Privacy Policy
Version 2.0 — in effect from September 13, 2026
This policy explains what AutoMarkas collects, why, who else sees it, and what you can ask us to do about it. We do not sell your personal information. Advertising on this site is served by Google and is only loaded if you allow advertising cookies.
Who is responsible for your information
AutoMarkas is an online vehicle marketplace serving Afghanistan. The organisation that operates it decides how and why your personal information is used, which under data protection law makes it the controller of that information.
The operator's legal name, registered address and registration details are published on our imprint page: Imprint
This policy covers automarkas.com and everything on it. It does not cover other websites you reach from our links or from an advertisement, which have their own policies.
What we collect
Information you give us
- Account information: Your name, email address, phone number and password when you register. Passwords are stored only as a one-way hash, never as text we can read.
- Profile information: A profile picture, your preferred language and the province or city you choose, if you add them.
- Dealer information: If you apply for a dealer account: your business name, address, business contact details and the documents you upload to support the application.
- Listing information: Everything you enter about a vehicle you list — details, description, price, location and photographs. A published listing is public and is visible to anyone, including search engines.
- Messages: Messages you send to other users through the site, so that both of you keep a copy of the conversation.
- Support and reports: What you write in the contact form or in a report about a listing, and the name, email address and phone number you give with it.
Information collected automatically
- Usage data: Which pages and listings you open, what you search for, and which filters you use.
- Device and connection data: Your IP address, browser, operating system and device type, which our servers and our security systems receive with every request.
- Error reports: When something breaks, a technical report is sent to Sentry so we can fix it. We have deliberately turned off the setting that would attach your personal details to those reports.
- Cookies and browser storage: A small number of items stored on your device, listed one by one in our Cookie Policy.
We do not collect payment card details. AutoMarkas is free to use and has no payment system.
Why we use it, and on what legal basis
Data protection law requires a lawful reason for each use of your information. Ours are:
| What we do it for | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Creating and running your account, and signing you in | Performance of a contract with you |
| Publishing your listings and showing them to buyers | Performance of a contract with you |
| Delivering messages between buyers and sellers | Performance of a contract with you |
| Verifying your email address and phone number | Performance of a contract with you |
| Detecting fraud, spam and abuse, and reviewing reported listings | Our legitimate interest in keeping the marketplace safe |
| Keeping the service secure, limiting abuse, and diagnosing faults | Our legitimate interest in a working, secure service |
| Measuring how the site is used so we can improve it | Your consent, given through the cookie banner |
| Showing advertising, including personalised advertising | Your consent, given through the cookie banner |
| Meeting legal obligations and answering lawful requests from authorities | Compliance with a legal obligation |
Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time, and where we rely on our legitimate interests you can object — see "Your rights" below.
Advertising and Google AdSense
AutoMarkas is funded by advertising. We use Google AdSense to select and display the ads you see on this site.
Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your earlier visits to AutoMarkas or to other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and to other sites on the internet.
Where personalised advertising is not allowed, Google may still show non-personalised ads, which are chosen from the content of the page and your approximate location rather than from your browsing history.
Google's advertising script is only loaded after you allow advertising cookies. Before you choose, and if you reject them, it is not loaded at all and no advertising cookie is set — so you will not see ads on this site.
We never give Google, or any other advertiser, your name, your email address or your phone number.
How to turn off personalised advertising
- On this site: use the Cookie settings link at the bottom of any page, or read our Cookie Policy
- Turn off ad personalisation in your Google account
- Opt out of personalised advertising from many vendors at once
- Google's advertising technology policies
- How Google uses information from sites that use its services
Where your information is stored
AutoMarkas runs on Amazon Web Services, and our main region is Asia Pacific (Mumbai), in India. Your information is therefore stored and processed outside Afghanistan.
Google and Sentry operate globally, so information they receive may be processed in other countries, including the United States.
Where information about someone in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom is transferred out of those regions, we rely on the transfer mechanisms our providers make available, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. We do not rely on your consent as the basis for these transfers.
How long we keep it
We keep information for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for. In practice that means:
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and profile | For as long as your account exists. Deleting it removes or anonymises your details straight away. |
| Listings you publish | Until you delete the listing or ask us to. We do not currently delete inactive listings automatically. |
| Messages between buyers and sellers | For as long as either party's account exists, because each of you needs your own copy of the conversation. |
| Contact form messages and listing reports | Until the matter is dealt with and any follow-up is finished. You can ask us to delete yours sooner. |
| Technical error reports | Kept by Sentry under its own retention schedule. |
| Your cookie choice | 6 months, on your own device only. |
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights over the information we hold about you:
- Access: See what information we hold about you and get a copy of it. You can download it yourself from your account settings.
- Correction: Have information that is wrong or incomplete corrected. Most of it you can edit yourself in your account settings.
- Deletion: Delete your account and the personal information in it. You can do this yourself from your account settings.
- Restriction: Ask us to stop using your information while a dispute about it is being resolved.
- Objection: Object to processing we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interests, and to any use of your information for direct marketing.
- Portability: Get the information you gave us as a structured, commonly used, machine-readable file. The download in your account settings is that file.
- Withdrawing consent: Withdraw a consent you gave, at any time, without having to give a reason. Withdrawing it does not undo what was done before you withdrew it.
- Complaining: Complain to a data protection authority if you think we have got something wrong.
How to exercise them
Two of these you can do yourself, immediately, in your account settings. "Download my data" gives you one file containing everything we hold about you. "Delete my account" erases it — because that cannot be undone, we ask for your password and ask you to type your email address first.
For anything else — correcting something you cannot edit yourself, objecting to how we use your information, asking us to restrict it, or a question about any of this — write to us:
- Write to us from the email address on your account, so we can tell it is you.
- Put what you want in the subject line — for example "Data request", "Delete my account" or "Copy of my data".
- We reply within 30 days. If a request is complicated we will tell you within those 30 days and say how much longer we need.
Email: info@automarkas.com
Deleting your account removes your name, email address, phone number, profile picture, address, password and two-factor security keys, signs you out everywhere, and withdraws your published listings along with the contact details on them. Two things deliberately remain: messages you sent stay in the other person's conversation with your name removed, because they are that person's records too; and a de-identified shell of the account is kept so that it cannot be reopened and so that any dispute or report about it can still be dealt with.
To change or withdraw a cookie choice, use the Cookie settings link at the bottom of any page, or see our Cookie Policy
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you can also complain to the data protection authority in the country where you live or work.
How we protect it
The measures we take include:
- Encrypting everything sent between your device and our servers.
- Storing passwords only as a one-way hash, so nobody — including us — can read them back.
- Limiting which of our people can reach personal data, and requiring a separate sign-in for administrative access.
- Rate limiting, abuse detection and monitoring for unusual activity.
No system is completely secure, and we cannot promise that nothing will ever go wrong. If a breach affects you and the law requires it, we will tell you.
Automated decisions
We do not make decisions about you by purely automated means that have a legal effect on you. Advertising shown to you may be selected automatically by Google when you allow advertising cookies, and listings may be ordered by relevance, but neither decides anything about your rights.
Children
AutoMarkas is not for people under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children, and if we learn that we have, we delete it. If you believe a child has given us their information, write to us and we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we publish the new text here and raise the version number at the top of the page. For a change that affects you significantly we will give notice on the site before it takes effect.
Contact us
For anything to do with this policy or with your information:
- Email: info@automarkas.com
Our full legal identity and postal address are on the Imprint page · Contact form