OceanSphere Service Sp. z o.o., ul. Nowogrodzka 31, 00-511 Warszawa, Poland (KRS 0001211680, NIP PL7011291111), represented by Małgorzata Kantner, President of the Management Board.
Telephone +48 784 132 577 · E-mail kontakt@oceansphere-service.com
We have not appointed a data protection officer because we are not required to do so; the management board is responsible for data protection. Please direct all questions about personal data to the e-mail address above with the subject "Data protection".
We process personal data only where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) allows it, and we keep the amount of data small. Our services are made for companies and professionals in shipping. Where we mention "you", we mean the natural person using the site: an employee of a shipping company, a superintendent, a purchaser, an engineer, a supplier or a journalist. We do not sell personal data, we do not use advertising networks and we do not run tracking or analytics scripts of third parties on our pages.
Where the sites run. Our websites run on servers we operate ourselves in Poland (Białystok; internet connectivity provided by KOBA Sp. z o.o.) and on rented servers of Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany (data centre Falkenstein, Germany), which we use for data processing, harvesting of public company data and backups. Hetzner acts as our processor under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). Backups are stored on our own infrastructure in Poland and Germany only.
Server logs. When you open a page, the web server records your IP address, date and time, the page requested, the referring page, the browser and operating system identification (user agent) and the response status. We need this to deliver the pages, to keep the systems stable and to recognise and block abuse, in particular automated mass downloading of our databases. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in a secure and working service. Log files are deleted after 14 days unless an entry is needed as evidence of an attack.
Protection against automated downloading. The Library and the directory contain databases that we have built at great expense. To distinguish people from download scripts, some pages set a technical cookie (see section 4) and some deliberately placed pages, which are never linked for visitors, log the addresses that call them. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR.
Encryption. All pages are delivered over TLS (https). E-mail we send is transported with TLS where the receiving server supports it.
We use only cookies that are necessary for the service you have asked for. They need no consent (Art. 5 (3) of Directive 2002/58/EC, § 25 (2) of the German TDDDG, Art. 173 (3) of the Polish Telecommunications Law). We do not use consent banners because there is nothing to consent to.
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
session | Keeps you signed in and protects forms against forged requests (CSRF token). Set only when you sign in or open a form. | Until the browser is closed or you sign out | oceansphere.io, parts.oceansphere.io, engines.oceansphere.io, maritimenetwork.io |
lang | Remembers the language you chose (English, German, Polish). | 12 months | parts.oceansphere.io, maritimenetwork.io |
os_eng_v, os_mar_v | Technical marker with a random value that tells our servers a browser has passed the bot check. It contains no personal data and is not used to recognise you across sites. | 30 days | engines.oceansphere.io, maritimenetwork.io |
We do not use local storage for tracking, we do not set third-party cookies and we do not embed social media buttons. Fonts and scripts are delivered from our own servers; opening our pages does not connect your browser to Google, Facebook or other advertising companies.
E-mail and telephone. If you write or call us, we process your name, contact data and the content of your message to answer you. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR when the message prepares or performs a contract, otherwise Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR (answering inquiries). We keep correspondence as long as the matter is open and thereafter as required by commercial and tax law (in general five years after the end of the financial year, Art. 74 of the Polish Accounting Act; up to ten years where German law applies to the contract).
Request forms (Request a part, Request service, Sell surplus, Contact). The forms ask for the data we need to work on your request: company, name, e-mail, telephone, the vessel or equipment concerned, the parts or the job, and optionally attachments. Every request becomes a numbered case at our trading desk. To find a part or a technician, we pass on the technical content of your request, and where necessary your company name, to suppliers, workshops, dealers and partner companies that may be able to supply. We do not pass on your e-mail address or telephone number to a supplier unless you ask us to bring you into direct contact. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR. Case files are kept for five years after the case is closed, longer where an order or a warranty requires it.
Mail delivery. Our systems send e-mail through our own mail relay and through the e-mail services of Namecheap, Inc., 4600 East Washington Street, Phoenix, AZ 85034, USA (Private Email) and Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd., One Microsoft Place, Dublin 18, Ireland (Microsoft 365 mailbox of the trading desk). Both act as processors. Where mail is stored on servers in the USA, the transfer is safeguarded by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Microsoft is certified) or by the Standard Contractual Clauses of the European Commission (Art. 46 (2) (c) GDPR).
Some services offer accounts. When you register we process your e-mail address, name, company, country and the role you choose, plus the time of registration and of your logins. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR (the account agreement). Accounts of companies on OceanSphere Parts are verified before the "Verified seller" badge is shown: we check that the e-mail domain belongs to the company and, where a VAT number is given, we check it against the VIES service of the European Commission. We keep the result of the check. You can close your account at any time by e-mail to us; the Library also offers a delete button in the account settings. After closing, we delete the account data within 30 days unless statutory retention applies to invoices or to listings that were part of a transaction.
Paid plans on oceansphere.io (Work) and maritimenetwork.io (directory plans) are billed through Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd., 1 Grand Canal Street Lower, Dublin 2, Ireland. Card or bank details are entered directly on Stripe's pages and never reach our servers; we receive from Stripe a customer reference, the plan, the payment status and the invoice data (company, address, VAT number). Stripe is an independent controller for the payment itself and may transfer data to Stripe, Inc. in the USA under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Legal basis for our processing: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR and, for the retention of invoices, Art. 6 (1) (c) GDPR (accounting and tax law, five years after the end of the financial year).
