Privacy Policy

DockNeighbor (“DockNeighbor”) is made by SC4 Technologies LLC (“we”, “us”), the developer listed on the app stores at sc4tech.com. This policy covers the DockNeighbor apps, the hosted cloud at api.dockneighbor.com, your account portal at account.dockneighbor.com, Marina Manager by DockNeighbor at marina.dockneighbor.com (including the public marina pages on it), and this website. It does not cover our community forum, which has its own terms. Questions: support@dockneighbor.com.

How DockNeighbor works

DockNeighbor needs an account. You sign in, and the app talks both directly to your sensors and valve gateway on the boat’s own network and to our hosted cloud at api.dockneighbor.com, which is what makes remote access, alerts, and sharing possible.

Much of the work still happens on the boat’s own network rather than through us — the app reads your sensors and commands your valve over the LAN when it can, and keeps its own on-device history regardless of your plan. What we store on the server is listed below, and it is limited to what the features you turn on actually require.

What the hosted cloud stores

• Account. Your email address and optional display name, via Firebase Authentication (Google, Apple, or an email and password). We use your account email to deliver alerts you enable, support replies, and occasional product announcements about DockNeighbor itself — every announcement carries an unsubscribe link.
• Vessel configuration — including some passwords you give us. Your vessels, their device setup, and settings, so they sync across your devices. A router or modem you add is identified in that setup by an identifier derived from its hardware (MAC) address. This includes credentials you enter so the app can reach equipment aboard: your router’s admin sign-in, your vessel Wi-Fi passphrase, a sensor device password, a router configuration backup if you save one (which itself contains the Wi-Fi passphrase), and the integration token you mint if you connect the vessel to Home Assistant or a similar system. Today these are stored as ordinary text, not encrypted. They are held in a private area of your vessel’s record that the app itself is blocked from reading: retrieving one goes through our servers, and only you as owner or a co-owner you have appointed may do it — crew at every other role cannot. That access control is currently the only protection on these values. They exist so the app can log in to your equipment on your behalf; you can remove them in the app at any time. We are working on encrypting them at rest, and this paragraph will change when that is actually running — not before. If a DockNeighbor hub aboard manages your router, the router’s sign-in is also sent to the hub, passing through our servers on the way without being stored there.
• Last-known sensor state. The most recent readings from your sensors (water flow, flood alarms, battery voltage, shore power), so the app can show status from anywhere.
• Sensor and position history — kept for a period set by your plan. Readings your vessel reports, including positions from equipment aboard, are kept as history automatically; there is no separate switch for it. Positions from a phone or computer’s own location are the exception: they are kept only while an alarm needs them (see Vessel position, below). The longest we keep it is currently one year on Free, two years on Dockside, three years on Weekender and five years on Voyager. We do not store every reading that arrives: routine readings are saved no more often than once every 15 minutes on Free, once every 5 minutes on Dockside, and once every 30 seconds on Weekender and Voyager. A flood or alarm event is never throttled. A daily job deletes history past your window. Two caveats: it works a whole month at a time and keeps the month the cutoff falls in, so in practice you may hold a few weeks more than the number above; and these figures are plan settings we can change, so treat them as the current maximums and not as a promise for all time.
• Notification addresses. A push token for your account (Firebase Cloud Messaging), and — on paid plans, if you set them up — an email address, mobile number or WhatsApp number for escalation (which of these a plan includes varies). An address is stored as soon as you add it, but receives nothing until it is verified with a code. You can also add a number as a voice-call destination; the app marks it as not yet deliverable, because we do not place calls today. Alert destinations are saved with the vessel’s settings, so everyone with crew access to that vessel can see them — including another person’s address or number if you added it.
• A second email address, if you add one. You can prove a second address with a code so that friends can invite you by an address they would actually think to type — which matters if you signed in with Apple and chose to hide your real address. We store it to match invitations against; it is not a marketing list.
• Vessel position. Your vessel’s position, so the app can show you where it is: latitude, longitude, its accuracy radius, when it was taken, and where it came from. It is saved with the vessel, so everyone with crew access to the vessel can see it. A position is only ever stored if you set up a way of producing one:
  • A GPS source aboard. A supported router’s GPS or an NMEA feed. The app reads it while the app is open, on a schedule or as a continuous feed. A DockNeighbor hub, or a router running our agent, can also report the position to us on its own, without the app being open at all.
  • This device’s own location, when you switch it on. If a vessel has no GPS source, the app offers to use the phone or computer you are holding. On a Free vessel, which is not set up with equipment aboard, the phone is where the vessel’s position comes from. The switch belongs to that one device — it is not added to the boat and does not turn on your other devices — and it switches off when the thing that needed it (a trip, an anchor watch, Away Mode’s vessel moved alarm, a recorded voyage) is finished. While it is on, the positions it produces do not stay on that device: they become the vessel’s position that your crew can see, and the app sends them to our servers — on phones, computers and in a browser alike — labelled with an identifier for that installation of the app.
