Privacy and data protection

The operator of CarrierRanked is the data controller for the processing described here and can be reached at [email protected].

Every record on this site originates in public files published by FMCSA: the Company Census File, the Vehicle Inspection File, the associated violation records, and the Crash File. We do not collect information from carriers or drivers directly, and we do not buy data from third parties. Because the data does not come from the people it may describe, this notice serves as the information required by Article 14 GDPR.

A motor carrier is usually a company, and a company’s record is not personal data. But some carriers are registered by sole proprietors who trade under their own name. Where that happens, the legal name on the federal register is also a person’s name, and the record — the USDOT number, operating authority, fleet size, inspection and out-of-service history, and crash counts — relates to an identifiable individual.

What we never collect. The FMCSA census file also contains company officer names, telephone and mobile numbers, fax numbers, email addresses and street addresses — for roughly two million records. Those columns are excluded at the point of ingestion: they are never requested from the API, never written to our database, and therefore cannot appear on this site. FMCSA’s own public interfaces do not display them either.

The purpose is to make an existing public register readable: to show a carrier’s federal safety record alongside the median for fleets of comparable size, so that a driver considering an employer, or anyone else with an interest, can understand what the record says.

The lawful basis is legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. The interest is the public’s ability to assess the safety record of a commercial operator on the public road — which is the purpose the federal register exists to serve. We consider that interest strong for the regulatory record of a business, and weak for personal contact details, which is why the latter are excluded entirely rather than balanced.

We also limit how far the record is amplified. CarrierRanked does not offer search by personal name, does not build pages keyed to a person, and publishes no biographical content. Pages describe registered motor carriers as businesses.

If a record on this site relates to you as an individual, you have the right to access it, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have it erased, to restrict how it is processed, and — because we rely on legitimate interests — to object to the processing at any time under Article 21 GDPR.

Write to [email protected]. Tell us the USDOT number and that you are the individual concerned. We will respond within one month. Where an objection or erasure request applies, we suppress the record: the page stops being served and is removed from our sitemap, and the suppression persists through later data refreshes.

You can also lodge a complaint with your data protection supervisory authority.

We publish what the federal file says and cannot change it. If the FMCSA record itself is wrong, the correction route is FMCSA’s DataQs system at dataqs.fmcsa.dot.gov. Corrections accepted there flow into this site at the next refresh. To report something displayed incorrectly by us, use the address above.

We keep the current state of each record plus a history of changes over time, because how a carrier’s fleet size and inspection record move is part of what the record means. Suppression entries are kept indefinitely so that a suppressed record is not reinstated by a later sync.

The data originates in the United States and is stored on servers in the United States. The source records are already published by a US federal agency.

We measure how the site is used in aggregate, so we can tell which records people look for and whether pages work. We do not sell data, we do not run advertising or ad profiling, and we do not try to identify individual visitors.

Provider. Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager. Google acts as our processor. It sets cookies containing a randomly generated identifier and receives the pages you view, referring URLs, an approximate location derived from your IP address, and basic device and browser information. Advertising features, ad personalisation and Google Signals are switched off, and ad data redaction is enabled. Data is processed in the United States.

Consent. Analytics storage is denied by default for visitors in the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, so no analytics cookie is set there unless consent is given. Elsewhere, aggregate measurement runs on the basis of our legitimate interest in operating and improving the site. You can block it anywhere with a browser setting or content blocker, and nothing on this site depends on analytics working.

Status on this deployment: not yet active — no analytics provider is loaded and no analytics cookies are set. Server logs kept by our hosting provider for security and operational purposes may include IP addresses.

The figures on this site are calculated arithmetic — rates, medians and percentile positions within a fleet-size class. They are not FMCSA Safety Measurement System percentiles, not CSA scores, and not a federal safety rating. Nothing here makes an automated decision about any individual, and no figure on this site is a judgement about a carrier.