Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy
Marine Data Cloud values the privacy of your personal data and your usage of our Service and Data. We need to collect, use and disclose personal information in order to perform our business functions and services. This Privacy Policy explains what information Marine Data Cloud collects about you and why and how it may be used and shared.
This Privacy Policy forms part of the Terms (as defined in our Terms of Service), and applies to the information obtained by us through your use of this website, the Service and other Marine Data Cloud products and services.
Marine Data Cloud Ltd is the controller of your personal data and is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO registration number ZB187665). You have the right to access, correct or delete your personal data, to restrict or object to its processing, to ask for it to be transferred to you, and to withdraw your consent at any time. You may also complain to the ICO. To exercise your rights or contact us about your personal data, see 'Contact Us' at the end of this Privacy Policy. We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time and will notify registered users of material changes by email or through the Service before they take effect, unless a change is required by law or is needed to protect the security of the Service, in which case it may take effect as soon as we notify it.
Organisation accounts. Where an organisation, such as a company on our Enterprise plan, uses the Service to manage its fleet, crew or other data, the organisation decides what data to put into the Service and why, and we process that data on its behalf as its processor, under the data-processing terms of our agreement with it. If you are a member of such an organisation, please contact the organisation about that data.
Information collection
The mission of Marine Data Cloud is to provide highly targeted Services to the world's maritime professionals and marine enthusiasts. To achieve this mission Marine Data Cloud makes features and functionality available through our website, including our mobile and other applications, API, premium services, and other information provided as part of our services (the "Services", which has the same meaning as the "Service" in our Terms of Service) to enable personalised access to our Data and networking features. Registering an account with us is optional. By registering with us, you voluntarily and willingly provide Marine Data Cloud certain information, including personally identifiable information, which we collect in order to provide the Services. If you have any hesitation about providing information to us and/or having your information displayed on our websites, mobile apps, API or otherwise used in any manner permitted in this Privacy Policy and the User Agreement, you should not become a member of our Services; and, if you are already a member, you should delete your account.
A list of the Personal Data Marine Data Cloud may collect, and why we collect it, follows.
What is personal data?
Personal data means any information relating to you which allows us to identify you, such as your name, contact details and information about your access to our website, mobile app and other Marine Data Cloud Services.
We may collect personal data from you when you use our website or mobile apps, you register with us, purchase any of our services, or when you contact us. We may also collect personal data either directly or indirectly through our trusted third-party partners.
What types of personal data does Marine Data Cloud collect?
Registration and log-in information
We collect the information you provide in our registration form when you sign up for an account. To become a member of our Services and create your own personal account, you need to provide us with your name, surname, email address and password. If you buy a paid plan, we also collect your billing details, including your company name, billing address and VAT number where applicable. Card details are handled by our payment provider, Stripe, and we do not store your full card number.
Web visitors
Marine Data Cloud collects information from visitors to our websites or mobile apps, where this is voluntarily provided to meet a request from those individuals, such as when they interact with Marine Data Cloud's Services, including indicatively but not limited to Customer Service and Sales teams in order to accurately categorise and respond to their requests. For example, we collect email addresses and other information when visitors fill in our contact form and request any information on our services, or the information they provide us when they use our service desk reporting forms or apply for a vacant position in our company.
Employee and Human Resource Data
Marine Data Cloud collects information from applicants to open positions or seeking employment with us, including private contact details, professional qualifications and previous employment history, necessary to reach employment decisions. Once employed, we collect information on staff for human resource, performance, payroll and tax purposes. We will collect and record employee level information in various company systems consistent with standard business operations such as the staff calendar or the company email platform that we use. We may also collect similar information relating to freelance consultants and contractors.
Use of Services
We collect information when you interact with and use our websites, our mobile applications and API. Specifically, we collect information about what you use and how you use our Services, such as the types of vessels you view or the frequency and duration of your activity. This can also include information about content you provide, such as the name or location of a photo you upload or the date a file was created by you. For example, we may log activity when you rate photos, click on ads, install a Marine Data Cloud mobile application, etc.
Device information
When you access our website and mobile apps or open electronic correspondence from us, our servers may record data regarding your device and the network you are using to connect with our Services. We collect information from or about the computers, phones or other devices where you access or install our Services, such as the operating system and hardware version you use, device settings, battery and signal strength, device identifiers and locations, including specific geographic locations, such as through GPS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals. For example, if you have given permission to our mobile application to use your device's location, we might use this information for statistical purposes or to check you in a vessel or improve tracking coverage. We may also collect information about your connection such as your internet service provider or your mobile operator, browser type, language and time zone, mobile phone number and IP address.
