Privacy notice

What is held about you, why, for how long, and what you can do about it. If you are here because a report mentions your vehicle, section 4 is the one you want.

Last updated 16 August 2026

1. Who is responsible

RoadSafe Ireland is the data controller for everything described here.

This deployment has not published a contact address yet. RoadSafe Ireland is not yet operated by a named legal entity, so there is no postal address or contact mailbox to give here. Until there is, the forms on this site are the routes that work: Your rights for anything about information held about you, Report content for anything published here, and This is not my vehicle if a registration is wrong. All three reach a person.

2. What is held about people with an account

Your email address: To create the account, to confirm it is yours, to send you the outcome of your reports, and to let you reset your password. It is never shown publicly and it is never attached to a published report.
Your password: Stored only as an argon2id hash. The password itself is not held anywhere and cannot be recovered from what is — a reset issues a new one rather than retrieving the old.
Your year of birth: To apply the age-16 requirement. The year alone is enough for that, so the date is not asked for.
Session records: When you sign in, a record is kept with your browser’s user agent and a hash of your IP address — never the address itself, and the hash uses a salt that changes daily, so the same address does not produce the same value tomorrow. This is what makes a session revocable and what makes rate limiting possible.
What you submit: Your reports, your confirmations of other people’s reports, any content you flag, and any appeal you lodge — with the account that made them.
Locations you are watching: If you ask to be told when something changes at a road issue, that request is held as a link between your account and that location, so we know where to send the email. Removing it on your account page deletes the link and stops the email — there is no separate setting, because the link is the only thing that causes it. No record is kept of which people were sent a particular message: what is kept against a location is how many were.

3. What is held about a report

Road issue reports

The description you write, the categories you pick, the county and town, and the coordinates you give. The precise coordinates are never published: the point shown on the site is rounded to a grid of roughly 25 metres, and the exact one is kept out of every public path in the system. That is unconditional — it does not depend on what the report is about.

Vehicle reports

The description, the date and approximate time, a general location, and the registration you enter. The registration is never stored as text. It is held in two forms, and neither is readable on its own:

a keyed hash, which is the only way reports about the same vehicle are matched to each other — it cannot be reversed, and it cannot be searched by prefix or by partial match, so the set of registrations on this platform cannot be listed or guessed at;
an encrypted copy, used only to show a masked plate on the vehicle’s own page.

The keys for both are held outside the database, in the running application’s configuration rather than in any table, so a copy of the database on its own does not yield a single registration.

Content reports, corrections and appeals

What you write, and your email address if you gave one. These routes are open without an account, so where there is no account a hash of the IP address is kept instead — again never the address — to make abuse of the form traceable.

What is never held

Registrations, email addresses, precise coordinates and the text of reports are never written to logs. That is enforced by a redaction layer the application passes error messages through, not by remembering to be careful. No photographs are accepted anywhere on the site.

4. If a report mentions your vehicle

This is the part of the notice that is about somebody who never gave us anything. A member of the public typed a registration they read from a moving vehicle. The information came from them, not from any official source: there is no connection to the National Vehicle and Driver File, to An Garda Síochána, or to any insurer, and nothing here is checked against a real vehicle or a real keeper.

Two routes, and neither asks you to prove anything.

This is not my vehicle — for a registration that has been misread. It takes a minute, needs no account, and marks the identification as contested immediately while a person looks at it. We do not ask for documents and do not want copies of them.
An objection under Article 21 — for when the vehicle is yours and you object to it being recorded here at all. That is a judgement rather than a correction, so nothing changes while a person weighs it. We answer within a month either way.

What is done about it in the meantime, without anybody asking:

Vehicle pages cannot be read without an account.
They are excluded from search engines, absent from the sitemap, and their web address is an opaque identifier rather than the registration — so a plate cannot be typed into an address bar to find a page, and a shared link does not contain one.
The plate shown is masked; how much is shown is an operator setting.
Published reports stop being shown twenty-four months after publication, and stop counting towards anything, automatically.
A report giving only part of a registration never creates a vehicle page at all.

5. Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide the account you asked for — Article 6(1)(b): Your email address, your password hash, your sessions. Without these there is no account.
Legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f): Publishing and moderating community reports about road safety, and keeping the platform from being abused. The interest is a public one: making road danger visible where it is happening. It is weighed against the interests of a person whose vehicle is described, and the whole of section 4 above is the outcome of that weighing rather than a set of features — the login requirement, the exclusion from search engines, the masking, the opaque addresses and the twenty-four-month limit exist because of it. You can object to this, and section 8 says how.
Legal obligation — Article 6(1)(c): The age check, and the records the Digital Services Act requires us to keep of moderation decisions, the reasons for them, and complaints about them.

A report about dangerous driving describes conduct that can be a criminal offence, and information of that kind carries extra protection under Article 10. It is one of the reasons the vehicle side of this platform is built the way section 4 describes rather than like the road issue side.

