Telltale — Privacy & Terms

Privacy

Who we are

Telltale is a free watersport racing tracker and results platform. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who can see it, and your choices. We aim to collect as little as possible.

What we collect

• Account details — the name/username you give when you register, and an optional email (or the email from Google sign-in). We only email you Telltale news & the occasional promotion if you tick the opt-in (your club handles its own race notices) — it is off by default, and you can turn it off anytime in the Crew Room. We never sell it.
• Boat & race data — boat name/sail number, GPS tracks from your phone, and any instrument data (NMEA/GPX) you choose to upload.
• Live position — while you are actively tracking a race, your real-time location.
• Participation tags — races, boats and roles you (or coaches) tag yourselves to, and your club.

Why, and who can see it

• Public (visible to anyone): season results, champions, the participation board, club branding — the "shop window" that helps grow the sport.
• Club-only (signed-in members): the detailed race replays and raw GPS/instrument tracks.
• Live tracking is public by default so parents and spectators can watch — unless the organiser marks a race private, in which case only signed-in club members can view it.
• Club membership — if you tick “I’m a member” of a club (on My Clubs), that club’s managers can see your name, boat and role so they can help with your boat, safety category and race admin. They never see your email or contact details. Simply following a club to watch its racing is private — the club is not told, and you can join or leave a club at any time.

How we protect it

Passwords are stored only as salted hashes (never in plain text). Access to detailed tracks requires signing in. We keep data for as long as it is useful for results and history; you can ask us to delete yours.

Your data, your rights

• Access & correct — see and fix your information.
• Delete — ask us to remove your account and data (and a parent can ask for a child's).
• Take it with you — export your tracks as GPX (an open format) any time, from the phone tracker or a replay. Your data is yours; there is no lock-in.

Crowdsourced environmental data

When you contribute on-the-water observations — tidal streams, currents, depths and wind — you grant Telltale a licence to aggregate that data into a shared, de-identified community dataset. That combined dataset (e.g. crowdsourced tidal-stream and depth maps) is owned and maintained by Telltale, and may be used to build tools that help sailors, divers, fishers and search-and-rescue — kept free for the community, and never tied back to you personally. This does not affect your own data: you still own your individual tracks and can export or delete them any time (below).

Third parties & data credits

We use a small number of open services to make Telltale work, with thanks — each shown under its own licence:

• Base map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
• Sea-mark / chart-symbol overlay © OpenSeaMap contributors (CC BY-SA 2.0).
• Satellite and ocean-depth base layers — Powered by Esri (Esri, GEBCO, NOAA, Garmin, HERE, Geonames.org and other contributors).
• Bathymetry from the GEBCO_2024 Grid (GEBCO Compilation Group, 2024; public domain).
• Aerial imagery and tide & tidal-stream predictions — Contains data sourced from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) under CC BY 4.0. Not to be used for navigation.
• Weather & wave forecasts and the historical-wind archive — Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0; underlying models include NOAA GFS, DWD ICON, ECMWF and Météo-France).
• Wellington harbour wind, wave & tide — CentrePort Wellington / OMC International.
• Buoy observations — NOAA National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) (public domain).
• Live aircraft positions (ADS-B) — airplanes.live.
• Public AIS vessel positions via aisstream.io and AISHub; optional “Sign in with Google”.

We display these under their respective open/attribution licences and do not resell or redistribute third-party data as a standalone dataset. Weather, tide, chart and depth data are not for navigation. We do not sell your personal information.

Open-source software we build on

Telltale stands on excellent open-source marine software, with thanks — used under each project’s own licence, and we honour their terms:

• Signal K — the open marine-data server/standard Telltale reads instrument & AIS data from.
• KIP by @mxtommy (MIT licence) — the Signal K instrument display we run alongside Telltale, not against it. Per the author’s terms, KIP may not be used to train machine-learning or AI models without the author’s permission — a boundary we respect and pass on. (It mirrors our own stance: don’t use Telltale, its data, or the tools we build on to train ML/AI models without permission.)
• AIS-catcher, canboat, and OpenCPN (interoperability) — used or interfaced under their respective open licences, with attribution preserved.

Cookies

We use a single sign-in cookie to keep you logged in. No third-party advertising trackers.

