Contact-page transparency
ThrottleOutreach
Throttle runs two automated systems that visit dealer websites. This page covers the second one, which reads the contact details a dealership publishes on its own site. It says exactly what that involves, how to block it, how to tell us never to contact you, and what we hold about dealership staff.
Two systems, two user agents
ThrottleBot indexes inventory. ThrottleOutreach reads contact pages. They identify themselves separately, and their page fetches run from separate network addresses.
| Property | ThrottleBot | ThrottleOutreach |
|---|---|---|
| User agent | ThrottleBot/2.0 (+https://throttle.toys/bot; [email protected]) | ThrottleOutreach/1.0 (+https://throttle.toys/outreach; [email protected]) |
| What it fetches | Inventory index pages, sitemaps and vehicle detail pages. | A dealership's home, contact, about/staff and terms-of-use pages (or its privacy page, where a site has no terms page). Nothing else, and never inventory. |
| Network addresses | The crawl pool. | A separate pool for page fetches, never shared with ThrottleBot. The mail-server check below runs from Throttle's own server. |
| How much | One request at a time per site, at least 2.5 seconds apart, or your Crawl-delay if it is longer. | At most 5 pages per dealership in any 30 days, one request at a time, at least 10 seconds apart, or your Crawl-delay if it is longer. A redirect is a request of its own: checked against robots.txt, spaced the same way and counted in the 5. A Crawl-delay longer than 120 seconds means it does not visit at all. |
| Details | ThrottleBot | This page |
Why two: traffic that reads contact details should never ride on the crawler's reputation, and a dealership that blocks one should be able to see exactly what the other does.
We publish the separation here so that it is visible, not merely operational.
Status
Contact discovery has not started. This page will show the date it does.
What it collects
From a dealership's own website, and nowhere else:
- Role addresses the dealership publishes for sales or general enquiries, such as a sales@ or info@ mailbox.
- The business phone number and the address of the website's contact form.
- A named person's address only where the dealership's own page labels that person as sales staff, recorded only.
- Other mailboxes on those pages, such as an owner's or a general manager's, recorded only.
- The page each item came from, so every record carries its evidence.
Only a role mailbox for sales, internet or general enquiries can ever be marked as an address a buyer's quote request may go to. A named person's address, and any other mailbox found on those pages, such as a general manager's, is kept as a record only. Department mailboxes such as service, parts, finance or careers are not kept at all.
What it never collects, and never does:
- Addresses from manufacturer dealer locators, bought lists or any third-party directory.
- Anything behind a login, a challenge page or a CAPTCHA. A challenge ends the visit, and ThrottleOutreach does not come back to that site.
- Contact forms are read, never submitted. CAPTCHAs are never solved.
- Addresses a site has deliberately obscured are never decoded.
- An address found on a page that carries a notice against collecting addresses, or on a site whose terms prohibit it, is recorded only as do not use.
Before any address could be used, we check that its domain has a working mail server: a DNS lookup, and a mail-server check that never sends a message. The mail-server check runs from Throttle's own server, not from the page-fetch pool.
How to block it
ThrottleOutreach reads robots.txt before anything else and obeys it. To block it and leave ThrottleBot alone, add:
User-agent: ThrottleOutreachDisallow: /
It also obeys every rule written for ThrottleBot, so blocking ThrottleBot blocks both. It reads Crawl-delay under either name and uses the longer delay.
Do not contact
To make sure Throttle never sends a buyer inquiry to your dealership, use the dealer opt-out page, or email [email protected]. No account is needed.
- It is permanent. We will not ask you to reconsider, and nothing a buyer or anyone at Throttle does can override it.
- It is actioned within 24 hours.
- It can cover a single address or your whole email domain — not only one store — along with every dealership whose website is on that domain.
Privacy notice for dealership staff
Work contact details are personal information, and the people behind them have rights over it whether or not their state's law says so. This notice covers the contact details of dealership staff that Throttle holds: what ThrottleOutreach collects, and addresses our dealer directory already held from manufacturer dealer locators.
| Who it covers | People who work at a dealership whose contact details appear on the dealership's own public website. |
|---|---|
| What we collect | A work email address; a name and job title where the dealership's page shows them; the business phone number. |
| Where it comes from | ThrottleOutreach collects only from the dealership's own public website — never manufacturer dealer locators, bought lists or data brokers. Separately, our dealer directory holds some addresses that manufacturer dealer locators published. Those are never used to contact anyone, and a deletion request erases them too. |
| Why we hold it | So that buyer quote requests reach the right mailbox, and so that we can honour do-not-contact requests. Addresses from manufacturer dealer locators are used only to tell which dealerships belong to the same group. |
| Selling and sharing | We do not sell this information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as the CCPA defines those terms. Before anything built from it is published or licensed, this notice will say so. |
| How long we keep it | While the dealership is in our index. After a verified deletion request we delete it within 45 days and keep only a one-way hash of the address, so that it is never collected again. Do-not-contact and opt-out records are kept permanently for the same reason. The records of requests themselves are cleared 24 months after they are completed. |
| Your rights | To know what we hold and receive a copy, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and to opt out of any contact. They apply wherever you live. |
| How to use them | Use the form below, or email [email protected], which is also how to ask for a correction. No account is needed. We verify each request by emailing a confirmation link, nothing happens until you open it and press Confirm, and we respond within 45 days. |
Request access or deletion
Deleting your own address completes as soon as you confirm it on the page the link opens. A request about a colleague's address, and a request for a copy, are completed by a person on our team within 45 days.