Privacy notice

Who runs it

Virtual Navigator is run by Harry Philip as a free, non-commercial game for a club-sized fleet. It has no advertising, no analytics, and no tracking cookies. The server runs on Fly.io in the United States (Newark region). For anything about your data, open an issue or write through the GitHub repository.

What is stored

Your account: username, display name, a salted PBKDF2 hash of your password (never the password), your email address, and when the account was made. You must be 16 or over.

Your session: one cookie, vn_session, that keeps you signed in for 90 days. It is essential to the service and carries nothing but a random token.

Password resets: a hashed reset token that lives for one hour and works once. The link goes to your email address.

Your boats: boat names, the routes you submit and when you submitted them, and the track your boat sailed. Waypoints you have not yet reached are private to you. The sailed track, submission times, boat name and your username are public, on the race page and on your profile page, exactly like a race tracker.

Race logs: when an admin corrects a course or restarts a boat, or when a boat is withdrawn, the race log records it. Log entries name boats, not people.

Server logs: the web server records each request with your IP address, kept for a short time by the hosting provider's log service and used only to keep the site running and to stop abuse.

Who else sees anything

Map tiles. The charts load from OpenStreetMap, OpenSeaMap and NOAA, so those servers see your IP address and the map areas you look at, under their own policies. Fonts are served from this site, not from a font service.

Email. Password-reset links and notices about your races are sent through an email delivery provider, which handles your address for that purpose only.

Weather, bathymetry and tracker feeds (Open-Meteo, NOAA, YB Tracking, aisstream.io) are fetched by the server about the race, never about you.

Nothing is sold, shared for marketing, or used to train anything.

Your data, your call

Change your email on your profile page.

Download your data: every boat's sailed track is available as GPX from its race page, and your profile lists your submissions.

Delete your account from your profile page. It removes the account, every boat you entered with its routes and sailed tracks, and signs you out everywhere. Race logs keep a line saying the boat was withdrawn. If you cannot sign in, ask through the repository and the admin will do the same from the server.

Real boats. If your yacht appears on a leaderboard from a public tracker and you would rather it did not, say so through the repository and it will be hidden.

If you are in the EU or UK, the legal basis for all of the above is the service you asked for by creating an account, and the site's legitimate interest in keeping itself running. You have the rights of access, correction, erasure and portability described here, and you may complain to your data-protection authority.