Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 29, 2026

VesselMark is operated by Stratiback LLC (Louisiana, USA). This policy describes what personal data we collect when you use vesselmark.com, why, and the choices you have. The short version: we collect what the service needs to function, we sell nothing, and the only third-party analytics on this site is Google's, which sets no cookies unless you allow them.

What we collect

Account data: your name (if provided), work email address, and a salted hash of your password — never the password itself. Multi-factor authentication secrets are stored encrypted. Signup context: the IP address used at registration, kept for abuse prevention. Content you add: the compliance material your organization puts into the service — controls, risks, notes, evidence files — which may incidentally contain personal data your organization chooses to include. Operational records: an append-only audit trail of actions in your workspace (who did what, when), and server logs kept for security and troubleshooting.

What we use it for

Operating the service, authenticating you, sending the emails the service depends on (verification links, task and deadline reminders, billing notices), preventing abuse, and providing support when you contact us. We send no marketing email without separate consent. We do not sell or share personal data for advertising.

Who else touches your data

We use a small number of service providers: Stripe (payment processing — we never see your card number), Postmark (transactional email delivery), and US-based hosting infrastructure operated by Stratiback LLC. These providers process data only as needed to provide their service to us. We disclose data if required by law, and we will tell you when we are permitted to.

Cookies

Essential cookies, always set: a session cookie to keep you signed in. We also store your cookie choice itself in your browser’s local storage so we don’t ask again.

Analytics and advertising cookies from Google Analytics and Google Ads, used to measure which campaigns bring people here. Google’s tag loads on our public pages with all cookies and advertising signals denied by default (Google Consent Mode). Until you click Allow, and if you decline, it sets no analytics or advertising cookies and sends Google only cookieless measurement pings without identifiers (for example, that a page was viewed or a signup completed), with advertising click identifiers redacted; like any web request, these reach Google from your IP address. Google uses them for aggregate, modelled reporting. If you arrived from an ad, its click identifier may be carried in the page address as you move between our pages, instead of in a cookie. Declining changes nothing about how the product works. You can change your choice at any time:

Clicking Allow lets the tag set analytics and advertising cookies, and means Google receives page-view information linked to those cookies and may use it to attribute advertising. Google acts as an independent controller for that data; see Google’s own privacy policy for what it does with it. If you allow and then decline again, a tag already running on the page you are looking at is told to deny all storage immediately, and every later page view starts denied.

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an opt-out of advertising: advertising cookies and ad signals stay denied even if you click Allow, which then turns on analytics cookies only.

We also keep the tag out of your workspace. It loads only on our public pages and on the billing page — never on the pages holding your vessels, controls, risks or evidence — so those addresses, which contain your record identifiers, are never sent to Google.

Demo video. The walkthrough on our demo page is hosted on YouTube. Until you press play it is only an image we serve ourselves, and nothing is sent to YouTube. Pressing play loads YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie.com); from then on YouTube, a Google service, receives your IP address and viewing information and may set cookies or use local storage to play the video. YouTube acts as an independent controller for that data under Google’s privacy policy. This is separate from your analytics choice above.

Retention

Account and workspace data is retained while your account exists and for a reasonable period afterwards to allow reactivation and export. Evidence files are special: they are stored in write-once storage under a one-year compliance retention lock, and cannot be deleted by anyone — including us — until that lock expires. If you ask us to erase your data, we will delete or de-identify everything within our control and confirm the date on which locked evidence will be destroyed. Database backups are retained for 14 days.

Security

Every account requires multi-factor authentication. Customer workspaces are isolated at the database layer with row-level security. Evidence is content-hashed and stored write-once. The audit trail is append-only and cannot be modified even by our own application. Data is encrypted in transit; MFA secrets are encrypted at rest.

Your rights

You can access and export your organization’s data at any time from within the service. You may request correction or deletion of personal data, subject to the evidence retention lock described above. If you are in the UK, EU, or another jurisdiction with statutory data rights, we will honor access, rectification, erasure, portability, and objection requests as those laws provide. Contact us via the contact form — it is the fastest route to a human.

International transfers

The service is hosted in the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your data is processed in the US. Customers needing a data processing agreement for their own compliance obligations can request one via the contact form.

Changes

We will update this policy as the service evolves and note the date above. Material changes will be announced by email or in-app notice before they take effect.