Privacy Policy

1. Information we collect

When you create an account or submit information, we may collect your email address, login credentials, and the content you choose to share about your vessel or yourself. We may also collect technical information necessary to operate the service, such as log data and basic usage details.

That technical information includes a record of the pages requested from this site: the page, the time, the address the request arrived from, the browser that made it, and the site that linked here, if any. Because each request is timed, the record also shows how long a page was open before the next one was asked for — the server never sees you close a tab, so the last page of a visit is not measured at all. We use the address to work out an approximate city, state and country, which is the level of detail the record keeps — it is not a street, and it is not tied to a name unless you are signed in. No advertising or third-party analytics service is used, no additional cookie is set for it, and no attempt is made to recognise you across devices or browsers. Nothing collected here is sold or shared for marketing. Records are removed automatically once they pass our retention period, and are deleted outright if you close your account.

A public page, Where We’re Read, shows aggregate counts drawn from these records — how many visits, and from which countries and states. No individual visit appears there, and neither does a city, an address, or anything finer than a state or province.

If you follow somebody else's build, we record which boats you follow, when you began, how far you have read, and whether you asked to hear by email or on the site. That is a record of what you read rather than anything about the boats, so it is treated as yours: it appears in the copy of your data, it is not shown to anybody, and it is never shown to the owner of the boat. A builder is told how many people follow their vessel and is never told who they are.

If you opt in to private messaging, we store the conversations you exchange with other registered members, along with read and archived status. Only the two participants can open a conversation. Notification emails name the sender and link back to the inbox, but do not contain the private message or reveal either member's email address. Conversations remain in both participants' account records when one account closes, because they are also the other participant's correspondence.

If you use direct chat, we store the lines you send and the times they were sent, so that the person you are talking to can read them and so that anything said while you were away can be filed in your inbox as an ordinary private message. Only the two people in the conversation can read it, and a chat you save keeps its transcript in your message centre until you delete it. Lines are held for as long as the conversation is; like a private message, a line belongs to both of you, so one member's copy is not removed because the other has gone.

While you are signed in we hold the time of your last activity, so that the site can say who is aboard and so the member you are chatting with can be shown that you have read their line. It is shown to signed-in members only, never on the open web, and only while you have chosen to be shown at all — with that choice off, nobody is told you are here or that you have read anything.

If you place or accept a private video call, we store a record of the call itself — who it was with, when it was placed, whether it was answered, declined or unanswered, and how long it lasted — and file a note of it in both members' message centres. We do not record calls. No picture, no sound and nothing said in one is captured, stored or transcribed by the registry, and the room is closed and destroyed when the call ends. Your camera and microphone start switched off, and no call can begin without the person invited pressing accept.

If you suggest a correction or report a concern, we store the reported page, your description, the review status, and the name and email address you provide so registry staff can investigate and follow up. Those contact details are never public. Submitted reports appear in a signed-in member's data export; if that member closes their account, the report is retained as part of the moderation record but its reporter identity and contact details are removed.

If you comment on a vessel, your chosen name and comment are public. If you are not signed in, we also ask for an email address; it is kept private and used for abuse handling, necessary follow-up, and notifying you if the vessel's builder replies directly to your comment. We retain the request address with the moderation record. A vessel's builder may send a comment, together with their note, to an administrator for review. Removing a comment takes it out of public view but retains a limited moderation record of what was removed and why.

A mailing address, if you ask us to mail you a Founding Vessel Token. This is the only mailing address the registry ever holds, and it is held for one purpose: to send that token to the builder it belongs to. We ask for it only if your boat was one of the first to take a registry number, only after we've told you why, and you can decline and keep the thanks. While it is held, it can be read by a registry administrator working through the mailing round and by nobody else — it never appears on the site, in your public profile, on a boat's record, or in any listing. It is erased from the registry in the same moment your token is marked as mailed, and we email you to say that it has been. You can ask us to erase it earlier, at any time, and closing your account erases it as well. It is never used for any other mailing, and it is never given to anybody else.

2. How we use information

We use personal information to provide account access, deliver the service, communicate about your account, moderate content, protect the integrity of the registry, and respond to legitimate requests or inquiries.