  Positions from a GPS source aboard are stored as sensor readings, so they are kept as history for your plan’s window (above), not just as a single latest position. Positions from this device’s own location are kept only while an anchor watch is armed, or Away Mode’s vessel moved alarm is armed on a paid plan. Once that watch is disarmed, the readings and their history are deleted the next time our servers check, which they do every five minutes; positions sent while nothing is armed are deleted within about five minutes. Our servers also use the latest position to run the anchor alarm and, where you set them, Away Mode’s vessel moved alarms and arrival announcements.
• Background location, only while an anchor watch is armed. If you arm the anchor watch on an iPhone or Android phone that is using its own location, DockNeighbor keeps reading that phone’s GPS while the app is in the background and the screen is locked, and keeps sending its position to our servers — latitude, longitude and accuracy, no more often than every 30 seconds, when the phone has moved or every two minutes otherwise. That is what lets a drag alarm wake you, and those positions follow the rule above for this device’s location: once you disarm the watch they are deleted within about five minutes, unless Away Mode’s vessel moved alarm is still armed on a paid plan. While it runs, Android shows a permanent notification and iOS shows its blue location indicator. It stops the moment you disarm the watch, it never runs when nothing is armed — a trip, Away Mode’s vessel moved alarm or a voyage does not start it — and there is no background location on desktop or in a browser. iOS asks for “Always” permission for this; if you decline, the watch still works while the app is open.
• Recorded voyages and tracks. If you record a voyage, the track — a list of positions with times — is stored with your vessel and visible to its crew. Voyages are kept until you delete them; nothing prunes them automatically. Each plan keeps a maximum number of voyages (1 on Free, 10 on Dockside, 50 on Weekender, 1,000 on Voyager). When a vessel is at its limit, a new voyage is not recorded until you delete one — we never delete an older voyage to make room. The anchor swing track and the live trip line stay on the device that drew them.
• Messages. DockNeighbor has in-app messaging: vessel-to-vessel conversations, a crew conversation for each vessel, direct messages between people, groups you create and invite vessels into, and the chat attached to a marina or dock (which is one of those groups, with its membership set by the place — including the marina’s own staff accounts, if the marina has joined DockNeighbor as an operator). Messages are delivered in the app with a push notification — never by SMS or email. What we store is the text, who wrote it, which vessel they wrote it as, the display names shown beside it, and when. Messages are capped at 2,000 characters and there are no attachments. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored on our servers in a form our operators can access. Separately, a marina or dock also has a board you can post to; board posts are not messages and none of the message rules below apply to them.
  • Who can read a conversation. A vessel-to-vessel conversation is readable by everyone with crew access to either vessel, not only by the person who typed it — that is how a boat, rather than a person, holds a conversation. Direct messages are between the two people. Joining a group lets you read what the group said before you arrived. When someone leaves a vessel’s crew, their access is recalculated rather than revoked on the spot, so there can be a short window in which they can still read that vessel’s threads.
  • “Delete” hides a message from you. It stays in every other participant’s copy of the conversation, which is why the app labels the control Hide.
  • Messages are deleted after one year. A daily job removes them; it works through a backlog in batches, so a message goes shortly after its first birthday rather than exactly on it. Board posts on a marina or dock are not covered by this and are not swept.
  • Reporting. You can report a message in any conversation — vessel, group, direct, crew, dock or marina chat — a board post, a marina event, an alarm comment, or a vessel or person profile. A report sends our operators a copy of what you reported and, for a message, the last 24 hours of that conversation from both sides, including messages you had hidden from yourself. It records who reported it, the reason, and any note you added. Only our operators can read a report; the person you reported is not told who reported them; and we may remove reported content. A report and its copy of the content are deleted one year after our team decides it (dismissed, or the content removed); a report nobody has decided yet is kept until it is. You can also report abuse by emailing support@dockneighbor.com.
  • Suspension. We may suspend an account for abuse or for breaking the terms. While an account is suspended its sign-in is disabled, every session is signed out, and the service refuses it. We keep a record of when it was suspended, by whom and why. Nothing is deleted by a suspension, and a suspension can be lifted.
  • Push delivery. A push notification carries the message text, so the text passes through Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging to reach your phone.
• Photos. You can give a vessel a photo, and give yourself one. Photos are re-encoded by the app before upload, which removes camera metadata such as the coordinates where the picture was taken. A vessel photo can be seen by your friends, by vessels sharing a marina or dock with you, and — if you publish a location link, below — by anyone holding that link. A personal photo can be seen by people you have a conversation with and by crews of vessels you are friends with, never by strangers.
