Privacy Policy

Soundings is a Section Nine product, operated from Norway. Contact for anything in this policy: [email protected]. The short version: survey answers are anonymous by design, administrators give us the minimum needed to sign in, and we run no advertising or analytics tracking anywhere.

1. Seafarers answering a survey

The survey is built so that we cannot know who you are. We do not ask for and do not store your name, email address, crew ID, or any account. We do not store your IP address with your answers. You open a link or scan a poster, answer, and submit; nothing to sign in to.

Vessel, rank, and nationality are optional questions. They are used only to compute grouped statistics, and any group with fewer than five respondents is withheld from every report, so a lone respondent in a category can never be singled out. Skipping them does not affect your submission.

While you answer, your draft is saved in your own browser’s storage on your own device, so you can continue later or answer offline; if you are offline at submission, the answers queue on your device and send when you are back in coverage. Local drafts and queued submissions expire from your device after thirty days. We set no cookies and run no trackers on survey pages.

Your employer receives statistics, never individual answers. Reports show aggregated scores per dimension and group, always subject to the five-respondent minimum.

2. Survey administrators

Administrator accounts store an email address, a display name, and a password hash. Signing in stores a session token in your browser. That is the extent of it; there is no tracking of administrator behavior beyond ordinary technical logs.

3. Prospective customers

If you email us, we keep the correspondence on our own mail servers in the EU. We do not add you to mailing lists and we do not share your details with anyone.

4. Where data lives

The service runs on servers we operate at Hetzner data centers in the EU (Finland and Germany), with encrypted nightly backups to Hetzner storage in the EU. Web traffic passes through Cloudflare as a reverse proxy for TLS and abuse protection; Cloudflare processes connection metadata to provide that service. There are no other processors: no analytics providers, no advertising networks, no third-party email services.

5. Retention and deletion

Survey responses are kept for as long as the commissioning organization uses the service, because year-over-year comparison is part of what the service does. When an organization requests deletion, its surveys and responses are removed within thirty days. Anonymized aggregate statistics (means and standard deviations per dimension, never below five respondents) may be retained in the industry benchmark; they contain no personal data.

6. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, and restriction, and the right to complain to a supervisory authority; in Norway that is Datatilsynet. For survey responses, note the flip side of anonymity: because answers are not linked to identities, we cannot find or delete an individual respondent’s submission, and this is a designed property of the system, not an oversight.

7. Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date above changes and administrators are notified. The current version always lives at this address.