We use the information you publish to display your record, support searching and browsing, and maintain the archive as a useful public resource.

3. How we protect information

We apply reasonable technical, administrative, and organisational measures to protect the information entrusted to us. Account credentials are handled with care, and passwords are not stored in plain form. However, no internet-based service can guarantee absolute security, and users should also take care to protect their own devices and account details.

4. What we share

We do not sell personal information to third parties. We may share information with trusted service providers that assist with hosting, maintenance, email delivery, or support where necessary to operate the site. We may also disclose information if required by law, court order, or to protect the rights, safety, or security of the registry and its users.

A video call is carried by a specialist third-party service, because the picture and the sound travel between the two of you and not through this site. What that service is given is the least that will open a call: a temporary room that exists for the length of it, your display name so the other person can see who has joined, and an identifier for your account. Your email address is not sent, and neither is anything else from your record. The call is not recorded, by us or for us.

5. Visibility of your content

The visibility of your vessel record, photographs, and related information is under your control where the site provides such options. You may choose to make information public, private, or limited to certain audiences. The registry may still retain a copy of the information for preservation, moderation, and operational purposes.

6. Where your boat is

The finest grain the registry records is a town, harbour or marina. No part of registering a boat asks for a home street address, and no column in the database could store one.

When you register a vessel you choose one of three answers, and you may change it at any time. The change takes effect at once.

• Show her hailing port. Her town, harbour or marina appears on her record, and her marker on the fleet map is placed there.
• Show the region only. Her state, province or country appears; the town does not. Her stored coordinates are never sent to anybody's browser. Her marker on the fleet map is the centre of a fixed area roughly fifty kilometres across, which she shares with every other boat in it — so the marker says which part of the world she is in, and nothing finer. Places you have typed yourself, such as where she was built or launched, still appear as you wrote them.
• Show no location at all. Nothing about where she is appears anywhere. Her hailing port, where she was built, where she was launched and her home waters are all withheld; she is not on the fleet map in any form; she is left out of the registry's own counts of countries and regions; and she cannot be found by searching or filtering for a place.

Every one of those rules is applied on the server, before anything is sent. A page about your boat does not contain her coordinates for a browser to reveal.

7. Your builder profile

Registering a boat publishes the boat. It does not publish you. Your first and last names, the address you sign in with, when you last signed in and when you joined are private, and none of them appears on any public page.

A builder profile is the page that says who built the boats — your display name, anything you have written about your workshop, the town or region you typed, and your own website if you gave one. You choose whether it exists at all:

• Listed. You have a profile page, and you appear in the builder directory once you have published a boat.
• Unlisted. You have a profile page, reachable from your own vessel records. It is not in the directory and is not offered to search engines.
• None. There is no profile page. Your display name still appears beside your boats, because it is part of their record, and nothing links to a page that does not exist.

Contact details are a separate choice again, and they start switched off. If you want to be written to you may add an address, a telephone number and a line beside them, and say who may read them: nobody, signed-in members only, or anybody who visits your profile. The address you sign in with is never published as a contact address by any route — a contact address is one you type in yourself, whether or not it is the same one.

Where you choose members only, the details are not sent to a signed-out visitor's browser at all. They are not hidden with styling; the page is built without them. Where you choose anybody, they are on a public page and can be read by whatever else reads public pages.

Every one of these settings can be changed, or emptied, at any time from your boatyard, and the change takes effect at once.

8. Retention, closure and deletion

We retain information for as long as necessary to provide the service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and maintain the archive. The record of visits described in §1 is the exception with a fixed life: it is deleted automatically after 400 days, and sooner than that if you close your account.

You can close your account yourself, from your account page. There is no form to submit and nobody to convince. What matters is what closure does and does not do, so it is set out here in the same words the closing screen uses:

The account stops opening You will not be able to sign in, and My Boatyard will not answer. Any session you have open elsewhere ends at once.

Your builder profile goes Your profile page stops answering and you leave the builder directory, the site's search and the sitemap. Anything you wrote about yourself, and any contact details you had published, stop being shown to anybody.

