Terms of use

boating.systems · last updated 30 September 2026

1. Who these terms are between

boating.systems is run by Progressable LLC, 69 E. Pearl Street, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. These terms cover every app in the family — Chart, Guide, Log, Anchor Watch, Marina and Line Honors — together with the websites at boating.systems and its subdomains. Using any of them means these terms apply. Questions or complaints: info@boating.systems.

Where an app has its own privacy policy, that policy governs what data leaves your device; these terms govern what we may do with it once it arrives. The privacy policy for every app is at boating.systems/privacy.

2. Safety — read this one

NOT FOR NAVIGATION.

These apps are companions to proper navigation, not replacements for it. Chart data is derived from public NOAA electronic navigational charts and may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Tide, current and weather figures are predictions. Depth colouring is a display aid computed from a draft you entered yourself and a tide prediction from a station that is not where your boat is. Anchor Watch is an aid to keeping watch, not a substitute for keeping one.

Carry official charts, keep a proper lookout, and make your own judgements. You are responsible for the safety of your vessel and the people aboard it.

3. Your account

Every app can be used without signing in. A few actions — starring a place in Guide, joining a race as crew, keeping an anchor watch, or sending feedback — create an anonymous session instead: a random account with no name or email attached. Signing in with Google or Apple is optional and is what lets your boats, settings and outings follow you between apps and devices. Keep your sign-in secure; you are responsible for what happens under your account. The apps are for people aged 13 and over. If you enter other people's names — as a race committee, an outing leader or a skipper listing crew — you must have their permission, and a parent's or guardian's permission for anyone under 18. If a club or other organisation has given you access to its records, that organisation sets what you may do with them, and its own agreement with its members applies alongside these terms.

4. What you record stays yours

Your outings, tracks, boats, photos, notes, place suggestions and reports remain yours. We do not claim ownership of them.

To run the service you give us permission to store, copy, process and display that content for the purposes described in these terms — showing it back to you, syncing it between your devices, publishing it if and when you choose to publish it, and the learning described in section 5. This permission lasts as long as we hold the content and ends when you delete it, except for copies in routine backups and for anything you have already published to others.

Publishing is always your own act. A trip is private when it is created. It becomes readable by other people only when you deliberately share it, and stops being readable the moment you unshare it. Nothing in section 5 ever makes a trip public.

You can take all of it with you, any day, without asking. In Log, your account sheet has Export my log: one ZIP archive with every trip you own as GPX and as the fixes we stored, your notes, photo previews and voice clips, journeys, your sea-service ledger, and the original files you asked Log to keep, byte for byte. It is made for you alone, up to three times a day, and deleted from our servers two days after it is made. Anything too large for one archive is listed in it with how to fetch it.

5. How we learn from what you record

Beyond showing your outings back to you, we study recorded data to make the service better. This section names what that means, and what it may never mean.

What we may study it for

• Finding real places. Where boats repeatedly arrive, stop, moor, launch or land can nominate an anchorage, landing, channel, ramp or moorings area that the Guide does not yet know about. Observation only ever creates a private candidate for review; a person decides what gets published.
• Checking charts against reality. A boat that floated somewhere proves the water was at least as deep as its draft. Corrected for tide and aggregated across many boats, that can show where a survey looks stale — particularly in sandy river mouths and after storms, where depths genuinely change. It can also show where the chart has no data at all.
• Depth and sonar data, if you connect an instrument. If you connect a depth sounder or an onboard system that reports depth, we may use those soundings for the same purpose, and may calibrate your instrument's offset against well-surveyed water so its readings are usable. We may contribute soundings to public hydrographic programmes such as the IHO/NOAA crowdsourced bathymetry effort, attributed to a vessel identifier rather than to you personally, and only with your agreement to that specific use.
• Conditions and seasonality. When places and routes are busy, by season, broad time of day, conditions and class of craft.
• Making the apps work better. Diagnosing faults, measuring whether a feature is used, improving the algorithms that colour tracks, detect manoeuvres, trim the drive home, estimate speed and assess depth ahead, and testing changes before release.
• Safety and research. Understanding groundings, near misses and hazardous areas in aggregate, so the apps can warn better.

