How the DigiTune Connect app handles your information — what it sends us, why, what stays on
your device, and what you can switch off.
Last updated: 5 October 2026 ·
Applies to DigiTune Connect for Android and for Windows.
DigiTune Connect is published by DigiTune Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 14083065. We are the data controller for the information described in this policy.
The best way to reach us about anything on this page — including a request to see or delete your data — is by email:
If you need a postal address, ask us by email and we will give you one. Our registered office is also on the public record at Companies House.
This policy covers DigiTune Connect only — the free app installed to run the tuning jobs we send. It does not cover DigiTune GTS, our application for professional tuners, and it does not cover our shop. Where Connect hands you over to the website or the shop, we say so.
It sits alongside the Software Licence Terms, which govern your use of the software itself.
Most of what Connect knows stays on the phone, head unit or PC it is installed on, in the app's own private storage. On Android that is the app's internal files directory, which other apps cannot read, and which is excluded from Android's cloud backup. None of the following is sent anywhere unless a section below says it is:
.dth5 files) — the file stays on the
device even after a copy has been sent.
When a tune licence key is entered, and again the first time the app meets an ECU, Connect
contacts our tuning service at tunes.digitune.co.uk and sends:
User-Agent
header. We record it, and the date we last heard from the app, against the licence — so a
tuner can see whether a job will run before sending it.An ECU identifier on its own says nothing about a person. Held next to a licence key, which is held next to an order, it does — so we treat it as personal data throughout this policy.
Lawful basis: contract — we cannot deliver a tune without it.
While a tune is active, the app asks the service whether anything has been sent. Those requests carry only the ECU's access token and no other information about you. Lawful basis: contract
When a job is finished, the app builds a single sealed file and uploads it. Pressing Submit at the end sends it straight away, but it is not the only way it goes: a finished job that was never submitted is sent when you close the app, open another job, or next start the app. And while a tune is in progress, a job you stop part way through — the engine switched off mid-drive, say — sends what it has so far as soon as a recording in it closes, and the finished version replaces it when the job is completed. Nothing is sent for a job you chose to stop, and the standard Record additional log job sends nothing once a tune is marked complete. The file contains:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| The answers to the job's questions. For the customer tune initialisation job these include forename, surname, email address, vehicle registration, and a long list of facts about the car and engine. For a garage's version of the job they are different — see section 7. | They are the specification the tune is built from, and the name and email are how a job folder is named and shared back. |
| Your name, email address, and your car's name and registration, on every job — where you have given them to us before, in an earlier job's questions or on the short About you form the Windows app shows in front of a job that does not ask. The form can be skipped with Not now. | So a result from a job that asks nothing about you is still filed under the right person and the right car, rather than parked unnamed. |
| Any notes typed at the end of the run — your own account of how the car is behaving. | It is the one part of the job the tuner did not write the questions for, and often the most useful thing in it. |
| A voice note, if you record one at the end of the run — the recording itself, and a written transcript of it. Nothing is recorded unless you press Record a voice note, and you can play it back or delete it before the job is sent. On Android the transcript is made on the phone, after the recording, by the phone's own speech recognition: on-device where the phone offers it; where it does not, the phone's speech service (on most phones Google's) may handle it under that provider's own terms. The Windows app makes no transcript, and where a note arrives without one we transcribe it on our own computer, with nothing sent to anybody else. | Saying what the car is doing is quicker than typing it, standing next to the car. The transcript is there so the tuner can read it; the recording is there because a transcript can be wrong. |
| The ECU's calibration — both as the job finished it and, where a job replaced it, as it was found beforehand. | A log cannot be interpreted without the settings it was recorded against, and the as-found copy is the only route back to what you had. |
| Engine recordings the job asked for, and a record of what each step did. | They are the measurements the tuning is calculated from. |
| The ECU's product name, model, firmware version and identifier. | So the result can be filed against the right car. |
Lawful basis: contract — this is the tune being delivered.
A recording is a .dth5 file: several hundred readings from the ECU, ten times a
second, for the length of a drive — engine speed, throttle, air and coolant temperature, fuel and
ignition values, boost, road speed as the ECU reports it, and so on. It also carries the
calibration the ECU was running at the time.
There is no location data in a recording. DigiTune Connect never asks for the location permission and cannot read your position. Road speed comes from the ECU, not from GPS. The one exception is a log you import yourself from another tuning system: whatever channels that file contains travel with it, and some third-party logging systems do record position.
There is a setting called Record Every Drive Automatically. It is off by default. Turning it on shows a full-page notice, which has to be accepted, saying that the app will start recording as soon as the engine turns over, that every finished recording is sent to the tuner by itself, that the ECU's settings go with it, and that it stops when the tune is marked complete. It can be turned off again at any time.
