Privacy Policy

When you create an account on Ship Engineer, we collect the personal information you provide, such as your name, email address, and account role (engineer or buyer). We also collect information about your use of the platform, including vessel specifications, equipment records, project details, and communication history.

Depending on your role, we collect additional information necessary to operate the marketplace. Engineers provide bank account details (IBAN), professional certifications, specializations, years of experience, and professional indemnity insurance coverage amounts, which are used for verification, invoicing, and job matching. Buyers acting through a company provide company name, tax office country, and EU VAT registration number where applicable, which are used to determine the correct VAT treatment of invoices. We also retain records of quotes, service agreements, ratings and reviews, disputes, and the self-billed and commission invoices generated on your behalf (see Section 5, "Disclosed Agent Invoicing", in our Terms of Service).

We also publish a limited set of engineer profile fields in a public engineer directory at /engineers, which is visible without login: your name, your average rating, your years of experience, your specializations, and your verification status. That directory does not show your email address, your phone number, or your billing address.

We may automatically collect certain technical information when you access the platform, including your IP address, browser type, device information, and usage patterns. This information helps us improve the platform and diagnose technical issues.

We use the information we collect to provide, maintain, and improve the Ship Engineer platform. This includes matching buyers with engineers, facilitating communication, generating self-billed and commission invoices, determining applicable VAT treatment, and sending important account-related notifications.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We may share your information with service providers who assist us in operating the platform, subject to appropriate confidentiality obligations. We may also disclose information when required by law or to protect our rights and the safety of our users.

Certain features, such as Smart Match, use Google's Gemini AI models to help identify suitable engineers for a posted job. When you use these features, relevant job details (title, description, location, risk tier, and associated vessel and equipment information) and non-sensitive engineer profile data (specializations, certifications, years of experience, and average rating) are sent to Google as a data processor to generate the match. Sensitive fields such as IBAN, phone number, and full account credentials are never included in this data. Google's handling of this data is governed by its own API terms and data processing commitments, which we encourage you to review.

AI-generated suggestions are not verified facts about any engineer or job; they are generated from the data described above and should be treated as a starting point for your own judgment, not a substitute for it.

We retain personal information for as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy, and no longer. As a general matter, we retain account and transaction information — including job records, service agreements, and dispute history — for the life of your account plus a limited period afterward to resolve open matters, and we retain invoices for longer, in order to meet our own tax and accounting record-keeping obligations. The table below summarizes the periods we currently apply; it is a draft pending confirmation by counsel and our tax advisors, and the specific number of years in each row may change before it is finalized.

These periods are drawn from a more detailed internal data retention schedule, which also addresses how each category is enforced (deletion versus anonymization) and records the open questions still pending counsel review, including the correct retention period once our operating entity's jurisdiction is finalized (see our Terms of Service, Section 0) and how a deletion request is handled where it conflicts with our own tax record-keeping obligations. Where a request under Section 5 ("Your Rights") would require deleting information we are separately obligated to retain — such as an invoice within its statutory record-keeping period — we will retain the minimum information necessary to meet that obligation and restrict its use for any other purpose, and will explain this to you at the time of your request.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to object to or restrict certain processing. To exercise any of these rights, contact us via our Contact Us page. We will respond in accordance with applicable law.

Our infrastructure providers, and the third-party AI provider described in Section 3, may process data in countries outside your own, including the United States, since our hosting infrastructure and the Google Gemini models used for Smart Match are both based there. Where personal information is transferred out of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland to a country that has not been recognized as providing an adequate level of protection, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) with the recipient, together with any additional safeguards required by applicable guidance, as the transfer mechanism. This applies both to our infrastructure providers and to Google as the processor of the Smart Match data described in Section 3.

A copy of the relevant Standard Contractual Clauses is available on request via our Contact Us page. This section, and our reliance on SCCs specifically as opposed to another transfer mechanism, is a draft pending confirmation by counsel.

We may update this policy as the platform evolves. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last Updated" date above, and, where required by law, we will provide additional notice.

We set only the cookies required to keep you signed in. These are authentication cookies issued by our authentication provider and are strictly necessary: without them you cannot remain logged in and the platform cannot distinguish one user from another. They are not used to profile you and they are not shared with advertisers.

We do not set analytics, advertising or marketing cookies, and the public pages load no third-party tracking scripts. Because no non-essential cookies are set, no cookie consent banner is shown.