Privacy
Open Waters is run by Open Water Software, LLC. There are no accounts here, so there is no profile to build. This page describes what the site and the APIs actually see, and what they deliberately do not.
The website
Page views are counted with Plausible, which is hosted in the EU and does not use cookies. It records the page you asked for, the referrer, and a coarse country, browser and device guess, and it does not store an identifier that follows you between pages or between visits. No advertising or social network scripts load on any page, so nothing here tracks you across other sites.
The site sets no cookies of its own. If you create an AIS token in the browser, the key is kept in your browser's localStorage on your own machine, and clearing site data removes it.
The APIs
The tides API needs no authentication and asks for nothing about you. It counts requests per IP address to enforce its published rate limits, which is the only thing the address is used for.
An AIS token is an Ed25519 keypair generated in your browser. The private key never leaves it; the service stores only the public key and the token's claims. No email address, name or payment detail is required or requested for the free tiers. A token may optionally be bound to an address range, in which case that range is part of the token. Commercial arrangements are made over email, so for those the only record is the correspondence itself.
Vessel positions
AIS is a public radio broadcast, and the positions Open Waters serves are the ones vessels transmit for anyone to hear. Every event names the source it came from, whether that is a national open feed, an exchange, or a volunteer receiver. Volunteer receivers are identified by an opaque hash or by the station's own MMSI, not by the operator.
The track endpoint, /v1/vessels/{mmsi}/track, serves the positions the network heard from one vessel; how far back a request reaches depends on the token it carries. If you contribute a receiver and want to stop, or want its history disassociated from it, email us and we will sort it out.
Sharing
Nothing collected here is sold, and there is nothing collected here worth selling. Contributed AIS data is forwarded to the open exchanges named in the AIS documentation, which is the point of contributing it. The site and APIs run on Cloudflare, which sees request traffic as the infrastructure provider.
Questions
Email hello@openwaters.io with anything about this page, including a request to remove something. A person reads it.
Open Water Software, LLC · hello@openwaters.io