Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. At Orca, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services

  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it

  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted

  • We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information

  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

Hey! We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow recreational boaters to navigate safer, with more confidence, and have more fun in the water.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

  • Our websites;

  • Our navigation applications (including the Orca mobile app for Android and iOS)

  • Our other Orca products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at Orca.

Throughout this Privacy Policy, we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

  • Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an Orca account to provide an email address and password, along with your first name and last name — and that’s it. You may provide us with more information — like your address, boat details, phone number, and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create an Orca account.

  • Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have an Orca account, your first name is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About My Boat” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

  • Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us — a subscription to an Orca plan or an Orca device, you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made.

  • Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Orca Engineers about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

  • Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us — awesome! You may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV, and work authorization verification as part of the application process.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services.

  • Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that you took while using Orca products — in other words, who did what and when. We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.

  • Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps and other navigational devices if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.

  • Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of a sailing trip.

  • Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Orca uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services: For example, to set up and maintain your account, store your private content, backup and restore your data or settings, provide customer service, process payments, and orders, and verify user information.

  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services: For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.

  • To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing: For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.

  • To protect our Services, our users, and the public: For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Orca and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.

  • To fix problems with our Services: For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.

  • To customize the user experience: For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications for our Services and recommending content such as a new harbor or journey you may like.

  • To communicate with you: For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on Orca; texting you to verify your payment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt-out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt-out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)

  • To recruit and hire new Orca employees: For example, by evaluating job applicants and communicating with them.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy.

  • Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.

  • Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you.

    Examples of these vendors include: Payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, and customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you); those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); and other third-party tools that help us manage operations, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

  • Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.

  • To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Orca, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.

  • Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Orca goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that are transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.

  • Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services or use de-identified information to provide better charts or routing services to you and other users.

  • Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.

That means information like your public comments, reviews, other content that you make public are all available to others — and we hope they get a lot of views!

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Orca’s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Orca’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

Security

We're following reasonable measures to keep your account and personal details secure. Amongst other things, we don't store your account password or personally identifiable information on our own services. Instead, we use a reputable and trusted third party to store and manage your account credentials and personally identifiable information.

We also monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks, following industry best-practices.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, premium subscriptions that carry an additional charge — may not be accessible.

  • Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information via our mobile apps. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like notifications for weather alters.

  • Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt-out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt-out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.

  • Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Orca does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can access your browser settings to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Orca’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Orca’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

  • Opt out of our internal analytics program: You can do this through your user settings. By opting out, you will stop sharing information with our analytics tool about events or actions that happen after the opt-out, while you’re logged in to your Orca account.

  • Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests such as paying royalties to chart data providers.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;

  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;

  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;

  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and

  • Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to find out how to reach us.

When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

Orca’s Services are worldwide. Orca is the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that we are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services.

Mail: Orca Technologies AS Tordenskiolds gate 3, 0160 Oslo, Norway 

Email:

hello@getorca.com

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us via e-mail.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because Orca’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the "How and Why We Use Information section" above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

  • In the case of US-based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the European regulatory requirements.

  • In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Orca may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Orca encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage, or sending you a notification through email). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Translation

Our Privacy Policy was originally written in English (US). We may translate it into other languages.

In the event of a conflict between a translated version of our Privacy Policy and the English version, the English version will control.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Changelog

  • May 11, 2020: First version

  • August 31, 2020: Updated URLs and e-mail-address along with minor typo fixes

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