We use AI systems in two ways, and we tell you which.
On our own hardware. Most AI work of the OceanSphere family — writing and translating equipment descriptions, classifying company data, drafting editorial articles for Maritime Signal, matching inquiry texts to the equipment register — runs on language models installed on our own servers in Poland. No data leaves our infrastructure for this.
External AI providers (Work only). The report generator of OceanSphere Work (oceansphere.io) can draft service reports from the case data entered by the user (vessel, equipment, findings, measurements, technician name). For this we send the case content to Anthropic, PBC, 548 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94104, USA, and, as a fallback, to Groq, Inc., 400 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA. Both act as processors under a data processing agreement; transfers are safeguarded by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified and otherwise by Standard Contractual Clauses. These providers do not use the data to train their models. The user decides case by case whether to use the generator; a report is only sent to an external provider when the user starts the generator. Legal basis: Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR (the Work agreement).
We do not take automated decisions with legal effect on you (Art. 22 GDPR).
You have the right to obtain access to your personal data (Art. 15 GDPR), to have it rectified (Art. 16), erased (Art. 17) or its processing restricted (Art. 18), to receive the data you gave us in a portable format (Art. 20) and to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21). Where processing is based on consent, you can withdraw it at any time with effect for the future. To exercise these rights, write to kontakt@oceansphere-service.com. We answer within one month.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular the authority of the Member State where you live or work. The authority responsible for us is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Danych Osobowych), ul. Stawki 2, 00-193 Warszawa, Poland, uodo.gov.pl.
The site itself only produces server logs (section 3). Requests for service or parts go through the forms described in section 5. OceanSphere Work is a case and report tool for service companies: the customer company (our client) enters cases, vessels, technicians, daily reports and documents. For this data the client is the controller and we are its processor under the Work agreement; we process the data only on the client's instructions, host it on our own servers and delete it at the end of the agreement. Paid plans are billed through Stripe (section 7). The report generator is described in section 8.
The Library is an equipment reference. It can be read without an account; a free account gives access to more data and lets you contribute corrections and documents. For accounts see section 6. When you contribute, we store the contribution together with your account reference so that we can ask questions and credit the source. Manufacturer names, model designations and technical data in the Library refer to products, not to people; where a manufacturer's contact person appears in a public data sheet, we do not extract that name.
OceanSphere Parts is a sourcing desk and a marketplace. Without an account you can search the catalogue, browse listings and send a request (section 5). Sellers register a company account (section 6) and publish listings with title, part number, condition, quantity, location, price and photos. Listings are public and are included in our sitemap for search engines; the seller's company name is not shown on the listing, only the location and the "Verified seller" badge. Inquiries on a listing go to our trading desk, which forwards the technical request to the seller. Buyer and seller are brought into direct contact only when both agree. We log who confirmed the availability of a listing and when, so that stale listings can be recognised. Reports about a listing (notice-and-action) are stored with the reporter's account or e-mail address for as long as the case is open and for six months afterwards as evidence. Saved searches and alerts are stored in your account until you delete them.
Directory. Maritime Network lists companies of the maritime industry: name, address, country, port, trades, website, general contact channels and, where published by the company or a class society, certifications. The data come from public sources — company websites, port authorities, classification society registers, trade fair catalogues — and are processed under Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR (our legitimate interest in an industry directory and the public's interest in finding suppliers). We list company data, not private individuals; personal names appear only where a company publishes them as its official contact, and we remove them on request. Companies can claim and correct their profile. Accounts and plans: see sections 6 and 7. Maritime Signal is our editorial section; reading it produces only server logs. Articles are produced with AI on our own hardware and are marked accordingly.
The service site is static: opening it produces only server logs (section 3); contact is by e-mail or telephone (section 5). ShipMind is a pilot for a technical assistant; access is by invitation, and the invited user's e-mail, name and the questions asked are stored for the duration of the pilot to improve the answers. ShipMind runs on our own hardware.
| Recipient | Role | Purpose | Country · safeguard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Processor | Rented servers, backups | Germany |
| KOBA Sp. z o.o. | Telecommunications provider | Internet connectivity of our own servers (transport only) | Poland |
| Namecheap, Inc. | Processor | E-mail delivery and mailboxes | USA · Standard Contractual Clauses |
| Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd. | Processor | Trading desk mailbox (Microsoft 365) | Ireland / USA · EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. | Independent controller | Payments for paid plans | Ireland / USA · EU-US Data Privacy Framework |
| Anthropic, PBC · Groq, Inc. | Processors | Report generator of OceanSphere Work only | USA · Data Privacy Framework / Standard Contractual Clauses |
| Suppliers, workshops, dealers | Independent controllers | Quotes for your request (technical content and company name only) | Worldwide, depending on where the part or the technician is |
| European Commission (VIES) | Public service | Validation of VAT numbers of sellers | EU |
We update this policy when our services or the law change. The version date at the top tells you when. Substantial changes that affect account holders are announced by e-mail.