Lawful basis: consent — withdrawn by switching the setting off.
Every recording on the device and its status — sent, waiting, or held by a job — is listed on the app's own screens, and any of them can be deleted.
Lawful basis: contract for recordings uploaded while a tune is under way — they are the work being carried out. Where automatic recording produced them, consent applies to the recording as well.
In a live session a tuner watches a running engine over the internet and can push adjustments to it while somebody is at the car.
Lawful basis: contract
We keep an archive of the calibrations and logs from cars we have tuned, and we study it to work out what a good tune actually looks like. It is how the app can offer a sensible starting map for a car it has never seen: the current base fuel tables for the Mazda MX-5 were built from 357 real cars, and the settings the app falls back to when a file does not say are the values the whole fleet agrees on — "2,361 of these boards use a 400 kPa sensor" is a usable default, and "nine maps disagree three ways" is not.
What we publish from it is aggregated, never anyone's individual file. What ships inside the product is a set of statistical tables and rules. No customer's calibration, log, name, registration or ECU identifier is included in anything we distribute, and the tools that do this analysis are not part of DigiTune Connect — they run on our own machines and are left out of the app entirely.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests proposed Our interest is in making our tunes better and safer for everybody we tune for, using work we have already been paid to do. It does not require us to identify anyone, and the output does not identify anyone. We think that is a fair use of the data, and that it is what a customer would reasonably expect from a tuning company. If you would rather your car was not included, email us and we will take it out — this will not affect the tune you bought.
Some garages and tuning businesses run DigiTune Connect on every car that comes through their workshop. If your car was tuned that way, you may never have used this app yourself — and this section is for you.
When a garage runs a job on your car, their version of the form asks them for their own job reference, your car's registration, the name of the technician doing the work, and — optionally — your name as the car's owner. Their own business contact details are filled in automatically. Everything else in section 3 applies as normal: the calibration, the recordings and the answers about the car all come to us.
A garage's app also sends us their job reference and a short label for the car — its registration and description — so the right line appears on their invoice, together with a record of what happened to each car: when it was first connected, when data first arrived, and when the tune was marked finished, reopened or handed over.
What we do with it:
Ask us directly. If you want to know what we hold about your car, or want it deleted, come to us at [email protected] — you do not have to go through the garage. If you want to know what the garage holds, that is a question for them.
A car's tune licence can move, and which of you the app is acting for changes with it:
History is not rewritten by a hand-over: work done while the garage had the car stays recorded against that garage, and nothing after it is.
If a job stops part way through, the app sends us a short failure report so we can work out why. It contains the job's title and identifier, the tuner's name, which step failed and what it said, the ECU's model, firmware version and identifier, the app version, and the filenames — never the full paths — of the job file and of the calibration that was open.
It never contains a calibration, a recording, a licence key, or any path from your own computer. The full record stays in a log file on your own device.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests — keeping the software working. A job that fails on somebody else's driveway is something we would otherwise never hear about. The report is deliberately narrow so that it tells us what broke without telling us anything else.
So the app can name the readings coming off an ECU, it downloads definition files from
gts.digitune.co.uk/medefs. These requests carry no licence key, no ECU identifier
and no account of any kind. They do reveal your IP address and — from which file is requested —
which model of ECU and which firmware definition is in use. The list is cached on the device for
a day. Lawful basis: legitimate interests — the app cannot describe
your own ECU to you without it.
The Windows version checks for a new release by fetching a small file from GitHub. The request carries nothing about you beyond your IP address, which GitHub sees as it would for any visit to their site. The Android version does not do this at all — Google Play handles updates, and the update code is not included in the Android build. Lawful basis: legitimate interests — keeping customers on a working version.
If the Windows app fails to start, or disappears while a recording is running, a separate small program opens a window listing what it has gathered and offering three buttons: Send report, Save locally and Cancel. Nothing is uploaded unless you press Send.
If you do, the report contains:
If you would rather not send it, press Save locally and send us the file yourself after looking at it, or press Cancel and nothing leaves your machine. Lawful basis: consent — the Send button.
The Android app has no crash reporting whatsoever. Nothing is sent to us, and nothing is sent to Google beyond whatever Google Play itself collects from your device, which is outside our control and covered by Google's own privacy policy.
