Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Peterson Auto Sales collects through petersonauto.com, including the website chat, what we do with it, and who else handles it for us. Questions about it are welcome: call us at (801) 561-2727 or email info@petersonauto.com.

What we collect

What you send us

• Through the contact form: your email address and your message.
• Through the form for selling or trading in a car: your name, phone number, the car's VIN and condition, and any details you add.
• Through the website chat: your messages, plus your name, phone number or email if you leave them. We also note the page you started the chat on and the car you were looking at, if any.

What's collected automatically

• A chat cookie: a random ID, kept for 180 days, so the chat can show your conversation if you come back. It doesn't contain your name or contact details.
• A session cookie the site needs to work, which ends when you close your browser.
• Your IP address, which our servers see when you visit, like any website's. The chat uses it briefly to limit spam, and we don't save it with your conversation.
• Visit statistics from Plausible Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn't follow you to other websites. It also counts how the chat is used, such as when one is opened or started, without anything you write in it.

The website chat

Chats are saved. Everything written in the chat, by you, by our team and by the AI assistant, is saved in our systems, and our sales team can read it.

The AI assistant is not a person. Its replies are written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. To write a reply, the conversation so far is sent to Anthropic. Our team can also ask Claude to draft a reply to you, which sends the conversation the same way. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, it doesn't train its models on this data, and it deletes it after a limited retention period.

We email our team about chats. When nobody is free to answer, or you ask us to follow up, we email your messages and any contact details you left to our staff.

Please keep sensitive details out of the chat. Don't share Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, bank or card details, or anything similar. We never need them there.

By using the chat, you agree to it being saved and handled as this section describes.

How we use it

• To answer your questions and follow up on what you asked about.
• To run the website, keep it secure, and stop spam and abuse.
• To understand how the site and chat are used and improve them, including reviewing chats to make the AI assistant's answers better.

We use the contact details you leave only to respond to you. We don't sell your information, and we don't share it with anyone for their own marketing.

Who else handles it

A few service providers handle information for us, only to provide their service:

• DigitalOcean hosts the website and its database.
• Anthropic provides the AI assistant and the reply drafts described above.
• Twilio SendGrid delivers our email, including chat notices to our team.
• Plausible Analytics provides visit statistics.

Some pages also load vehicle photos from Cloudinary, fonts from Google Fonts, a map from Google Maps and videos from Bunny.net. Your browser contacts those services directly, which shares your IP address with them.

We may also share information when the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone's safety.

How long we keep it

We keep chats, messages and contact details for as long as we need them to help you and for our business records. You can ask us to delete yours at any time.

Your choices

To see, correct or delete the information we have about you, call (801) 561-2727 or email info@petersonauto.com. To stop the chat from recognizing your browser, clear your cookies for petersonauto.com.

Security

We protect what we collect with reasonable safeguards, such as encrypted connections and staff-only access to chats. No system is perfectly secure, so we can't promise that information will never be exposed.

Children

This site is for people shopping for cars, and we don't knowingly collect information from children under 13.

Changes

If we change this policy, we'll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact us

Peterson Auto Sales
8498 South State Street, Midvale, UT 84047
(801) 561-2727
info@petersonauto.com