This Privacy Policy explains how Vroomi collects, uses, shares and protects your personal data when you use our mobile app and website, whether you're a learner driver, a driving instructor, or a driving school. We are committed to protecting your privacy and handling your data in line with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
1. Who we are
Vroomi is a driving-lesson marketplace app operated by Arri Tech Ltd ("we", "us", "our"), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 13784390, with its registered office at 9 Telford Road, Southall, Middlesex, UB1 3JG, United Kingdom. "Vroomi" is a trading name of Arri Tech Ltd.
For the purposes of UK data-protection law, Arri Tech Ltd is the data controller of the personal data described in this policy. If you have any questions, contact us using the details in section 14.
Arri Tech Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) as required by law.
2. The data we collect
What we collect depends on how you use Vroomi. We ask for the minimum needed to run the service for each type of account.
If you are a learner driver
| Category | What we collect |
|---|---|
| Identity & contact | Name, email address, phone number, profile photo |
| Location | Home postcode, and the coordinates we resolve from it, so we can find and rank nearby instructors by distance |
| Driving licence | Photos of the front and back of your provisional licence, where you choose to upload them so an instructor can verify your entitlement to learn |
| Learning progress | Lesson bookings and history, instructor notes on your progress, mock-test/theory records, and your target test date if you set one |
| Messages | Messages you send to instructors or schools through the app |
If you are an instructor
| Category | What we collect |
|---|---|
| Identity & contact | Name, email address, phone number, profile photo, business name and bio |
| Qualifications | Your ADI or PDI badge number, years of experience, transmission type and languages you teach in |
| Driving licence | Photos of your driving licence, where uploaded |
| Vehicle details | Make, model, colour and registration of your teaching vehicle, and its MOT/tax expiry — which we can pre-fill from the DVSA's public MOT History records when you enter a registration, though you can edit it yourself |
| Location | Your postcode and coordinates, so learners can find you by distance, and your own travel radius |
| Business & billing | VAT number (if VAT-registered), the lesson prices you set, and your Stripe customer/subscription identifiers for your Vroomi subscription — see section 6, we never see or store your card details |
| Pupils & lessons | Bookings, lesson history, the notes and progress records you keep on your own pupils, and mock-test/theory records you log for them |
| Device | A push-notification token (via Firebase Cloud Messaging) so we can notify you of new bookings and messages |
If you are a driving school
| Category | What we collect |
|---|---|
| Business details | School name, logo, "about" description, address and postcode, and VAT number (if VAT-registered) |
| Team | Which instructors belong to your school, their role (owner or member instructor), your join code, and the seats you're billed for |
| Billing | Your Stripe customer/subscription identifiers for your per-seat school subscription — see section 6 |
We collect this data when you create an account, complete your profile, book or give lessons, join or manage a school, message other users, make a payment, or contact our support team.
3. How we use your data
We use your personal data to:
- Create and manage your account and profile;
- Match learners with instructors and schools based on location, transmission, language and availability;
- Enable bookings, messaging, lesson tracking and mock-test records;
- Run the ADI Hub community feed for instructors and school teams;
- Take payments for Vroomi subscriptions and manage billing (see section 6 — we never process the payment you make to your instructor for an actual lesson, that's arranged directly between you);
- Send you service messages, such as booking confirmations, push notifications and account or payment emails;
- Power the AI features described in section 4;
- Provide customer support and respond to your enquiries;
- Keep Vroomi secure, prevent fraud and misuse, and improve our service;
- Comply with our legal and regulatory obligations.
4. AI features
Vroomi includes two AI-powered features. Both are optional to use, and both involve sending some data to a third-party AI provider to generate a response. We treat this as a disclosed sub-processing arrangement under UK GDPR, set out here in full.
Spark — the learner theory assistant
Spark is a chat assistant available to learners for general UK driving-theory and Highway Code questions (for example, hazard perception or DVSA theory-test preparation). Spark only sees the messages you type to it in that conversation — it does not read your booking history, lesson notes, or any other account data. Spark is powered by Anthropic (Claude).
Instructor Assistant — the instructor's business assistant
Instructor Assistant is a chat assistant available to instructors to help manage their own teaching business — for example, checking their diary, finding a free slot, looking up a pupil, or drafting a message. To do this, it can read (under your own account's normal permissions, never anyone else's):
- Your lesson diary — dates, times, titles, status and pupil names;
- Your availability and blocked-out dates;
- A pupil's lesson history and the notes you've written about them (topics covered, ratings, what to practise next), and whether they've passed their theory test;
- Your earnings figures (aggregated lesson prices and payment status);
- Draft text for a message, lesson proposal or cancellation you ask it to help write — nothing is sent or booked automatically; you always review and confirm before anything is saved or sent.
Instructor Assistant only ever queries your own data — it runs under your own account's access rights, the same as the rest of the app, so it cannot see another instructor's pupils, notes or earnings. Instructor Assistant is powered by OpenAI.
Data sent to Anthropic or OpenAI to generate a response is processed under their standard API terms, which (as of this policy) state that data submitted via their API is not used to train their models by default. We do not currently keep a separate, permanent transcript of your conversations with Spark or Instructor Assistant beyond what's needed to generate each response; the underlying lesson/pupil data it draws on is your normal account data, kept under the same rules as the rest of this policy.
5. Our legal bases for using your data
Under UK GDPR we rely on the following legal bases:
- Contract — to provide the Vroomi service you've signed up for: matching, bookings, messaging, and your Vroomi subscription if you're an instructor or school.