Your name comes off the register Where your display name stood beside a boat or an ownership period, the registry stops naming you. The record itself stays, because a boat's history is not one person's to withdraw.

Your boats do what you tell them to Every vessel you have published is yours to leave on the register or to withdraw from it, one by one. A withdrawn boat keeps her registry number, her photographs and her whole record — she simply stops being public, exactly as she would if you withdrew her from her own edit screen.

The registry keeps the records Every vessel entered under your account stays in the register, with her number, her photographs, her build journal and the ownership periods you typed. Closing an account is not a way to delete a boat, and the registry will not pretend otherwise.

Your visitor record is deleted The pages you opened while signed in, when you opened them, the address they were opened from and the city it resolved to are removed outright, rather than left to expire. It is the one thing we hold about you that the archive has no use for.

The builds you follow go quiet The registry stops writing to you about anybody else's build the moment the account closes. The list itself is kept, so that reopening the account within the grace period brings back what you were following rather than leaving you to remember it. Nobody was ever told you were following them.

Your name and address stay on the closed account Your first and last names, the address you sign in with and your password remain on the closed row, so that the account can be reopened and so the registry can answer for what it did. None of them appears on any page, and none of them ever did.

You have 30 days to change your mind Sign in with the same address and password within 30 days and the account opens again as you left it, boats and all — including any you withdrew, which you can then publish again. After that, only the registry can reopen it, by hand.

Closing an account is not a way to delete a boat, and we would rather say so than discover it at the wrong moment. A vessel entered under your account keeps her registry number and her record whatever you decide, because other people's records — ownership periods, sister ships, links written down years ago — depend on hers. What you choose, boat by boat, is whether she stays on the public register or is withdrawn from it. A withdrawn boat is off every public page; her record is kept.

Deletion beyond that is not something we can promise as a rule, and the honest position is this: ask, and a person will read it. If there is something in the archive that should not be there — a photograph you did not mean to publish, a name that identifies somebody who never agreed to it, anything unlawful — write to us at support@builtandlaunched.org and we will remove or limit access to it where that is feasible and lawful. Sending the message from the address the account signs in with saves us having to ask whose account it is. There is no closing date on the asking.

9. Your choices

Three of these you can do yourself, at once, without asking anybody:

• Change what is published. Your builder profile, your contact details and their audience, and each boat's visibility and location privacy are all yours to change from your boatyard, and every change takes effect immediately.
• Take a copy of what we hold. One button gives you a file containing your account, your profile, every vessel entered under your name with her full record, your build journals, your photograph details, the ownership periods and name changes you typed, and your own visit history. The file names what it leaves out and why, so you can tell an omission from an oversight.
• Close the account. As above, from your account page, with 30 days to change your mind.
• Control private messages. You can turn member messages and their email notifications on or off independently from your account page. Your copy of every conversation is included in your data download.
• Stop the reminders about your own boats. The registry writes to you unprompted about one thing only: a record of yours left unfinished — entered and never published, or still listed as under construction when her own record gives a launch date. There are at most three letters about any one boat, ever, and never more than one in three weeks however many boats you keep. Every one carries a link that stops them and needs no password; one checkbox does the same, and Don't remind me about this beside the notice silences a single boat for good.
• Control who may talk to you. Your account page carries a switch for each of it: whether members may open a direct chat with you, whether they may invite you to a private video call, and whether anybody is shown that you are aboard. Both people have to have said yes before either can start anything, and every one of these is off until you turn it on.
• Stop hearing about a build. Every message we send about somebody else's build carries a link that stops it, and that link needs no password — it is the one thing on this site you can do without signing in. The same switches, per boat, are on the builds you follow. It is the only kind of message we send that is not about your own account, and it is the only one you have to ask for before it starts.

And one you cannot: information you have published may already have been read, quoted, linked to or copied by somebody the registry has no authority over, and search engines keep their own caches on their own schedule. Withdrawing a record stops us serving it. It does not reach into anybody else's copy of it, and no policy that claimed otherwise would be true.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy, about what the registry holds on you, or about anything above that reads as though it were written to be skipped, are welcome at support@builtandlaunched.org.