What we count

Page views and how many people visit, so we know whether Telltale is useful — counted on our own server, never sent to an analytics company. With each page view we note only the country, worked out on our server from an offline table (IP Geolocation by DB-IP); your address itself is not kept. Monitor shows how many people are watching right now as a count only. Bots and link previews are left out.

Terms of use

• Fair use — tag only yourself and boats/races you took part in; don't impersonate others or upload data that isn't yours to share.
• Accuracy — results and tracks are provided as-is with no warranty; official club records prevail.
• Your content — you keep ownership of your tracks and tags; you grant Telltale permission to display them per the visibility rules above.
• Free to use — Telltale is free to use today, and our aim is to keep the core community experience free and accessible for sailors and clubs. To keep the platform running and growing we may introduce optional paid features, premium tools, or club/partner-supported tiers in future. Whatever we do, we’ll be upfront about it — and we’ll always let you export your own data and never sell your personal information.
• Changes — these terms may change from time to time. We’ll post updates on this page and flag material ones where we can; continuing to use Telltale means you accept the current terms. Please check back.

Protecting the platform & other people’s data

You are always free to access Telltale and to export your own tracks and data (see “Take it with you”). What you may not do is take everyone else’s. Specifically, you must not:

• use bots, scrapers, crawlers, spiders or any automated means to bulk-download, harvest, index or copy data from Telltale, its pages or its APIs (other than exporting your own data through the tools we provide);
• reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell, license, sublicense, publish, redistribute or resupply all or part of Telltale’s content, results, replays, GPS/instrument tracks, or aggregated / community datasets — or another user’s data — to any other person or service, whether for payment or free of charge, except through Telltale’s own sharing features;
• access, probe or use any undocumented or private endpoint, or reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, adapt or tamper with any part of Telltale or its data feeds;
• remove, obscure or falsify any attribution, source or ownership notice, or misrepresent where the data came from.

These protections exist so the community dataset stays a shared community asset and so individuals’ tracks aren’t harvested by third parties. They do not limit your right to take your own data with you. Data and content on Telltale (including aggregated environmental datasets) remain the property of Telltale and/or its contributors, and are provided for your own personal, recreational use only. We may suspend or remove access for anyone who breaches these terms.

Non-commercial use — and commercial licensing

Telltale’s free access is granted for your own personal, recreational, non-commercial use. “Non-commercial” means not primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

Without a written commercial licence from Telltale, you must not:

• use Telltale, or any of its content, results, replays, tracks, vessel/AIS data or datasets, for a commercial purpose — including reselling, sublicensing, brokering, advertising- or subscription-supported republishing, commercial or market research, or building it into any paid or ad-supported product or service;
• use any part of the platform or its data to build, train, benchmark or supply a competing or substitute product, service or dataset;
• use automated systems — including scraping, bulk API access, or AI/ML training — to extract, mine, aggregate or reconstruct our data or database.

Commercial use is genuinely welcome by arrangement. Sailmakers, coaches, media, ports, marine businesses and researchers can licence data or features on fair terms — get in touch. This is the deal that keeps the community version free: those who profit from the data contribute back, rather than taking it for nothing.

Vessel & AIS data

Telltale shows live and historical vessel positions from public AIS broadcasts and from receivers operated by Telltale, clubs and community contributors. The underlying AIS radio signals are public; what Telltale owns and protects is its compiled database — the combined, curated, quality-controlled historical dataset built across many sources, receivers and time, together with the software, presentation and any derived data. This compilation is protected by database and related rights and may not be copied, extracted, re-utilised or redistributed in whole or in any substantial part — whether for payment or free of charge — except through Telltale’s own features or under a licence.

If you operate a receiver that feeds Telltale: you keep full freedom to use your own receiver’s raw output however you like, and you grant Telltale a licence to include it in the community dataset. We will not sell your individual contribution out from under you — the shared dataset stays a shared community asset. Data drawn from third-party networks (e.g. aisstream.io, AISHub, and club results providers) remains subject to their terms; Telltale grants you no rights in third-party data beyond viewing it within the service, and you must not extract or redistribute it.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or removal requests: contact@telltaleracing.com — or ask your club.