What Burgee knows about people
Burgee holds details about people who never signed up for it: crew who answered an invitation, contacts a skipper typed in, and somebody’s next of kin who has no idea they are in here at all. This is what it holds, why, and how long for.
Who is responsible
Jonathan Harbourne, who built Burgee and skippers Sea Gypsy out of Tollesbury. Anything in this page, or any request about your own details, comes to hello@jharbourne.com.
What it holds
- About the skipper
- An email address, used only to send a sign-in link. The boat, her draught, the home port and its sill. No password is stored, because there isn’t one.
- About people on the crew list
- A name, and whatever else the skipper adds: a phone number, an email address, free-text notes and tags. Added by the skipper, from their own address book or from a reply.
- When somebody answers an invitation
- The name they gave or tapped, whether they can come, and any note they left. Nothing else – no account, no password, no email address unless they volunteer one.
- If a confirmed crew member chooses to fill it in
- Roughly how much sailing they have done, any tickets, when they last sailed, and anything they want to say. Optional, and the app says so.
- One person to ring, and anything the skipper should know
- Also optional. See the paragraph below, because this one is different.
What it deliberately does not hold
- No medical conditions, medication or allergies. That is health data, the bar for holding it is higher, and you do not need it to take four friends sailing. “Anything I should know” does the job and keeps this out of that category.
- No tide predictions. The tide table is read on the skipper’s own device and stays there. It never reaches a server.
- No advertising, and nothing that follows anybody between sites. There are no advertising tags here and nothing is sold or shared for marketing.
- One cookie, which keeps a skipper signed in. It is the cookie without which the app cannot work at all, and it is still the only one.
What does get counted
This page used to say “no analytics”. That stopped being true, and saying so plainly is more use than quietly leaving the old sentence up. Burgee now counts how its screens are used, with PostHog on servers in the EU. Here is exactly what that means.
- No cookie and nothing stored on your device. The counting keeps nothing between visits – not a cookie, not an identifier in your browser’s storage, nothing. Close the tab and there is no thread back to you. That is also why you have not been asked to agree to anything: there is nothing being put on your device to agree to.
- No recordings and no clicks. Session replay is off and so is automatic capture. Nothing records what you type or what a screen said while you looked at it – which matters, because those screens show crew names and somebody’s next of kin.
- Which screen, not which link. What is sent is the shape of the address –
/i/[token]– never the address itself. The token in a real invitation link is a key to that invitation, and it is not something to hand to anybody else. - On an invitation page, a count and no more. Opening an invitation and answering one are each counted, along with whether the answer was yes or no, so it is possible to tell “nobody opens these” from “everybody opens them and says no”. Your name, your note and your telephone number are not part of that. Invitations are told apart by a one-way scramble of the link, which cannot be turned back into the link.
- No IP address and no location. Both are switched off rather than merely unused.
The cost of doing it this way is ours rather than yours: because nothing persists, Burgee cannot tell a returning visitor from a new one, and never knows it was you. That was the point.
The awkward one: next of kin
If you gave a skipper somebody to ring in an emergency, that person did not give it to you or to us – you did. They may not know their name and number are in a sailing app.
Two things follow. Tell them, so it is not a surprise. And know that it deletes itself thirty days after the trip gets back, automatically, without anybody remembering to do it. Burgee is not building a list of emergency contacts; it is holding one for one weekend because somebody might need it.
How long everything stays
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Next of kin and “anything I should know” | Thirty days after the return, then deleted automatically |
| Sailing experience and tickets | Kept, so nobody types it in twice. Ask and it goes |
| Crew list, replies and trips | Until the skipper deletes them |
| Your own reply | You can change it or withdraw it yourself, any time, on your own link |
Where it is
In a database in London (Supabase, eu-west-2), reached through a site served by Vercel. Nothing is sold, shared or handed to anybody else, and there is no mailing list – Burgee sends no email at all except the link that signs a skipper in.
What you can ask for
A copy of what is held about you, a correction, or deletion. Email hello@jharbourne.com and it will be done, without needing a reason. If you would rather not ask me, you can complain to the Information Commissioner.
Burgee is one person and one boat. If that ever changes – if other skippers use it – this page changes with it, because they would become responsible for their own crew’s details and I would only be holding them.