API and developer data
If you use our API, we collect and keep your API keys, the requests you make and the time and result of each, usage and rate-limit counters, your IP address and error logs. We use them to provide and secure the API, to apply quotas and rate limits, to enforce the licence terms and prevent abuse, to invoice you and to give you support. The API is not designed to receive personal data about the end-users of your application, and you should not send us such data through it.
AI chat
If you use the AI chat in the app, we process the messages that you send and the boat data needed to answer them, and we send them to our AI provider, Anthropic, which processes them on our behalf to generate the reply. Please do not include other people's personal data or sensitive information in a chat. This is separate from the connection that you may make with your own AI assistant through our MCP connector, described below.
Information from third parties
We may collect information about you and your activities on and off our Services from third-party partners, such as information from a partner when we offer our Services jointly or from an advertiser about your experience or interaction with them.
How do we use your personal data?
We may process the personal data we collect in the following ways:
- Filing and archiving your personal data in databases for the proper execution of our Services to you
- Delivering, developing and improving our Services
- To communicate with you about our Services and inform you about our policies and terms and keeping records of this communication
- To promote and ensure the security of our website and Services
- Internal accounting and administration
- To comply with our legal obligations, for example regarding labour or tax law
- For research and analysis in relation to our business and services, including but not limited to trends and preferences in sales and use of our website and apps
- Involving you in market research and seeking feedback regarding our relationship with you and/or the service we have provided
- Targeted marketing communications relating to our products and services (and those of third parties) that we think may interest you
We will only process your information if you have previously given your consent to such processing (which you may withdraw at any time in the future), or in case the processing is necessary to provide our services to you; or for compliance with our legal obligations; and/or the processing is necessary for our legitimate interests or those of any third-party recipients that receive your personal information; or according to our contractual arrangement.
Is personal information disclosed to third parties?
Marine Data Cloud takes the privacy of your personal data very seriously, and we do not sell, rent, or otherwise provide your personally identifiable information to third parties, except as described in this policy.
AI assistants that you connect. If you choose to connect an AI assistant (such as Claude or ChatGPT) to your account through our MCP connector, then at your request we make the results of your questions available to that assistant's provider (Anthropic for Claude, OpenAI for ChatGPT). The provider handles that data under its own terms and privacy policy. You can revoke the connection at any time from your assistant's connector settings. To make the connection, we issue an access token to the assistant.
We may disclose personal data for the purposes and under the terms mentioned in this Privacy Policy to third parties and specifically to:
- Our employees; Marine Data Cloud ensures that our employees who process your personal data are properly trained regarding the lawful manner for any processing thereof and have access only on a need-to-know basis in order to meet legitimate business purposes or for the performance of contractual obligations.
- Our contractors and service providers, including suppliers of IT based solutions, that assist Marine Data Cloud in providing its Services, indicatively such as:
- Back-office systems for customer-support (helpdesk), customer relationship management (CRM), etc. (e.g. Zoho);
- Analytics providers (e.g. Google Analytics);
- Marketing and market research and analysis companies (e.g. Zoho Campaigns);
- Hosting, content-delivery and infrastructure providers (e.g. Railway, Cloudflare);
- Authentication and content-management providers (e.g. Clerk, Sanity);
- AI providers that process data to deliver AI features (Anthropic for our in-app AI chat) or at your request (see 'AI assistants that you connect' above);
- External business advisers, such as lawyers and auditors;
- Financial institutions and credit card providers, according to your explicit consent and authorisation for the execution of a payment order (e.g. Stripe);
- Government agencies, public authorities and regulatory bodies in order to comply with a valid and authorised request, including a court order or other valid legal process.
Regarding the abovementioned third-party partners of Marine Data Cloud, we ensure that any processing of the personal data we may disclose to them is subject to the terms of this policy and concerns exclusively the purposes defined by Marine Data Cloud as described above. For that reason, we adopt contractual agreements whereby the usage of specific technical safety measures is mandated in order to safeguard that your personal data remain secure and are processed only for the purposes defined by us, and not further in a manner that is incompatible with our purposes, and in any case in compliance with the applicable law. We may also provide aggregated anonymous information about the usage of our Services to third parties for our legitimate purposes such as to prospective advertisers on Marine Data Cloud.
