Privacy and affiliate links
What this site does with your data, which is very little, and how it is paid for.
Your data
No cookies. Nothing on faultfile.co.uk sets a cookie, which is why there is no cookie banner. There are no accounts and nothing to sign up to.
Visitor numbers. We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It does not use cookies or anything else stored on your device, and it does not track you from site to site. It tells us which pages were read, which site sent you, the kind of browser and device you used, and roughly which country you are in. It is the only outside script on the site.
Checklist ticks. Tick something off on a checklist page and the tick, along with any label you give a car, is stored in your own browser (in what browsers call localStorage) and nowhere else. It is never sent to us or to anyone. Clear your browser’s site data and it is gone.
Reg lookup. When you look up a number plate, the plate goes to a small service we run on Amazon Web Services in London. That service asks the DVSA’s MOT History API for the car’s record and passes back only what the page shows. It does not keep the plate. It holds your IP address in memory, never on disk or in any log, so one person cannot flood it with lookups. That memory is wiped whenever the service restarts, which it does on its own, usually within a few hours. The plate is also added to the page address so you can bookmark or share the result, which means our visitor numbers can show it as a page that was read.
Hosting. The pages are served by Amazon CloudFront. Like any web server, it has to see your IP address to send a page back to you.
Affiliate links
Fault File can earn money from affiliate links. Where a page links to a partner and you go on to buy from them, the partner pays us a commission. You pay the same as you would going to them direct.
The one partner we have applied to so far is ClickMechanic, for its pre-purchase inspections: a qualified mechanic checks a used car for you before you buy it. Until ClickMechanic accepts, no page carries the link. Once it does, the link sits at the end of the checks on a model page and at the end of each checklist, because that is the point where you are deciding whether to do the checks yourself or pay someone to. If more partners are added, they will be listed here.
Every affiliate link is labelled Ad where you meet it, with a line saying we earn a commission. Search engines are told the link is sponsored.
The link goes through Awin, the network that runs ClickMechanic’s affiliate programme. When you click it, Awin and ClickMechanic use cookies on their own sites to record that the booking came from here. Those are their cookies, under their own privacy policies, and they are only set if you click. Nothing is set on this site before or after.
What money does not touch
No one can pay to change a failure rate, a grade, a ranking or an owner report. The figures come from the DVSA’s MOT data, and the same rules produce every page whether or not it carries an ad. Partners do not see pages before they go live and have no say in what they say. There are no display ads, and no car maker, dealer or warranty firm pays for anything here.
Who runs this, and your rights
Fault File is made by appy lad, a sole trader registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (registration number ZC189956). You can ask what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it, by emailing the address below. In practice the answer is almost always nothing, because nothing on this site is tied to a person.
hello@appylad.com
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Last updated 27 September 2026.