Privacy

Who we are

Wash Near Me is operated by THICKRIM LLC. Contact: [email protected].

Business operators

When a business lists itself or claims its listing we store the account email, the business details and page content it gives us, its verification status and, for Pro, the Stripe identifiers needed to manage the subscription. Stripe handles card details; Wash Near Me does not see or store a card number. To set up or correct a page, we may read the business’s own public website.

Businesses that have not claimed a listing

We hold basic details about other car washes and detailers, taken from public business data such as Overture Maps, OpenStreetMap, City of Chicago business licenses and the business’s own website: name, category, address, phone, website and hours. These are details about a business, not about the people who use it. Most are not published. We add some to the locator as a basic listing marked Unverified. We may use these details to invite a business to claim its listing, and any business can ask us to correct, remove or delete them through the removal form. The sources are listed on the data sources page.

Visitors

Wash Near Me does not accept bookings or vehicle-service payments. A business’s page can accept a quote request containing the information the visitor chooses to submit, such as name, contact details, vehicle and requested work, and up to six photos of their vehicle, which go to that business with the request. Those photos are shown on the business’s page only if the visitor ticks the box saying it is OK and the business then adds them to one of its past jobs; their name and contact details are never shown. We store it for the listed business and alert that business by email, and by a notification in our iPhone app if they use it. For a business whose own website THICKRIM also runs, a copy is also kept in THICKRIM’s lead log for that website. The request belongs to that business; we email the person who submitted it only on that business’s behalf, and never sell the information. For as long as the tab is open, the browser remembers how the visitor reached a business’s page (for example from the locator, a search engine or a QR code) and sends that one word with a quote request, so the business can see where its requests come from. If they gave an email address, the person who sent a request gets one email with a copy of it. When the business marks the job as won, we send that person one email asking for a review, once, with a link to unsubscribe, unless the business has switched review requests off. It can also send that person a reward for a next visit or for a friend, by a text from its own phone or by an email from us with a link to unsubscribe; the business honors the reward in person and no payment passes through us. Nothing else comes from us. When a visitor taps call, directions, reviews, website or email, we store the listing and action type so the operator can see aggregate 30-day counts. We deliberately do not report an invented or bot-inflated page-view number.

Forms and abuse prevention

Quote-request, claim, removal and contact forms store the information a person submits so a real request is not lost. Public write endpoints may store a salted, one-way hash of the sender’s IP address for rate-limit enforcement; the address itself is not retained in that field.

Analytics

Google Analytics, and Plausible where it is switched on, run on marketing and operator pages to tell us which pages work. It does not run inside the quote form an operator embeds on their own website. Names, business names, emails, phone numbers and form messages are never sent as analytics properties. We do not use advertising pixels, we do not use Google’s advertising features, and we do not sell audiences.

Retention and deletion

Quote requests are kept for as long as the account that received them exists. An operator can delete their account in the iPhone app or from Account on the website. That ends their sign-in on every browser and phone, deletes the quote requests their customers sent, clears the alert and contact email on the listing, and cancels a Pro subscription. The listing goes back to being an unclaimed business; a listing the business created itself is taken off Wash Near Me. The operator’s own photos and page wording stay with the listing unless the operator asks us to delete them too. Photos a visitor attaches to a quote request are deleted 90 days after they were sent, or sooner when the request is deleted, including when the operator deletes their account. The one exception is a photo the visitor agreed to have shown and the business put on one of its past jobs: that copy stays until the business removes the job or deletes its account. We keep a record that the account was deleted, with its email address, so we can answer questions about it later. A visitor can ask us to delete a request they submitted, and an operator can ask us to delete one sooner. Contact and waitlist submissions are kept only while they remain useful for the request made. A deletion request sent to us is completed within 30 days and confirmed when finished.

The iPhone app

How long usage records are kept

Searches, and the taps, views and saves described above, from the website and the app, are kept for 13 months and then deleted. That is a full year plus the current month, enough for a business to compare a month with the same month last year. Quote requests are kept as described under Retention and deletion.

Reported and blocked requests

A business can report or block a request it received. The request is deleted from its inbox, and a copy of what it said comes to us to review. So the same sender cannot reach that business again, we keep a salted one-way hash of the sender’s phone number and email address for as long as the business has its listing, and of their network address for 30 days, with the reason the business gave. The sender is not told.

Service providers

THICKRIM’s own servers run the app and its database. These companies process data for us, each for one job: Cloudflare carries every visit to the site and stores our database backups. Brevo delivers our email, so it receives each recipient’s address and the message. Apple’s push service delivers app notifications to an operator’s phone, including the customer’s name and what they asked for. Stripe handles operator billing. Cloudinary stores and serves the photos operators upload, the photos a visitor attaches to a quote request, and the images in our emails. Google Analytics and Plausible count page use as described above. Sentry receives an error report when a page or request fails: the page address without anything after it, the browser type and what went wrong, never a name, email, phone number or form text. Mapbox draws the map on a business page when one is shown, so the visitor’s browser loads that map from Mapbox. Twilio forwards calls made to a business’s tracking number, so it receives the caller’s and the business’s phone numbers and call details such as the time and how long the call lasted. Calls are not recorded. When we refresh a business’s page from its own public website, the text of that website can be sent to Anthropic to draft the changes; no customer details are sent. When a visitor uses Fill in from VIN on a request form, our server sends that VIN, and nothing else, to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s free vehicle database to look up the year, make and model; we do not store the VIN. We do not sell data.

Changes

If these practices change materially, affected operators will be told directly rather than being expected to notice an edited page.