Privacy Policy

YachtSee is a yacht brokerage operating from British Columbia, Canada. We run this website and the listing service on it. In this policy, “we” and “YachtSee” mean YachtSee, and “you” means anyone who visits the site or creates an account.

We handle personal information under British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Because listings are marketed across Canada and the United States, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) also applies to some of what we do.

Questions about privacy go to our privacy officer at owen@yachtseebroker.com.

We collect only what the service needs, and we collect it from you.

When you create an account

• Your email address and a password. Passwords are stored hashed — we never see or store the password itself.
• A display name and, if you upload one, a profile photo.

When you build a listing

• Details about the vessel: year, make, model, specifications, condition, equipment, photos, asking price, and where it is kept.
• The Hull Identification Number (HIN), which we decode and verify.
• Your name, email address, phone number and location as the seller contact.
• Identity documents you upload so we can verify ownership.
• The disclosure form and listing agreement you complete, including the signature you draw on them.

When you contact us

• Your name, email address, optional phone number, and whatever you write in the message.

Automatically, as you browse

• Standard technical information: IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, and the site you arrived from.
• Advertising and analytics identifiers, described under Cookies and tracking below.

We use your information to create and secure your account, to build and publish your listing, to verify that the vessel is yours to sell, to answer your questions, to send you service email about your listing, and to measure and improve how the site and our advertising perform.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not rent or trade mailing lists.

We collect, use and disclose your personal information with your consent. You give it by creating an account, by building a listing, or by sending us a message. For anything beyond what this policy describes, we will ask you first.

You can withdraw consent at any time by emailing us, subject to legal and contractual limits. Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer list your vessel or keep your account open. Commercial email we send follows Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and every commercial message includes an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing does not stop essential service email, such as a password reset.

We share personal information with service providers who help us run YachtSee, and only as much as each one needs:

• Convex — our database and file storage, including listing photos and uploaded documents.
• Vercel — website hosting and privacy-preserving traffic analytics.
• Resend — delivery of transactional email such as verification and password resets.
• Meta — advertising measurement through the Meta Pixel, described below.
• OpenAI — only if you ask us to draft a listing description for you. We send the vessel details you entered. We never send identity documents, signatures or your contact details.

When your listing is published, the listing content and the seller contact details you provided are shared with the marketplaces we advertise on, including YachtWorld, Boats.com and BoatTrader, and with cooperating brokers who may bring a buyer. That is the point of listing, but it is worth being plain about: a published listing is public.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, to enforce our terms, or to protect our rights, and to a buyer of the business if YachtSee is ever sold.

Our service providers store and process data on servers in the United States. While your information is there it is subject to the laws of that country, and foreign courts and law enforcement may be able to compel access to it. By using YachtSee you consent to this transfer.

We use cookies and similar technologies to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences. These are necessary for the site to work.

We also run the Meta Pixel, which reports page views and enquiries back to Meta so we can measure our advertising and reach people with similar interests. You can limit this in your Facebook and Instagram ad settings, or by using your browser’s tracking protection or an ad blocker. Our analytics through Vercel does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you.

We keep account and listing information for as long as your account is open, and for a reasonable period afterwards to meet our legal, tax and record-keeping obligations. Identity documents are kept only as long as needed to verify ownership and to satisfy those obligations. Contact form messages are kept as business correspondence. When information is no longer needed, we delete it or render it anonymous.

We protect personal information with safeguards appropriate to how sensitive it is: encrypted connections, hashed passwords, access controls that limit staff to what they need, and rate limiting on public forms. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we take this seriously — particularly the identity documents you trust us with.

You have the right to:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you and how we have used it.
• Ask us to correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
• Withdraw your consent, subject to legal and contractual limits.
• Ask us to delete your account and the information attached to it.

Email owen@yachtseebroker.com and we will respond within 30 days, as PIPA requires. We may need to confirm your identity first.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, or to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

YachtSee is meant for adults selling vessels. The site is not directed at anyone under the age of majority in their province, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe we have, tell us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy as the service changes. The date at the top always shows the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you before it takes effect.

Reach our privacy officer at owen@yachtseebroker.com or through the contact form.