6. Who else sees it

No advertising networks, no analytics that identify anyone, no data brokers, and nothing is sold or licensed on. What exists is the small number of suppliers it takes to run a website:

the hosting provider running the application and its database, in the EU;
a mail provider, to deliver a message you are owed — a confirmation link, a password reset, or the outcome of a decision;
a network provider in front of the site, which sees requests in order to serve them.
Cloudflare, which runs the check that confirms a form is being filled in by a person. Your browser talks to it directly on any page with a form, so it sees your IP address and information about your browser at that moment. It is not sent anything you typed, and it is not told which form you are on.

Each is a processor acting on instructions, not a recipient free to use anything for its own purposes. What is described here stays inside the EEA, with these exceptions: the check confirming you are not a robot runs on a network with servers all over the world, and can be answered by any of them. Those transfers are made under the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. If that matters to you, section 8 is how to object.

7. How long it is kept

Published vehicle reports: Twenty-four months from publication. After that they are no longer shown, no longer counted, and no longer returned by anything on the site, and what the reporter wrote — the description, the place and the time of day — is deleted. What is kept is that a report of that kind was made and what we decided about it, which is the record we have to be able to produce. This runs automatically every day; nobody has to remember it.
Your account: Until you close it. You can do that yourself at any time — see section 8.
Sessions: Thirty days at most, and not extended by continuing to use the site. Expired sessions are deleted nightly, which is also what limits how long a hashed IP address is held.
Confirmation and password-reset links: Twenty-four hours and one hour respectively, then deleted.
Emails we send about a decision: The record that a message was sent is kept for ninety days; the body of the message is deleted as soon as it has been delivered.
Requests you make about your own information: Two years after we finish dealing with one, then deleted — the request, your address and our answer. What is left afterwards is a record that a request of that kind was made and answered, with nothing in it that says who made it.
An objection about a vehicle registration: Kept while it stands. If we agree to stop publishing about a registration, the request is the reason that registration is blocked, so deleting it would leave a block nothing explains.
Moderation decisions and complaints: Kept. A decision you can challenge has to be producible, and so does the reason given for it.

8. Your rights

Two of these you can exercise yourself, immediately, without asking anybody:

A copy of your data. Your data produces a file containing your account, everything you have submitted, and every decision made about it.
Deletion. Closing your account deletes it and everything that identifies you. That page explains exactly what is removed and what survives before you confirm anything.

You also have the right to have inaccurate information corrected, to restrict what is done with it, to object to the processing described under legitimate interests, and to receive your data in a portable form. Each of those is a judgement rather than a lookup, so each is decided by a person: ask for one here, or write to the content report form. You do not need an account to ask, and we answer within one month. If we decide not to do what you asked, we tell you why and how to take it further.

If we agree to correct something, we change that part of the report and the page says that it was corrected and on what date. It does not repeat what it said before — that would republish the thing you asked us to remove — though we keep the earlier wording in our own record of the decision, because a decision you can challenge has to be producible. If we agree to stop showing something while a question about it is settled, it comes off the site until that is resolved. In both cases the person who wrote the report is told what happened and that no decision was made about them.

The automatic copy above deliberately contains what was communicated to you — your submissions, the decisions, the reasons given. It does not include internal notes a moderator wrote while deciding, because those can mention other people, and separating what is about you from what is about somebody else is a judgement rather than a query. Ask for those and a person will go through them.

If you think any of this is being done wrongly you can complain to the Data Protection Commission, which supervises data protection in Ireland. You do not have to raise it with us first, though it is usually faster.

9. Cookies and other people’s code

One cookie, set when you sign in, holding a random session identifier and nothing else. It is necessary for the account to work, so there is no consent banner to click past. There are no analytics cookies and no advertising cookies.

Pages with a form on them load one piece of code from Cloudflare: the check that confirms you are not a robot. It looks at how your browser behaves in order to make that judgement, and it may store something in your browser to remember that you have passed. It is not an advertising or analytics script, it is not used to follow you between websites, and it is not given anything you typed. Every other page on this site loads nothing from anybody but us.

10. Automated decisions

Submitted text is checked automatically for personal information and abuse before a moderator sees it, and that check can ask you to edit a report. It cannot publish anything, cannot reject anything, and does not profile you or take account of anything about you.

Separately, the check that confirms you are not a robot can stop a form being submitted. It does not read what you wrote and decides nothing about it or about you — it is about the browser sending it. If it stops you, the page says so and reloading it lets you try again.

Every decision to publish, refuse, hold or remove is made by a person, and every appeal is read by one. There is no automated decision-making of the kind Article 22 covers.

11. Changes

The date at the top is when this notice last changed. If what is done with information already held changes materially, account holders are told by email at least fourteen days before it takes effect. That email goes to every confirmed address and there is nothing to unsubscribe from — it is the notice this paragraph promises, and an account able to switch it off would be one we had stopped keeping the promise to.