Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

This policy applies to guides.cdlscan.com only — the guides, the search and the assistant on this subdomain. The CDLScan product at cdlscan.com is a different service with its own privacy policy, and that one governs anything you do after you follow a link over to it. In this policy, "we" means CDL scan, the publisher of these guides.

What we do not do

Stated first because it rules out most of what a privacy policy usually has to explain:

• There are no accounts. You cannot register, log in, or create a profile.
• There is no advertising on this site, and no ad network, retargeting pixel or remarketing tag.
• We do not sell, rent or share personal information with anyone for their own purposes.
• We do not track you across other websites.

The assistant, and what happens to your question

The assistant answers from the guides published on this site. When you send it a question, the question passes through a redaction step before it is stored and before it is sent to the model that writes the answer. That step removes, and replaces with a placeholder:

• Social Security numbers
• Driver licence and CDL numbers
• Dates that look like a date of birth
• Email addresses and phone numbers
• DOT and MC numbers
• Personal names

This matters more here than on an ordinary site. Our readers are deciding whether to hire a named person, so a question can easily contain a real driver's details — someone who never agreed to us holding them. Redaction happens on the way in rather than on the way out, because anything written down unredacted is one backup away from being permanent.

After redaction we keep, for each question:

• the redacted text of the question and the answer given;
• the time it was asked and which page it was asked from;
• which guides the answer drew on, and whether an answer was found at all;
• whether the visitor then followed a link to cdlscan.com;
• a session hash — a one-way fingerprint computed from a secret value, your browser's user-agent string and the current date. It groups several questions from one sitting, it changes every day, and it cannot be reversed into anything that identifies you. It is not a cookie and is not stored in your browser.

We use this to improve the answers and, mainly, to find the questions our guides fail to answer — an unanswered question is the clearest signal of what to write next.

Storage in your browser

This site sets no cookies. It stores exactly one value in your browser's local storage, guides:ai-open, which remembers whether you left the assistant panel open or closed. It never leaves your device. Clearing your browser data removes it.

Analytics

At the time of writing this site runs no analytics — there is no Google Analytics tag, and no third-party measurement script, on any page. We expect to add privacy-respecting page measurement; when we do, this section and the date at the top of this page will be updated before it goes live.

Companies that process data for us

• DigitalOcean — hosting for the site and for the assistant's server.
• OpenRouter — routes the redacted question to the language model that writes the answer. It receives the question only after redaction, never your IP-linked identity.
• Cloudflare — DNS and network protection. If we enable its anti-bot check on the assistant, Cloudflare will process a challenge token for that purpose.

These providers act on our instructions and may not use the data for their own purposes.

Server logs

Like any web server, ours records requests: IP address, time, page requested, user agent. These are used for security and debugging, and are not combined with the assistant's question log.

Children

This site is written for people doing a job at a motor carrier. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Your requests

Because we hold nothing tied to your identity, there is usually nothing to look up, correct or delete. If you believe a question you asked contained personal details that survived redaction, email [email protected] with roughly when you asked it and what it concerned, and we will find and delete the record. Depending on where you live you may have further rights over personal data; write to the same address and we will honour them.

Changes

If what we collect changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. We will not start collecting something new and describe it here afterwards.