Cookies and analytics

The first time you visit the website or portal, a banner asks whether analytics cookies may be set. Until you answer — and whenever you decline — no analytics cookies are written and no advertising signals are granted. Strictly functional cookies (your session, your language) are always set; they are what signing in requires.

What accepting does

Accepting lets the site measure how it is used, through Google's measurement tools. What is measured is the pages visited and the actions completed: buttons and contact links pressed, searches run, forms started, sent or failed, and — on a tuning website — the car a visitor looks up, the tuning stage they pick, any extra services they tick, which route they take through the search and how far they get along it, and any purchase that follows.

The files attached to an order, the contents of messages and support tickets, and your sign-in details are never part of these measurements.

One decision covers both the marketing website and the portal: they share the same domain, so you are asked once, not twice.

Is the licence plate part of what is measured?

Yes, when the car was found by plate. Looking a car up on a tuning website puts that car into the measurement data — make, model, engine, year, fuel, power, and which of the three routes (licence plate, search, or browse) the visitor took. Where the route was the plate, the plate itself is sent, tidied to one form (upper case, no dashes or spaces), with a one-way digest of it alongside.

This includes lookups that find nothing. The plate is recorded as the search term when it is submitted, so a plate we hold no car for is measured too — along with the reason it failed, which is what tells a site owner which vehicles their visitors want and their catalogue does not cover.

A licence plate is personal data in most of Europe, so it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving it to be found in a network tab. The vehicle identification number (VIN) and the German HSN/TSN key numbers stay with the lookup and are never sent.

Contact details are handled differently. Where a visitor gives an email address or a phone number on a contact or quote form, the measurement carries a one-way digest of it — never the address or the number itself. Two digests, in fact: Google and Meta each require the address to be written their own way before it is digested, so the same address produces a different one-way value for each, and neither can be turned back into the address.

These digests are only sent once a visitor has accepted the banner. They are what lets an advert be credited with a sale without anyone learning who bought — but a digest of a real person's address is still that person's data, so a visitor who has not accepted, or who declined, has none of it measured at all.

The same applies to you when you are signed in to the portal. Your account is measured as a set of one-way digests — of your user id, your organisation and your own email address — never as the address itself, which does not leave your browser. The digest of your user id is what lets a visit on your laptop and one on your phone be counted as one person rather than two. Like every digest above it is gated on your cookie decision: decline, and none of it is sent. Your plan, your role and how long you have had the account are also reported, but as plain categories that describe the account rather than identify you.

Whose analytics account receives all this?

It depends on whose site the visitor is on.

On TheTuningGroup's own website and portal, the measurement goes to TheTuningGroup.

On a tuning website built on the platform, it goes to the site owner: the Google Tag Manager container, the Google Analytics 4 property and the Meta Pixel entered under Website → Settings, in the Tracking & code card. If you run such a site, everything described above arrives in your own account, the licence plate included — which makes it yours to declare in your privacy policy and yours to set a retention period for.

Measurements about the platform itself — sign-ups, subscriptions, orders placed, orders delivered — are never handed to a site owner's account. Only the visitor-facing events on their own site are.

Changing your mind

Use the Cookie settings link in the website footer to withdraw or change a decision at any time. Withdrawal takes effect immediately — measurement stops the moment you clear the choice, and the banner comes back so you can decide again.

Declining never limits the product: every feature works identically either way.

No banner appeared, or my choice keeps being forgotten

On a tuning website the banner is the site owner's setting, not a fixed part of the page: a site whose owner has not turned the banner on will not show one, and tags then start at the default the owner chose. On TheTuningGroup's own website and portal the banner is always shown until it is answered.

If the banner returns on every visit, the decision cookie is not surviving — usually a browser set to clear cookies on close, or private browsing. The choice is stored in a cookie, so a browser that discards cookies discards the answer with them.

Anything else, tell TheTuningGroup Support which page you were on, whether you accepted or declined, and what you saw instead — that is enough to trace which of the two banners was involved.