Privacy Policy

Bayla is operated by Auto Connect, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Bayla," "we," "us," "our"). We operate the Bayla and Bayla Pro mobile apps and propermech.com (the "Service"), which connect drivers with independent car-service providers. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.

Information we collect

• Account information — your name, email, phone number, and (for providers) business details, when you sign up with Google, Apple, phone, or email.
• Profile, photos, and videos — your profile picture and any photos or videos you or your provider attach to a service request, estimate line, or job update, including scan-tool photos used by the provider AI tools.
• Provider verification documents — identity, license, insurance, certification, background-check, or business documents a provider chooses or is required to submit. These documents are private and reviewed only by authorized Bayla administrators; customers see only verification badges or status.
• Vehicle information — the year, make, model, and VIN you enter or scan.
• My Garage — the cars in your garage and what you add to them: nicknames, photos and captions, a short "about" note, service and mod entries you log yourself, and the record of each Bayla job a pro completes on your car (shop name, job titles, date, and mileage). These job records are created automatically when a job is completed.
• Bayla Club (optional) — if you join, your Club handle, an optional profile photo and bio, an optional city and state (never a ZIP code or street address), the cars you choose to share, your likes, follows, comments, questions, answers, reports and blocks, your Club notification setting and your device's time zone (so we don't notify you at night), and the kinds of cars you look at or tell us you're interested in (so Club updates are about cars you care about). We never ask for your real name to join.
• Car-marketplace information — vehicle listing details and photos, saved-search criteria, ZIP/radius, private offers and replies, marketplace chat, and safety reports.
• Service and order data — the requests, quotes, estimates and approvals, appointment times, status updates, and messages exchanged between customers and providers.
• Service address (mobile jobs) — if you request a "comes to you" job, the address you provide is stored securely and revealed only to the provider who accepts your job — never to providers who are just browsing.
• Provider location while en route (providers only) — when a provider taps Navigate to head to a customer, their approximate position may be shared with that customer only from departure until the provider stops sharing or the job starts, after which it is automatically deleted. Providers control this with the in-app Stop sharing control and their device's location permission; declining it does not block the job.
• Conversations with Bayla — Bayla is the AI assistant in both apps. What you type or say to her, and the details she needs to help (such as your vehicle, your request, the shop's menu, or a provider's job), are used to answer you and to carry out what you ask, such as finding a shop or booking a job.
• Microphone and voice — the microphone is used only while you tap the mic to talk to Bayla, dictate a note, or (providers) record a job video with sound. Your speech is turned into text by your device's speech-recognition service (Google on Android, Apple on iOS); we receive the text, not a recording of your voice. A job video you record is uploaded and stored like any other job photo or video. If Bayla's voice is on, the text of her replies is sent to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech to produce the audio. You can mute her voice in the app, and you can type instead of talking.
• Location — if you allow it, your approximate location to help find providers near you. You can decline; the Service still works.
• Device and usage data — basic device identifiers and app activity used to operate and improve the Service.

Bayla Cars privacy

Public car-market responses contain only approved listing fields such as vehicle specifications, price, description, photos, general location, dealer business name when applicable, and limited trust badges. They do not publish a private seller's name, account identifiers, contact details, full VIN, vehicle-owner identifiers, private offer details, chat access tokens, or saved-search coordinates. Saved-search ZIP/radius and coordinates are used to calculate nearby matches. Offers, replies, and marketplace chat are visible only to participating signed-in accounts or an authorized legacy website session. Reports are shared with our moderation team for safety review.