The Android app asks for these permissions, and only these:
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| USB host | Talking to the ECU over the cable. The app cannot do anything at all without it. |
| Internet | Collecting jobs, checking a licence, and sending results home. |
| Foreground service (connected device) | Keeping a recording running while the screen is off and somebody is driving. |
| Wake lock | The same — stopping the device sleeping mid-recording. |
| Post notifications | Showing the recording clock. Refusing it costs the clock, never the recording. |
| Ignore battery optimisations | Some phone manufacturers kill a background recording after a few minutes even when everything above is in place. This is the only lever the app has against that, and a recording that ends part way through a drive is a drive somebody would have to make again. |
| Microphone | Recording a voice note at the end of a job, and only while you are recording one. Android asks the first time you press Record a voice note; refusing it costs the voice note and nothing else. |
There is no location permission, no contacts permission, no camera permission, and no access to your photos or to files outside the app's own folder — other than a job file you explicitly open.
| Who | What they do with it |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Runs our tuning service, its database, its file storage and the live-session relay, and sits in front of our websites. Everything Connect sends us passes through Cloudflare, and finished jobs and recordings are stored there until we collect them. |
| GitHub, Inc. | Hosts the Windows update file. Sees your IP address when the Windows app checks for an update. Nothing else. |
| Google LLC | Distributes the Android app through Google Play, and separately hosts the shared folder in which we deliver a finished tune. Where your phone's speech recognition is Google's and cannot run on the phone itself, Google may also process a voice note to transcribe it — see section 3. That is a service of your phone rather than one we engage, and it runs under Google's own terms. |
| Bluehost / Newfold Digital | Hosts digitune.co.uk, where our shop and your account live. Connect only reaches it when it hands you over to the website. |
These companies act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes. Once a finished job reaches us, we take it off Cloudflare and file it on our own storage in the UK, in a folder named after the customer, which is shared back to them through Google Drive. That folder is how a finished tune is delivered.
A partner garage is not on this list, because it is not acting for us — see section 7.
Cloudflare, GitHub and Google are United States companies with worldwide networks, so information you send through DigiTune Connect may be processed outside the United Kingdom.
Where that happens we rely on the safeguards in those providers' own data processing terms. Cloudflare's incorporates the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses as amended by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum issued by the Information Commissioner under section 119A of the Data Protection Act 2018, and Cloudflare is additionally certified under the UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. GitHub's and Google's terms rely on the same combination of mechanisms.
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Finished jobs, recordings, failure reports and crash reports held by Cloudflare | One month at most. In practice far less: a finished job is removed as soon as it has been collected onto our own storage, usually within minutes. |
| A part-finished job sent while it was still under way | Replaced, and the earlier copy deleted, when the finished job arrives. |
| A voice note not yet sent | On your device until the job it belongs to is sent, then deleted from the device; the copy we receive is kept with the job, below. |
| A finished tune and the job it came from, on our own storage — including any voice note and its transcript | For as long as we may need it to support that tune. A tune is not a one-off transaction — a customer may come back years later with a fault, a new part or a firmware change, and the only way to answer them is to still have what was done. We review this and delete on request (see section 14). |
| Calibrations kept for the reference library (section 6) | For as long as we maintain the library. Removed on request. |
| Your licence and the record binding it to your ECU | For as long as the licence exists, so we can support the tune and honour it. |
| A request for a live session | Stops being offered to a tuner two hours after it is made. |
| Records of a partner garage's cars and jobs, for invoicing — the registration, the job reference and the list of events | Six years from the end of the accounting period, which is how long UK company and tax law requires business records to be kept. |
| Anything on your own device | Until you delete it, or uninstall the app. |
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
To exercise any of these, email [email protected]. Tell us the email address, licence key or vehicle registration we would know you by so we can find you. We will respond within one month. There is no charge.
You can also delete your own data from the app at any time: recordings and downloaded jobs can be deleted from within DigiTune Connect, and uninstalling the app removes everything it has stored on your device.
DigiTune Connect is not directed at children and is not designed for them. Using it requires a road vehicle, an aftermarket engine management ECU and a tune purchased from us. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us their information, email us and we will delete it.
Finished jobs are encrypted on the device before upload, with a key only the tuner's installation holds — our own service stores them without being able to read them. Every request the app makes is over HTTPS, and every request carrying your data carries a token that speaks for one ECU and no other, so one app cannot ask about another customer's car. Licence records are protected by Windows' own data protection on Windows, and by the Android Keystore on Android.
If we change what the app collects or what we do with it, we will update this page and change the "last updated" date at the top. Where a change is significant — a new kind of data, or a new purpose — we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and where the change relies on your consent we will ask for it. The current version always lives at this address.
DigiTune Ltd (company number 14083065, England and Wales)
[email protected]
www.digitune.co.uk