• Marinas and docks. If you join a marina or a dock, that membership, your slip if you set one, and anything you post to that place’s board are stored and are readable by the other vessels there. Arrival and departure announcements are off unless you switch them on — telling a dock that your boat has left is telling it the boat is unattended.
  • Marina operators. A marina can have staff accounts on DockNeighbor. Staff can post to the marina’s board and chat as the marina, and publish events. Events, and which vessels have said they are coming and with how many people, are visible to everyone in that marina.
  • A marina’s member directory. Marina staff can keep a directory of their members in DockNeighbor — for example names, phone numbers, email addresses, slip, vessel details, contract, insurance and registration dates, an emergency contact and staff notes — entered or imported by the marina, not by you. In the app, only that marina’s staff can read it; member vessels cannot, including their own entry. We do not delete these entries on a schedule, and deleting your DockNeighbor account does not remove an entry a marina keeps about you — ask the marina.
  • Asking to become a marina operator. If you ask, we store your request — your name and account email, the marina, your role, phone number, website and any comments — so our staff can review it, and we email those details to our own support inbox. You and our staff can read it. We do not currently delete these requests on a schedule, including declined ones.
  • Letting a marina’s staff see your alarms. A vessel that belongs to a marina can let that marina’s staff know when some of its alarms go off — flood, shore power, battery, security, Away Mode, anchor, device health or arrival and departure — choosing which. It is off until the vessel turns it on. When one of those alarms fires, the marina keeps a record of it with the vessel’s name, its slip and dock if the marina knows them, the kind of alarm and when it happened; it never carries your sensor readings or your position. Staff get a push notification, and if nobody acknowledges it in time the marina can have a text sent to its own on-call or manager phone with that same headline. When staff acknowledge an alarm, your crew gets a push naming the marina and any note they added. Only that marina’s staff and your vessel’s crew can read these records. Revoking the permission, or leaving the marina, stops it at once; alarm records already made stay with the marina. When several boats on one dock raise the same alarm together, the marina also gets a summary with the dock and the number of boats, which does not name them. Alarm records, those summaries, and the marina’s log of acknowledging, resolving and escalating them are deleted two years after the alarm by a daily job. Deleting a vessel blanks its name and the link to it on the marina’s alarm records straight away, and takes it out of any summary.
  • Slips and stays. A marina can keep its slips and its visiting-boat stays in DockNeighbor. A stay holds the vessel’s name, length, beam and draft, the power it needs, arrival and departure dates, a contact name, phone number and email address, notes, the slip, and the marina’s own rate and paid notes. It comes from one of three places: a slip request from the app, a request from the marina’s public page (below), or marina staff entering it themselves.
    • Requesting a slip in the app. The request carries your vessel’s identifier, name and size from its profile, the dates, power and notes you enter, and the contact details shown on the form — your account’s name and email address (and phone number, if the account has one) are filled in to start with, and you can change or clear them. A seasonal member can also tell the marina that the boat will be away from its slip for some dates, so the marina can use the slip meanwhile. If your vessel has arrival and departure announcements switched on at that marina, arriving and leaving also mark a confirmed stay as arrived and departed.
    • Who can see a stay. That marina’s staff, and — for a request or away notice made in the app — everyone with crew access to that vessel. Other boats at the marina cannot, and neither can other marinas. Staff get a push notification with the vessel’s name and dates when a request arrives. When the marina confirms or declines, a request from the app is answered by a push notification to the vessel’s crew; a request with no vessel is answered by an email to the address given, sent through our email provider, carrying the dates and either the slip and rate or the marina’s reason for declining, with the marina’s own email address to reply to. We do not use these details for marketing.
    • How long we keep them. Once a stay is finished, the contact name, phone number and email address, the notes, any reason for declining, and the links to the vessel and to the account that asked are blanked — for a departed stay 180 days after its departure date, and for a cancelled or declined one 180 days after the marina’s decision. A request the marina never answered is blanked 30 days after its arrival date. A stay the marina never closed — still confirmed or marked arrived more than seven days after its departure date — is treated as departed and blanked 180 days after its departure date, and an away notice is blanked 180 days after the last day it covers. A daily job does this. What stays, as the marina’s record of who occupied its slips, is the vessel’s name and size, the dates, the state of the stay, the slip, and the rate and paid notes. Deleting a vessel or your account blanks some of these details sooner (see What deletion actually removes).
  • A marina’s public page, and slip requests from it. A marina can publish a page on marina.dockneighbor.com that anyone can open without an account. It shows only the marina’s own profile — its name, location, description, address, phone, email, website, VHF channel, hours and amenities — and never which boats are berthed there. If the marina takes requests on that page, anyone can send one, DockNeighbor user or not: vessel name, length, beam and draft, power needed, arrival and departure dates, notes, and a contact name with a phone number or an email address (at least one). It becomes a stay as described above, with the same visibility, email reply and retention. To keep automated spam out, the form uses Cloudflare Turnstile: the check runs in your browser from Cloudflare, and our servers send the result, with your IP address, to Cloudflare to verify it. Your IP address is also used to count requests from it; it is not saved with the request, but the counter is kept as described under Abuse-prevention counters, below.
• Service requests to a marina. Where a marina offers it, you can send it a request — maintenance, a wash, food, a concierge ask — as free text, together with your vessel’s name and the contact details shown on the form (your account’s name and email address, and phone number if the account has one, filled in to start with and editable). The marina’s staff see the request and their replies to it; nobody else does. A request is kept for two years after it is closed, then deleted by a daily job. Deleting your account or your vessel blanks the requester on any request you sent — the marina keeps its own record of the work, without your name or contact details.
• Friends. Being friends with another vessel does not share your position or your vessel’s record. It does let each vessel’s crew see the other’s vessel photo, and a vessel’s friend list — including each friend’s email address — is visible to that vessel’s crew. An invitation shows the person you invite your email address and your vessel’s public name.
• Sharing your position with people. Each friend you share your position with is a separate grant you make and can revoke, and what they receive is the vessel’s latest position and when it was taken, not your vessel’s record. You choose how long a grant lasts, up to a year, or “until I turn it off”. Removing someone as a friend ends their access to your position at once. While a share is live we keep a single latest-position record for it; once that record has not been updated for seven days, a daily job deletes it.
• Alarms sent to a friend (friend watch). A vessel’s owner or co-owner can ask a friend to receive some of the vessel’s alarms, and the friend has to accept. When one of those alarms fires, the friend gets a push notification with the vessel’s name, the kind of alarm and its text — for an anchor alarm, how far the boat is from its anchor point. It never carries coordinates and does not share your position. How long a watch can last depends on the vessel’s plan: up to 24 hours, for anchor-drag alarms only, on Free; up to one week on Dockside; and on Weekender and Voyager any period up to “until I turn it off”, which does not expire. On Weekender and Voyager a friend can therefore keep receiving your vessel’s alarms indefinitely, until the owner or a co-owner removes them as a friend or they remove themselves. A timed watch simply stops at its end. If the vessel moves to a lower plan, alarm types that plan cannot share and any “until I turn it off” watch stop reaching the friend; a timed watch already accepted runs to its end.
• A public location link, if you create one. Dockside, Weekender and Voyager can publish a link that shows the vessel’s position to anyone who has it, with no sign-in — the link is the key. The page it opens shows the coordinates, how long ago the position was taken, and a link you can choose to follow to OpenStreetMap. It does not show your name, your account, or the vessel’s identifier, and it loads nothing from anywhere else. The same link also serves the vessel photo to anyone who requests it directly. You choose how long it lasts — anywhere from an hour to a year, 24 hours if you do not choose, and there is an explicit “until I turn it off” option that never expires on its own (if the vessel later moves to a plan without public links, such a link stops working 30 days after the change). Revoking it kills it immediately. Treat it like a key, because it is one.
• The vessel directory and nearby map, if you opt in. You choose whether your vessel is private (the default — nobody can find it), visible within a distance you pick, or publicly listed. Anything but private means other signed-in users can see your vessel’s exact position and name on a map when you are within range, and a public listing means a name search finds your vessel and its public link without an account.
• Abuse-prevention counters. To limit abuse, some requests — including password resets, public vessel searches, public location links, public marina pages and slip requests sent from them — are counted against the IP address they came from. Those counters are stored with the IP address as their label and a daily job deletes them once they are more than two days old.
• Email delivery records. When we send you an email, we keep a record of the address, whether it arrived, bounced or was marked as spam, and the receiving server’s explanation if it did not arrive — so that “my code never showed up” is a question we can actually answer. These records are deleted after 30 days. We do not use open or click tracking in our email.
• Support tickets. If you contact support, the email address and message content, kept as a ticket thread so we can reply. We do not currently delete support tickets on a schedule; email us if you want yours removed. If you choose to attach a diagnostic report, it includes your app version and build, device type, time zone, install identifier, your account identifier, the vessel’s identifier, type and plan, the local network addresses of your equipment, and up to ten recent log lines per device. Attaching it is your choice, and you can open and read the whole report before you send it. It is built from a fixed list of fields, which is why it contains none of your passwords and no coordinates.
  
  If you send a bug report, it can also include — each part yours to leave out — the names of the last few screens you opened; your alert settings (Quiet Mode, units, time zone, and whether notifications are allowed); the app’s recent error messages; requests that failed (the address without its query, the status and how long it took — never what was sent or received); your role on the vessel and whether its live connection was up; and a screenshot, if you attach one, which shows whatever was on your screen. Tokens, passwords, email addresses, phone numbers and coordinates are removed from error messages as they are recorded, and an attached screenshot is re-saved without its photo metadata. Error messages and failed requests are kept only in the app’s memory until you close it, and leave your device only in a report you send. You can read the whole report before sending it. Bug reports and their screenshots are deleted after 90 days.

What we don’t do

• No location reading unless a vessel has a GPS source or you switch on this device’s location, and no background reading at all except while an anchor watch is armed — which your phone shows you the whole time it is running.
• No analytics, advertising, or tracking SDKs in the app; no analytics or tracking cookies on this website.
• No selling or renting of your data, and no sharing of it with other companies for their own marketing. Ever. (Our hardware pages do carry Amazon affiliate links — see Affiliate links. Those send no data about you; they are ordinary links you choose to click.)
• No reading of your messages for advertising or analysis of any kind.

Data collected by Google’s libraries in our apps

Our mobile apps are built with software libraries from Google that provide sign-in (Firebase Authentication and Google Sign-In) and push notifications (Firebase Cloud Messaging). These libraries send data to Google as part of how they work, under Google’s privacy policy. On iOS, Google declares that its libraries collect diagnostic data and device identifiers, and that Google Sign-In also collects usage data and approximate location, alongside the account details you sign in with. Apple builds an app’s App Store privacy label from those declarations, so our label lists Diagnostics, Usage Data and Coarse Location as collected.

That collection belongs to Google’s libraries, not to our own code. DockNeighbor’s own code does not collect crash reports, diagnostics or usage analytics. Sending us a diagnostic report with a support ticket is a separate, optional step, described under Support tickets.

SMS and mobile information

If you add a mobile number for SMS alerts, we use it solely to send the verification code you request and the alert texts you opted into (see the Terms of Service, “SMS text alerts”).

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties. Information sharing with subcontractors in support services, such as customer service and message delivery, is permitted — Telnyx, the SMS and WhatsApp delivery provider listed under Service providers below, processes your number and opt-in status strictly on our behalf to deliver the messages you signed up for, never for its own purposes.

Alerts to other people

If you add an email address that isn’t your own account’s to a vessel’s alerts, that person must confirm first (double opt-in) — nothing is delivered until they click the confirmation link. Every alert email carries an unsubscribe link that can stop just that kind of alert, all alerts for that vessel, or all email from us, permanently.

If you send alerts to a service of your own — a Discord or Slack webhook, an IFTTT or Home Assistant endpoint, or an ntfy topic (ntfy.sh unless you point it at your own server) — the alert goes to whatever address you supplied, on that provider’s terms rather than ours. What we send is the alert headline and text, the vessel’s name, identifier and type, the device name, the alert category and a timestamp. It never carries coordinates. Discord and Slack receive the text only.

An integration token is different. If you mint one for Home Assistant or a similar system, whatever holds that token can read the vessel’s current readings and its hosted history through our API — and that includes the vessel’s position if it reports one. Revoking or replacing the token ends that access.

The DockNeighbor Network

If you set a Home Station for your boat, the owner of that DockNeighbor Station — a Network Partner, or the marina’s staff when the marina owns it — sees your boat’s name in their list of Home Station boats. A station’s owner can also see the names of boats the station carried in the last 24 hours. They never see your boat’s plan, readings, alarms or position through the DockNeighbor Network. A marina where someone else’s station sits sees only how many boats it serves. Clearing your Home Station removes your boat from that list.

Service providers

The hosted cloud runs on a small set of infrastructure providers, each used only for the purpose listed:

Affiliate links

The hardware pages on this website link to products on Amazon, and some of those are affiliate links that earn us a commission if you buy — the pages say so where they appear. Following one takes you to Amazon, which will see the visit as its own and apply its own privacy policy and cookies. The link identifies us as the referrer so the commission is credited; it carries nothing about you, and we do not record who clicks.

Your data, your controls

• Delete everything. Full account deletion is built into the app, and so is deleting a single vessel. Both are set out in detail under What deletion actually removes below, including the things that outlive it — we would rather list them than promise an erasure that does not happen.
• Export. The history the app keeps on your own device stays on it and is yours on every plan. Self-serve export of your hosted data is not available yet: some plans list data export as a feature, but there is currently no way in the app or your account portal to download your hosted history as a file. To ask about access to your data, email support@dockneighbor.com.
• Turn off what you don’t want. A vessel’s position exists only if you set up a source or switch on this device’s location; the directory is private until you change it; a public location link can be revoked; arrival announcements are off until you enable them; and SMS and WhatsApp destinations exist only if you add and verify them.
• In conversations. You can mute a thread, hide a message from your own copy, and report any message, post, event, comment or profile. You can block a vessel or a person: a blocked person or vessel cannot message you directly or send you friend or alarm-watch requests; their messages, posts, events and comments are hidden from you; and you get no notifications from them. A marina’s urgent emergency broadcasts still show. A block lasts until you unblock (in Social settings) or until either account or vessel is deleted.
• Unsubscribe. Every alert and announcement email includes an unsubscribe link; verified SMS and WhatsApp numbers can be removed in the app at any time.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional legal rights over your personal data (such as access, correction, or deletion). Email support@dockneighbor.com and we’ll honor them.

What deletion actually removes

You can delete a single vessel, or your whole account, from the app. Both do the same work in the same order, and it is worth knowing what that order is.

1. Anything live is switched off first. Any public location link you published is revoked — including the server-side index that makes the link resolve, which is the part that actually kills it — every position you granted to a friend is withdrawn, and the shared position itself is cleared.
2. Then the vessel’s stored data is erased by our servers, because much of it is in places the app is not allowed to reach. That is: sensor and position history; recorded voyages and their tracks; the last-known sensor state; float plans and anyone you shared them with; the private area holding your router, Wi-Fi and device credentials and your integration token; the vessel’s friends, alert-consent records, messaging preferences, blocks and pending group invitations; its row in the nearby map and directory; the Trip Planner’s daily counter; and the vessel profile — its public name, home port and its photo file, along with any pairing code or pairing QR that still points at it.
3. Only then is the vessel record itself deleted.

If any step before the last one fails, we stop and delete nothing — not the vessel, and on account deletion not your login either. You are told what went wrong and asked to try again. That is deliberate: the earlier steps are authorised by the vessel record, so deleting it over a failed cleanup would put the remaining data permanently out of reach of everyone, including us, and leave a published location link that nobody could ever revoke. Being told to retry means nothing has been lost.

A vessel other people are still on is not deleted. Deleting your account removes you from it and leaves the boat, its history and its voyages with the crew who remain. Only a vessel you are the last member of is erased.

Account deletion additionally removes your user record, your personal photo, your mute and read-position lists, your direct-message conversations, and your messaging opt-in on every vessel; if you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to disconnect DockNeighbor from your Apple ID. Your sign-in is deleted last.

What outlives deletion, and why:

• Messages you wrote stay in other people’s conversations. In a vessel, crew, group, marina or dock conversation, the lines you sent remain readable by the other participants, with the name and vessel you sent them under, exactly as they were. We do not scrub them, because a conversation belongs to everyone in it and removing one person’s half would leave the rest answering nobody. It is the same rule as hiding a message: your copy is yours, theirs is theirs. Those messages are deleted by the one-year message sweep like any others. Your direct messages are a different case and are deleted outright.
• Posts you made on a marina or dock board stay on that board. Nothing sweeps them; delete any you do not want left behind before you close your account.
• Your place on other vessels’ friend lists stays. Deleting your account removes the friends of vessels you are erasing, but not the friend record another vessel holds for you — which includes your email address and any alarms you agreed to receive — nor friend invitations and alarm-watch requests sent to or from you. That vessel’s owner or a co-owner can remove you from their list.
• Some marina records stay with the marina. An entry a marina keeps about you in its member directory is not removed by deleting your account or vessel. The records of your vessel’s alarms that a marina’s staff were allowed to see are kept too, until they expire two years after the alarm, but deleting the vessel — on its own or along with your account — blanks the vessel’s name and the link to it on them. Slip stays are kept as the marina’s occupancy record, but deleting a vessel immediately blanks the link to that vessel and the contact details on its stays, and deleting your account blanks the contact details on stays you asked for and the link to your account. What else a stay carries is blanked on the schedule under Slips and stays. Your vessel’s replies to marina events, and its permission for a marina to see its alarms, are deleted along with the vessel; replies you made for a vessel that survives you, and a request you made to become a marina operator, are deleted along with your account.
• Reports outlive the account, for a while. If you delete your account you are removed as the reporter on any report you filed, but the report itself (and its copy of the content, including 24 hours of a reported conversation) stays until it is deleted one year after our team decides it. A report about you follows the same rule. Blocks you placed, and blocks placed on you, are deleted with the account.
• An address that asked never to be emailed again stays on our do-not-email list. Forgetting it would mean emailing you again the next time somebody adds that address.
• A record that the account existed and which vessels it trialled is kept, so free trials cannot be reset by deleting and re-registering. It holds an account identifier and vessel identifiers, nothing else.

If a member of our staff deletes an account or a vessel for you, that path runs the same erasure, in the same order, and refuses in the same way if any part of it fails.

Payments

We do not take payments yet. There is no payment processor connected to the apps, the cloud or the account portal, and we hold no card details of any kind — today a paid plan is reached by redeeming a coupon. When billing does start, payment will be handled by Stripe or by your app store (Google Play / Apple In-App Purchase), your card details will go to the processor and will never touch our servers, and this policy will be updated before we take the first payment.

Children

DockNeighbor is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, we’ll update the date at the top and note it in the release notes. The current version always lives at this address.