My Garage and the Bayla Club

• Verified job records. When a Bayla pro completes a job on your car, we add a record to your garage with a checkmark. It contains the shop's name, the job titles, the date, and the mileage, plus internal references to the shop and the job. It never contains the price, your name, your address, or your VIN. If a shop logs a job for you before you have an account, we keep only a one-way code made from the email or phone number the shop entered, and the record joins your garage when you add a car in the app with an account whose verified email or phone number matches.
• History stays with the car. To keep a car's history together, we match cars by VIN using a one-way code derived from the VIN, so the raw VIN is not copied into your garage. Adding a VIN does not reveal anyone else's records. A car's history moves to a new owner only when the seller gives them a transfer code in the app. The seller keeps a read-only view of their own records under Past cars. Photos move with the car only if the seller chooses.
• Photos. When you add a garage or Club photo, it is sent to Google Cloud Vision, which finds license plates, house numbers, and street signs or other visible text showing a street, phone number, email, or web address, and checks for unsafe content. We then make a blurred copy with those areas blurred and the location data in the file removed. Your original stays in private storage that only you can open. Other members and the public only ever see the blurred copy, and a photo we cannot process stays hidden. You can blur more spots yourself.
• Private by default. Every car starts private. For each car you choose who sees it: just you, Club members only, or Club members plus a public page on propermech.com. You can change this at any time. When a public page is turned off, its link stops working and new links never point back to old ones.
• What a public garage page shows: your Club handle, the car's year, make, model, trim, and nickname, your "about" note, blurred photos and their captions, verified jobs (shop, month and year, job titles, and mileage rounded to the nearest 1,000), entries you logged (marked as not verified), mods, the number of likes, the month you joined the Club, and your city and state only if you chose to show them. Public pages never show your real name, VIN, license plate, prices, exact dates, comments, or address. Anyone with the link can open a public garage page. Public pages are not listed in the Club directory, we tell search engines not to index them, and AI assistants' public tools for garages are off. If that changes, we will update this policy first. Members-only content is never shown on a public page.
• What Club members see. Members see the cars you share with the Club, your handle and Club profile (photo, bio, and city and state if you add them), and your comments. They never see your VIN, plate, email, phone, or address. Comments are visible to members only. If you block someone, neither of you sees the other in the Club.
• Safety screening. Text you post in the Club (bio, captions, notes, comments, questions, and answers) is checked automatically for addresses, phone numbers, emails, links, VINs, and plate numbers. Text containing any of these is refused, and we tell you what to remove. Reports go to our moderation team, which reviews them within 24 hours.
• Notifications. We send a push notification for your first verified job. Club activity (likes, comments, follows, answers to your questions, milestones, news about cars and builds you follow or told us you're interested in, and a prompt to post photos after a verified job) is bundled into one push notification, weekly by default. You can change it to instant (at most once an hour) or turn it off, and we don't send Club notifications between 9 PM and 8 AM in your time zone (Eastern time until your device tells us yours). We never text you about the Club.

Google Business Profile reviews (providers)

A provider may choose to connect the Google Business Profile they manage so their Google rating and reviews appear on their Bayla profile. This is optional, is never required to use the Service, and happens only when the provider signs in with Google and approves the connection on Google's consent screen.

• What we access. With the provider's permission (Google scope business.manage) we read, from Google's Business Profile APIs: the list of Business Profile accounts and locations the signed-in Google account manages (business name, address, phone number, website, Google place ID and Maps link), and for the one location the provider picks, the profile's average star rating, total review count, and the most recent reviews (reviewer display name as shown on Google, star rating, review text, and review dates). Access is read-only: we never post, reply to, edit, or delete reviews, and we never change anything on the Business Profile.
• How we use it. We show the rating, review count, and reviews on the provider's Bayla profile in both apps and on the provider's propermech.com page, always labeled "Reviews from Google" with a link back to the provider's Google listing. Reviews are shown exactly as Google returns them; we never edit them and never combine Google ratings with Bayla ratings into one number. The Google rating is one of several inputs to the order providers appear in search results. Our booking assistant may quote the rating and review count to customers ("4.8 stars across 212 Google reviews"). We do not use this data for advertising, do not sell it, and do not use it to train AI models.
• How we store it. The Google access and refresh tokens are stored in a server-only area of our Google Firebase database that the apps cannot read, and are used only to refresh the rating and reviews about once a day. The imported rating, review count, and up to 20 recent reviews are stored on the provider's public profile record so they can be displayed. If a refresh fails repeatedly, the profile is labeled as not current until the next successful refresh.
• Who sees it. The imported rating and reviews are shown to Bayla users and visitors as part of the provider's public profile, which is the purpose of the connection. We do not share the data or the tokens with any other third party, except the service providers that host the Service (see "Who we share it with").
• Disconnecting and deletion. A provider can disconnect at any time in the Bayla Pro app (Profile → Google reviews → Disconnect) or by removing Bayla's access at myaccount.google.com/permissions. On disconnect we revoke and delete the Google tokens immediately; the imported rating and reviews are marked stale, stop being shown within 7 days, and are deleted from our systems within 7 days. If a provider revokes access at Google, the next daily refresh detects it and the same removal happens. Deleting a Bayla account removes the connection and all imported Google data with it.
• Limited Use. Bayla's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Until a shop connects its own profile, Bayla may show the shop's public Google Maps rating and reviews, read live from Google when you view the shop. We store only Google's place identifier for the shop; the ratings and reviews themselves are not stored by Bayla and are shown with Google Maps attribution.