Where this work does not need to know whose track it is — and it usually does not — we use the data aggregated and stripped of account, person, vessel and trip identifiers. We may publish the results of that work, including maps, layers and statistics derived from many people's outings.

What it may never mean

• No sale, and no advertising. We do not sell your data, share it with third parties for their own purposes, or use it to target advertising. There is no advertising in these apps and no advertising identifiers.
• No individual exposure. Published results are aggregates. We do not publish an individual trajectory, do not publish a result that could be used to reconstruct one, and do not tell anyone that a particular person visited a particular place. Aggregates are published only above a minimum number of distinct contributors, with places that could reveal a home, a private dock or a habitual schedule trimmed or suppressed. (Race results are a different thing: when a race committee publishes a race in Line Honors, its entries and finishes — boat names, sail numbers and skipper names — are public, as race results always are.)
• No scoring of people. We do not build profiles that rate individual skippers, and we do not use this data to make decisions about you.
• Safety data is kept apart. Anchor Watch's live alarm data — the watch, its positions and its alarms — lives in a separate database that only your own account can read. When you end a watch, a summary of it (the anchor point, the last few dozen positions, how far the boat swung, your note and the tide) is copied into your boat's history, where people with access to that boat can read it. Neither the live data nor that summary is an input to anything in this section, even in aggregate.
• Never a navigation claim. Nothing derived from tracks is a depth measurement or a surveyed route. Evidence that boats pass somewhere may flag a chart as possibly stale; it may never raise a charted depth, clear a hazard, or quiet a warning. That a place appears in the Guide is evidence that people go there — not that it is legal, safe, public, or deep enough for you.
• Signed-out recordings never leave your device, so they can never contribute to any of this.
• A new purpose needs new notice. If we want to use recorded data for something materially different from what is named above, we will say so here and, where it is appropriate, ask you first.

Opting out

You may opt out of having your uploaded outings used for these community insights while still using every app normally. Ask at info@boating.systems; we will also provide this as an account setting before publishing any aggregate product built from track data.

Opting out applies going forward and removes your outings as a source for aggregates that are rebuilt from source data. It does not remove your private outings from Log — delete those separately — and it cannot retract an aggregate that has already been published, which by design does not identify you. Deleting a trip, or deleting your account, also removes it as a source.

Website analytics

Separate from anything you record: this website, Guide, Log and Vessel use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people actually find useful. It records the page, where you arrived from, and coarse device and location information — not your name, and nothing you have recorded in the apps. Ads personalization signals are turned off, and visitors in Europe are asked first (see the privacy policy). Chart, Anchor Watch and the other apps carry no analytics at all. If your browser or an extension blocks it, nothing on the site stops working.

6. Using the service decently

Do not use these apps to break the law, to harass anyone, to misrepresent who you are, or to publish someone else's private information. Do not upload content you have no right to upload. Do not scrape, overload or attempt to break the service, work around its access controls, or use automated means to extract other people's data. Place suggestions, reports and comments are public contributions to a shared map: submit them in good faith, and expect them to be moderated, edited or declined.

7. What we contribute, and what we do not promise

The apps are provided free and as they are. We do not promise they will be available, uninterrupted, accurate or fit for any particular purpose, and we do not warrant the public data they display. We may change, suspend or discontinue any app or feature. Where practical we will give notice, and everything you have put in Log remains exportable (section 4) so your records are not trapped here.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data, or for decisions made in reliance on charted data, predictions, or any output of these apps. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some places do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

8. Ending it

You may stop using the apps at any time and delete your account from Chart's information panel or the account deletion page. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or puts other people or the service at risk; where the situation allows, we will explain why and give you a chance to respond.

9. Changes to these terms

If these terms change materially we will update the date at the top and say so in the apps' release notes. Changes to section 5 that add a purpose take effect only going forward, and never retroactively to data already collected under a narrower notice.

10. Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Connecticut, USA, and disputes belong to the courts sitting there — except where the law of the place you live gives you the right to bring a claim locally, which these terms do not take away. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stands.