Privacy

Last updated 19 September 2026

STOW is an app that a vessel uses to run itself: what is onboard, what needs doing, and the crew’s hours of work and rest. This page says, in plain English, what personal information passes through it, why, who can see it, and how long it is kept. It is written for a captain rather than a lawyer. Where the law needs a precise term, it is in brackets.

Who is responsible

STOW is operated by Tristan Crowther, trading as Stow Yachts (“we”). You can write to us at hello@stowyachts.com.

For the crew’s records, the vessel is the controller and we are its processor: the captain or the management company decides what is recorded and who sees it, and we hold it on their instructions. For this website and for enquiries, we are the controller.

What we hold, and why

• Your account: name, email address, rank, department, the vessel you belong to, and your permissions. Needed to sign you in and to show you the right things.
• Hours of work and rest: your daily record, your confirmation and the Master’s endorsement. Required of the vessel by the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 and the flag state; it is a statutory record, not marketing.
• Leave, rotation and sea service: your pattern, your dates, your requests and their answers. Used to plan cover and to count what you have accrued.
• Crew documents and certificates: where the vessel chooses to record them — passport details, medical certificates, STCW and other certificates, next of kin. Needed for port entry, for the flag state and for your own safety. These are stored in a private store and reached only through short-lived links.
• Your signature, if you draw or type one, used only on your own rest record.
• Photographs you take of items, jobs and defects. These are of the boat, not of people, and they are stored under the vessel’s own folder.
• Preferences: theme, text size, which tutorials you have seen. Kept so the app looks the same next time.
• Technical logs needed to run the service: sign-in events, errors, and the device token used to send you a notification if you have turned notifications on.

We do not sell any of this, share it with advertisers, or use it to train anything.

Who can see it

• Your vessel’s crew, according to the permissions the captain sets. A rest record is visible to you, to those who approve hours, and to the Master.
• People you choose: you can share your leave dates with named crew members. Nobody sees them otherwise.
• Suppliers and contractors the captain invites see one note at a time and nothing else.
• No other vessel. Every record is scoped to the vessel at the database; the boundary is enforced by the database itself, not by the screen.
• Us, only to run and support the service, and only when needed. We do not browse the crew’s records.

Where it lives

The database and the file store are provided by Supabase and hosted on Amazon Web Services in Ireland, inside the European Union. The app itself is served by Vercel from its worldwide network; Vercel delivers the pages and holds none of the records. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts. Email to hello@stowyachts.com is forwarded by Cloudflare. These four are our sub-processors, and each is bound by its own data-processing terms.

How long we keep it

• Hours of rest and sea service: as long as the flag state requires the vessel to keep them, and in any case not less than the vessel instructs. These belong to the vessel’s record and to your seafarer’s record.
• Crew documents: until the vessel removes them, or you leave the vessel and the vessel deactivates your berth.
• Your account: deactivated, never deleted, when you leave the vessel — so that what you did and earned stays on the record. Personal details can be removed on request where no legal duty requires them.
• Photographs of the boat: until the vessel deletes them. Files nothing points at any more are removed by a nightly clean-up.

Your rights

You can ask to see what is held about you, to have mistakes corrected, and to have personal details removed where the law does not require them to be kept. You can export your own seafarer’s record from inside the app at any time. Ask your captain first, because the vessel controls the record; if that does not resolve it, write to us.

Cookies

The app uses the browser’s storage to keep you signed in and to keep working with no signal. This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the app will say so the next time you sign in.