Notes on Privacy

The register has been deliberately designed so that owner information is neither required nor wanted.

This is not simply a promise made on the public website. The database itself has no owner table and no fields for an owner’s name, address, telephone number or email address etc. Its data model is restricted to vehicle-level information only.

Each entry describes a car.

The register may privately record information such as a registration number, VIN, trim, colour, first-registration date, mileage or limited-edition number. Those details are used to distinguish one vehicle from another and to prevent duplicate records.

They are not accompanied by the identity of the owner.

The register cannot, from the database alone, show who owns a particular car. It contains no ownership information to reveal, expose or misuse.

Vehicle identifiers are nevertheless treated cautiously because, in some circumstances, information such as a registration number could be connected with a person using information held elsewhere. That is why all such identifiers remain private, offline and are never published by the register.

The public website is not a vehicle lookup service.

It does not allow visitors to enter a registration number, VIN, engine number or private plate. It does not display a list of known cars, individual vehicle profiles or complete histories for identifiable vehicles. There is no connection between the public site and the offline database.

Sensitive vehicle-level information is specifically excluded from public output.

The public site instead presents grouped statistics about the wider UK Fiat 124 Spider population only.

The public dashboard answers questions such as:

• how many Fiat 124 Spider are in the UK;
• how common each 124 Spider trim or colour is;
• how registrations were distributed over time;
• how mileage is distributed across broad bands;
• how many Fiat 124 Spider Anniversary or S-Design cars are still on the road
• how are Fiat 124 Spider prices affected by the cars mileage

These findings are generated from multiple records and published as aggregate counts, percentages, bands and trends.

A visitor sees the statistical result, not the private records used to calculate it. The public site is intended to explain the Fiat 124 Spider population without enabling anyone to identify a particular car, and definately not the owner!

The register has a clear technical boundary between the private database and public information.

Vehicle-level records are held in a private offline database. The public website does not connect directly to that database.

Updates are made to the public site after an extraction and aggregation script has been manually run against the database. This creates a JSON file of aggregated data which is then checked for prohibited private fields and values. Then, that JSON will be made available to the public site using another manual process. I designed it this way to ensure the public site has no connection whatsoever to the database.

The public frontend therefore only receives statistics rather than access to the underlying vehicle records.

Privacy does not depend solely on remembering to remove information manually.

The project includes explicit safety checks for its generated public files. These checks reject private fields and search for values such as VINs and registrations.

The register does not store full MOT information, advisory text, failure descriptions, test locations or test comments.

Only the MOT date and recorded mileage are retained. This is enough to support statistical mileage research without reproducing detailed vehicle documents or creating an unnecessarily intrusive history.

Most vehicle information will originally have appeared in a public advertisements, auction listings or other publicly accessible sources.

The register does not treat that as permission to republish the complete record though, and photographs of cars are never stored either.

This is the most important privacy fact about the project:

To reiterate, the 124 Register does not hold (or want to hold) the identity of any owner behind a vehicle record. This is simply a vehicle register, not a members club or discussion forum.

The project records the existence and characteristics of cars. It does not record the people associated with them.

The purpose of the 124 Register is to build a factual picture of the modern Fiat 124 Spider population in the United Kingdom.

That research can be carried out without collecting owner identities and without publishing identifiable vehicle records. The project has been structured accordingly from the database upwards.

Private records distinguish cars from one another. Public outputs combine those records into statistics. Owner details are never collected, because they are not needed.

The result is a vehicle research project that can document the UK Fiat 124 Spider population without becoming an owners’ directory and without creating any mechanisms to identify the people behind the cars.

It is my understanding that 124 Register (UK) operates outside the scope of GDPR by limiting its dataset to non-identifiable technical information about cars; and not data about people. By deliberately not publishing sensitive vehicle identifiers, the platform focuses exclusively on the vehicle as a mechanical asset, thus, I believe, means it fails to meet the "personal data" definition under GDPR Article 2.

I maintain this site for free to improve public record. My aim is provide this data as a source of truth for those members of our enthusiastic community that like to know such things. I reserve the right to remove this resource at any time.