Sharing controlled by you. Through our mobile apps, and/or where you connect a compatible NMEA Gateway or other telematic device, you can choose to share your data, including your boat data, position and location, with other people. You control who the recipients are, and therefore who may see your data and location, and you can change or stop sharing at any time. We share this data only as you direct. Once you have shared it with others, we do not control how they use it.
Security measures
Marine Data Cloud is committed to protecting the security of your information and takes reasonable precautions to protect it. Once we receive your data transmission, we make all commercially reasonable efforts to ensure its security on our systems:
We implement and maintain appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a security level appropriate to protect personal data provided to us from accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure, or access to personal information transmitted, stored or otherwise processed. We train all our employees meticulously to follow the principle of strict compliance with all legal requirements. Certain Marine Data Cloud Services support the use of standard SSL encryption to protect data transmissions. Your personal information and data stored in our systems are protected by various physical, electronic and procedural safeguards. It is housed in a secure facility, and Marine Data Cloud and our hosting partners restrict physical and network access to this facility to selected trained staff. Your Marine Data Cloud password is protected by encryption so that only you have knowledge of it.
We regularly evaluate and review our technologies, facilities, procedures and potential risks to maintain the security and privacy of our users' data. In any case we will destroy or de-identify personal information once we no longer require it for our business purposes as explained herein, or as required by law.
Marine Data Cloud is not responsible for any third party’s actions or their security controls with respect to personal information they may collect or process via their websites, services or otherwise.
Hosting and international transfers
Our servers are hosted in third-party data centres that comply with recognised security and privacy standards, such as ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 and CSA STAR. Servers are duplicated in physically separate data centres to provide data redundancy. To deliver our website and apps quickly worldwide, we also use a content delivery network (CDN) provided by Cloudflare, which caches data in many cities and countries. As a result, your personal data may be processed outside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area. Where personal data is transferred from the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area to a country that does not have an adequacy decision, we use the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, or another safeguard permitted by law.
Retention and deletion
We keep your personal data for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Services. If you delete your account, your account and associated personal data are irrevocably deleted, except where we must keep them by law and except for Master-boat specifications and photographs published to the public boats database and for public checklists (on which your name is anonymised), as described in the User Agreement. We keep API usage logs only for as long as needed for security, billing and enforcing quotas and the API terms, and we keep invoices and payment records for the period required by tax and accounting law (in the UK, generally six years).
Children
Our Service is not directed at children under 18 and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe that a child has given us personal data, please contact us and we will delete it.
Local Storage
In addition to cookies, we use browser local storage technology to store your preferences and make your user experience more consistent. Local storage is a persistent type of storage that provides similar functionality to cookies, but its contents are not transmitted across the Internet, like cookies are.
We use local storage only to make the Service work and to remember your preferences, which the law allows without your consent. You can control how local storage works in your browser settings, globally or for specific websites. Disabling the local storage functionality on your browser will result in loss of functionality of the provided Services.
Contact Us
Marine Data Cloud Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 11835484, VAT registration number GB331451241. General enquiries and legal notices, as well as support and copyright-removal requests can be communicated via:
- Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 9JQ, London, United Kingdom
- E-mail: [email protected]
- Web: Support.MarineDataCloud.com
Social Media Features
Our Service uses social media features ("Social Features") provided by companies and services such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) to enable you to share information via these channels. The Social Features are identified on our website by these companies' respective logos. These cookies are owned and controlled by third parties, and therefore the third parties - and not Marine Data Cloud - are responsible for their use. As such, we cannot guarantee that we have listed every cookie you might get from a third party since a third party could change these cookies at any time as their needs change.
When you visit a page on our website that contains Social Features, your browser establishes a direct connection to the applicable social network's servers. The Social Features provide the social networks with the information that you have accessed on our website, and, if you are logged into the social network, your visit may be logged to your account on that service. For example, if you click the Facebook "Like" button, that information is transmitted from your browser directly to Facebook and stored by it. Even if you are not logged into the social network, or do not click on a Social Feature on our site, there is still a possibility that a Social Feature can transmit your IP address to the social network.
Marine Data Cloud does not control social network services, your profiles on those services, modify your personal settings on those services or establish rules about how your information and personal data will be used on those services. You and the social network service providers are in control of the above issues and not Marine Data Cloud. You are encouraged to read all policies and information on the applicable social media services to learn more about how they handle and safeguard your data and information, before using any such features made available to you on the service. For information on the purpose and scope of data processing by the social network, as well as your options for protecting your privacy, please visit the appropriate social network website's privacy policy: