Privacy notice and terms of use

Hull Gauge is run by NC Digital Limited, and we decide how your data is used.

NC Digital Limited, registered in England and Wales (company no. 16413452), registered office 5 Canon Court, Institute St, Bolton BL1 1PZ, United Kingdom, is the controller of the personal data described here. VAT number GB 508193686. Contact: privacy@hullgauge.com.

We read facts about boats, not people.

Our crawler reads public boat listings and keeps structured facts about each boat: builder, model, year, length, engine and hours, asking price and currency, VAT status, where it lies (the country, and the place as the listing names it), whether a private seller or a broker is selling it, and the dates we saw it.

With those facts we keep the listing’s title, the selling firm’s trading name, the listing’s own reference number, its page address and, where a listing shows a hull identification number, only a one-way hash of it. They let us recognise the same boat on different sites and read a listing again. Page addresses stay internal: our free pages never link to a listing.

We don’t keep copies of pages, photos or descriptions. We have no field for the names, phone numbers, email or street addresses of private sellers, and phone numbers and email addresses are removed automatically from the titles, places and reference numbers we store. The crawler runs on a computer we operate ourselves, reads each page in memory, and logs only the address it fetched and the result.

Our pages publish figures computed from many boats and, for single boats, derived facts only: model, year, asking price, hours, VAT status, country and month. Never a seller, a photo, a description or an exact date.

Where facts about a boat could identify its owner in combination with other information, we treat them with the same care as personal data and will remove them on request. To stop us reading your own site, see our bot policy.

Only what a feature needs, and only if you use it.

Your email address, if you sign in or ask to be told when a model is published, and what you ask us to watch: a model, your own boat or a search. The details of a purchase: your email address, billing country and what you bought. Name, work email and firm, if you claim a broker account. Sold prices, if a broker contributes them. What you tell us in a request, for example to opt out or to see your data, and any email you send to our addresses.

If a search on the site finds nothing, we record the words searched, in lower case with accents and punctuation removed, and count them by day, so we can see what the index is missing. No IP address, browser details or email address is stored with them; a search containing an email address, a phone number or a long run of digits is not recorded at all; and each day’s record is deleted after 180 days.

When you use one of our forms, such as sign-in or an opt-out request, we keep a one-way hash of your IP address and the date, only to limit how often the form can be used. We delete it within two days: with the sign-in record after a day, and from an opt-out request once it is a day old.

When a request or an email to one of our addresses arrives, we send a short note to the person who reads requests. It gives the reference and, for an email, its subject line, never the rest of what you wrote.

The valuation tool does not store what you enter. Your answers travel in the page address, so a link you copy carries them to whoever opens it, and our host’s request logs keep that address for a limited time.

To do what you asked, and nothing else.

We send the alerts and letters you asked for (your consent, which you can withdraw from any of those emails). We run sign-in, broker accounts and paid products (contract), and keep the records tax law requires (legal obligation). We handle requests and legal notices (legal obligation and legitimate interest). We publish statistics derived from listings and study searches that found nothing (legitimate interest in providing independent market information, balanced against the fact that we keep no personal details of private sellers and nothing that identifies a searcher).

No analytics, and no advertising cookies.

The site sets no cookies of its own unless you sign in or open a report you have bought. Then it sets cookies that keep you signed in or give you access to that report, and nothing else; they are strictly necessary, so they need no consent. When you pay for a report, Stripe’s checkout sets its own cookies to prevent fraud.

If you choose a currency on a model or year page, your browser remembers the choice in its own storage (localStorage, as hg.currency) so the next page shows the same currency. It stays on your device, and clearing this site’s data in your browser removes it.

We have no analytics installed: no visitor-counting script, no advertising or social-media trackers, nothing that follows you across sites. Our host keeps ordinary request logs, such as the page requested and your IP address, for a limited time to run and protect the site.

A few suppliers who host and send things for us; never advertisers.

Hosting: Vercel Inc. runs the site. The servers that build its pages and handle forms are in London, and Vercel’s network delivers each page from a location near you (London, for visitors in the UK).

Domain: Cloudflare, Inc. answers DNS lookups for hullgauge.com. If we put its network in front of the site, requests to the site will pass through it too.

Database and sign-in: Supabase, Inc., with the data stored in London (eu-west-2).

Email: Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC) sends our emails, and receives the email you send to our addresses through its inbound service, which passes each message to us.

Payments: Stripe, which takes card payments and calculates VAT with Stripe Tax. Stripe holds your card details; we never see them.

Each supplier acts on our instructions under a data-processing agreement. Where one handles personal data outside the UK, the transfer is covered by the safeguards UK data-protection law requires. We never sell or rent personal data, and we share it with no one else unless the law requires us to.

Only as long as it’s useful to you, or the law requires.

Sign-in links and codes: 24 hours. Watches and alerts: until you remove them or unsubscribe; a removed watch is deleted after 30 days. Our record of the emails we send you: 13 months.

Gauge Reports: the report files for 12 months; the order and its VAT record for 7 years, as tax law requires.

Broker accounts: while active, then 12 months. Contributed sold prices: kept in aggregate; the contributor’s identity is kept only while their account is active.

Requests, notices and the emails about them: 6 years, as a record. Searches that found nothing: 180 days.

See it, fix it, delete it, or object, for free.

You can ask for a copy of your data, correction, deletion, restriction, portability, or object to our use of it. Email privacy@hullgauge.com, or use the opt-out page. We reply within one month, usually within five working days. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

Email attachments larger than about 3 MB can’t reach us. Send a large document as a link, or by post to our registered office.