Privacy Policy

FairHelm - Academy of Yacht Mastery ("we", "us") respects your privacy. This policy describes what data we collect, how we use it, how long we keep it, and your rights.

• Contact form: When you submit the contact form we receive your name, email, and message. We use this only to respond to your enquiry.
• VHF course: If you sign up for the paid VHF course we use our own backend (FastAPI on Railway) and a managed Railway Postgres database to manage your account, course progress, and authentication. Your data (e.g. progress, messages, certificate) is stored on Railway infrastructure; we use EU-based hosting where available.
• Promotional VHF access: If you activate a time-limited free offer for the paid VHF course, we record that claim in our database (Railway Postgres), including your user id, the access period, and optionally the IP address and browser user-agent from the request. We use this for abuse prevention, auditing, and support. We retain these records in line with our other course-related account data.
• Payments: Subscription payments are processed by Stripe, a third-party payment processor. We do not store your card details. Stripe acts as a data controller for payment information under their own Privacy Policy. We receive only a subscription status and customer ID from Stripe.
• Essential operation: We do not use analytics or non-essential cookies on this site. Session or strictly necessary technical data may be processed to deliver the site (e.g. form submission).

We do not sell your data.

We process your data to respond to enquiries (legitimate interest, or consent when you submit the form) and to run the website (legitimate interest).

We keep contact form submissions for as long as needed to handle your request and any follow-up, and for a limited period for our records (e.g. up to 24 months unless you ask for deletion earlier).

You have the right to:

• Access - request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification - ask us to correct inaccurate data.
• Erasure - ask us to delete your data (subject to legal exceptions).
• Restriction / object - in certain cases, restrict or object to processing.
• Complaint - lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (e.g. in your country).

To exercise these rights or ask questions about our data practices, contact us at the email below. We will respond within a reasonable time (typically within 30 days).

For any request about your personal data or this policy, contact: [email protected]. We will treat your request confidentially.

If you are in the EEA/UK and we process your data outside the EEA, we ensure appropriate safeguards (e.g. adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses) where required.

We use only essential cookies needed for the site to work (e.g. form submission). We do not use non-essential or marketing cookies unless you consent via the cookie banner. If you accept analytics cookies, we may send optional events (e.g. course progress, self-report answers, or page views in the free VHF course) only with your consent. These help us improve the experience and are described in our cookie settings.

You can set your browser to block or delete cookies; some site features may not work if you block essential cookies.

We may update this policy from time to time. The current version is always on this page. Last updated: 2026-04-11.