- Legitimate interests — to keep our service secure, prevent fraud, run features like the AI assistants and the ADI Hub feed, and improve Vroomi, where this is not overridden by your rights and interests.
- Consent — for optional things such as non-essential cookies (see our Cookie Policy). You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Legal obligation — where we must process data to comply with the law, for example tax and accounting records.
6. Who we share your data with
We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with trusted service providers ("processors") who help us run Vroomi, and only as needed to provide the service described above:
| Provider | What it receives and why |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Our database, authentication and file-storage provider — it hosts essentially all of your account data, including private driving-licence images, on servers in the EU (Ireland) |
| Stripe | Processes your Vroomi subscription payment if you're an instructor or school. Stripe holds your card details; we only ever receive a customer/subscription reference, never your full card number |
| SendGrid (Twilio) | Sends transactional emails on our behalf — for example, your welcome email, and subscription/payment confirmations |
| Google Firebase | Delivers push notifications to your device (new bookings, messages, reminders) |
| Google Analytics | Measures how our website is used — pages visited and whether a visit leads to creating an account. Only if you accept analytics cookies on our website (see our Cookie Policy); never inside the app |
| Anthropic | Powers the Spark learner theory-assistant chat feature (section 4) |
| OpenAI | Powers the Instructor Assistant business-assistant chat feature, and drafts blog content for our website (section 4) |
| DVSA (MOT History API) | We send a vehicle registration number (no personal data) to the UK government's public MOT History service to pre-fill a teaching vehicle's MOT and tax expiry dates |
| postcodes.io | A free, public UK postcode lookup service we send postcodes to, to convert them into map coordinates for the Find Instructor search |
We may also share data with other Vroomi users where the service requires it — for example, an instructor sees a learner's name, contact details and booking information once a lesson is arranged with them, and a school owner sees their own team's instructor profiles. We may disclose data if required by law, or to protect our rights, users or the public.
7. International transfers
Our database, authentication and file storage (Supabase) is hosted in the EU (Ireland). Stripe, SendGrid, Google (Firebase and Analytics), OpenAI and Anthropic are US-headquartered and may process data outside the UK and EEA. Where they do, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as the UK's International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or a UK adequacy regulation covering that transfer.
8. How long we keep your data
We keep your personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes set out in this policy, and to meet our legal obligations:
- Account data — kept while your account is active. If you delete your account, we delete or anonymise your personal data within 30 days, except where we need to keep something longer for a legal reason set out below.
- Driving licence images — we do not currently delete these automatically after a fixed period; they're retained while your account is active, for as long as they're needed for the verification purpose you uploaded them for. You can ask us to delete them at any time (see section 9) and we will act on it.
- Payment and invoice records — kept for six years, as required by UK tax law.
- Messages and lesson/progress records — kept while your account is active, and deleted as part of the account-deletion process above.
9. Your rights
Under UK data-protection law you have the right to: access the personal data we hold about you; correct inaccurate data; request erasure; restrict or object to processing; receive your data in a portable format; and withdraw consent where we rely on it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk, though we'd appreciate the chance to put things right first.
To exercise any of these rights, get in touch through our contact form. We will respond within one month.
To have specific personal data deleted while keeping your account open, use our data deletion request page.
10. Children and young people
You can legally hold a provisional UK driving licence from age 15¾ and start learning to drive a car at 17, so a real proportion of Vroomi's learner users are under 18. We take this seriously, and this section sets out our position honestly.
We do not currently ask for or verify a learner's date of birth. Because of this, we cannot always tell from our data alone whether a particular learner account belongs to someone under 18 — so, as a matter of policy, we apply the same data-minimisation and privacy protections described in this policy to every learner account, rather than only to accounts we can confirm are under-18.
Where the Children's Code applies, our approach is to:
- Collect the minimum — we only ask learners for what the service genuinely needs (name, postcode, and licence photos only if you choose to upload them for instructor verification), not anything extra.
- Keep defaults private — a learner's profile and location are only shared with the instructors and schools involved in arranging their lessons, never published publicly.
- Avoid profiling — we don't use automated profiling or targeted advertising based on a learner's data. Instructor matching is a straightforward distance/availability/language filter, not behavioural profiling.
- Keep location narrow — a learner's postcode is used only to find nearby instructors, never tracked continuously or shared beyond that purpose.
- Write for our audience — we try to keep this policy and our in-app messaging plain and understandable, including for a younger audience.
Payment and parental involvement. Vroomi does not take payment from learners for lessons — a learner (or their parent/guardian, where the learner is a minor) pays their instructor directly, outside the app, by whatever arrangement they agree between them. We'd encourage a parent or guardian of a learner under 18 to be involved in setting up their account and agreeing lesson arrangements with an instructor.
If you are a parent or guardian with a question or concern about your child's use of Vroomi, please get in touch through our contact form.
11. How we protect your data
We use technical and organisational measures to protect your data, including encryption in transit, access controls that scope what each account can see (for example, an instructor can only ever see licence images for a pupil they have an active or accepted booking with — not a school-wide list, and not any other instructor's pupils), and reputable infrastructure providers. No system is completely secure, but we work to protect your information and to notify you and the ICO of any breach where legally required.
12. Cookies
Our website uses a small number of essential cookies, and — only if you choose "Accept all" — Google Analytics cookies to understand how the site is used. You can change your choice at any time. For full details, see our Cookie Policy.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the "last updated" date above, and where changes are significant we will let you know. Please check back periodically.
14. Contact us
For any privacy question, or to exercise your rights under section 9, get in touch through our contact form, or write to: Arri Tech Ltd, 9 Telford Road, Southall, Middlesex, UB1 3JG, United Kingdom.