How we use your information

• To create and manage your account and operate the Service.
• To match customers with the right provider and manage service requests.
• To power Bayla, the AI assistant, and the AI Diagnostic Helper and AI Service Writer (for provider mechanics) — see below.
• To communicate with you about your account and your requests.
• To maintain security and improve the apps.

Who we share it with

• Between users — when a job is booked or accepted, the relevant customer and provider see the details needed to complete it (such as name, vehicle, the request, and messages).
• Service providers (processors) — we use Google Firebase (authentication, database, file storage, hosting) and Google Places (address lookup) to run the Service.
• Google Cloud Vision — garage and Club photos are sent to Google Cloud Vision to find license plates, house numbers, and street signs to blur, and to screen out unsafe images. See "My Garage and the Bayla Club".
• Other members and the public (only what you choose) — Club members see the cars you share with the Club, and anyone with the link can see a car you make public. See "What a public garage page shows" above.
• Google Business Profile (providers only, optional) — when a provider connects their Business Profile, we receive their Google rating and reviews from Google's Business Profile APIs under the provider's authorization. See "Google Business Profile reviews (providers)" above.
• Subscriptions — the Bayla Pro app uses RevenueCat and the applicable Apple App Store or Google Play billing service to manage provider subscriptions and purchase status.
• AI processing — Bayla's replies are generated by Anthropic (the Claude AI). When you talk to Bayla, or a provider uses the AI Diagnostic Helper or AI Service Writer, the content needed for that reply (such as your messages, vehicle and request details, scan-tool photos, typed codes, and job notes) is sent to Anthropic to generate it. Anthropic processes it on our behalf and does not use it to train its models.
• Speech and voice — your device's speech-recognition service (Google or Apple) turns what you say into text, and Google Cloud Text-to-Speech turns Bayla's replies into her voice. See "Microphone and voice" above.
• Legal — where required by law or to protect rights, property, or safety.
• We do not sell your personal information.

Data retention

We keep your information while your account is active and as needed to provide the Service, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and meet legal obligations. In-app account deletion removes the account, profile, vehicles, messages, uploads, verification documents, and other personal data. Shared completed-job records may remain for the other party only in minimized, anonymized form. If an account was blocked for safety, non-reversible identifiers and anonymized report evidence may be retained to enforce that decision.

My Garage and the Club. When you delete your account, we delete:

• the entries and mods you logged;
• every garage and Club photo, both the original and the blurred copy;
• your Club profile and handle;
• your likes, follows, comments, questions, answers, and Club activity;
• any public garage page (its link stops working).

Records of jobs completed by Bayla pros stay with the car with your identity removed, so the car's history survives a sale. They contain only the shop's name, the job titles, the date, and the mileage, plus internal references to the shop and the job, never your name, price, address, or VIN. The car's year, make, and model and the one-way VIN code also stay, so the history can stay linked to the car. Comments and likes on a car you owned are removed when you delete your account or sell the car.

Security

We use industry-standard safeguards, including encryption in transit, to protect your information. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to protect your data.

Your choices and rights

• Access, update, or correct your profile information in the app.
• Turn location permission on or off in your device settings.
• Delete your account directly from the Profile screen in either app, or contact us for help or a copy of your data.

Children

The Service is for adults age 18 and older, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. If you believe a minor has provided us information, contact us.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the new effective date here and, for material changes, provide notice in the app.

Contact us

Auto Connect, Inc. (Bayla). Questions or requests, including data or account deletion: michaelsheaffer018@gmail.com (or support@propermech.com once active).