area are visible to anyone, because that is what being listed means. Your date of birth, badge number, insurance details and contact details are not public.
• Reviews are public once published, shown under a shortened name.
• Pass photos are opt-in. A photo of you on the day you passed appears on your instructor’s profile only if you consent, we record when you gave that consent, and you can withdraw it. Anyone can report a photo for removal.
• Dashcam clips are public, and load only when asked for. An instructor’s wall shows thumbnails of clips they posted on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. Nothing is sent to those platforms while you are only looking at the wall — no clip is loaded, and no cookie of theirs is set, until you press play. When you do, that platform receives your IP address and applies its own privacy policy and cookies.
• Documents you upload as proof are never public. A photograph of a provisional licence, an ADI badge, an insurance certificate or vehicle paperwork is visible only to the member of our team reviewing it, and we record who made the decision. It is not shown on any listing, not given to your instructor or school, and not used for anything except the check it was uploaded for.
• Your instructor sees what they need to teach you — your name, contact details, pick-up address, lessons and progress. Driving schools cannot read private lesson notes or feedback about their instructors.

7. How long we keep things

8. Marketing, and how to stop it

We send marketing only to people who have already booked a lesson through MotorInstructor. We do not buy contact lists, and we do not market to people who have never been customers.

Every marketing message carries a way to stop it. Unsubscribing takes effect permanently and immediately, and we keep a record of the fact you unsubscribed precisely so that you are not contacted again if your address is ever uploaded a second time.

Service messages are different. Reminders about your lessons, and security messages about your account, are part of the service — you can turn most of them off in your notification settings, but messages about signing in, verifying your email and resetting your password cannot be switched off while your account is open.

9. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in your profile;
• delete your account and personal data, subject to the explanation below;
• restrict what we do with your data, or object to processing we base on legitimate interests;
• give you your data in a portable, machine-readable form;
• withdraw a consent you gave — such as for a pass photo, publishing your gender, or marketing;
• tell you if any decision about you was made purely by a computer. None currently is: verification, disputes and moderation are all decided by a person.

We will respond within one month. There is no charge.

What happens when you delete your account

We want to be straight about this, because “delete” is doing more work in most privacy notices than it can bear. When you close your account, we erase your personal details — your name, email, phone number, photo, address and date of birth are removed, and you are signed out everywhere.

What we keep is the record that a lesson happened and was paid for, with your personal details stripped out of it. We have to: your instructor was paid, tax records exist, and a booking with no counterparty is a broken record rather than a private one. So the underlying account row survives in an anonymised form rather than being deleted outright. UK law allows this where we have a legal obligation to keep financial records, and it is the reason the confirmation you receive says your data has been removed rather than that every trace of you is gone.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first — but you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113 at any time.

10. Under-18s

You can start learning to drive in the UK at 17, so many learners here are under 18. We ask for a date of birth, we keep what we hold about a young person to what running a lesson actually needs, and we do not profile anyone or sell anyone’s data. If you are under 18, talk to a parent or guardian before you share your address or a photo — and if you believe a child’s data has been shared with us in a way it should not have been, contact us and we will remove it.

11. How we protect it

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as a modern cryptographic hash and cannot be read back, by us or by anyone who obtained the database. Accounts can be protected with two-factor authentication, you can see and revoke your active sessions, and staff actions on customer records are written to an audit log. Access to data is separated per account at the database level, so one school cannot read another’s records. If a breach ever puts your rights at risk, we will report it to the ICO within 72 hours and tell you.

12. Cookies

We use a small number of our own cookies and no third-party tracking. They are listed individually, with their purpose and lifetime, in the cookie notice.

13. Changes to this notice

When we change how the service handles personal data, we update this page and change the date at the top. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you re-reading this page.