Privacy and Cookies Policy

AskChief Ltd ("we", "us"), is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. The website at www.askchief.ai (our "Website"), and Services are meant to assist marine and shipping companies to automate troubleshooting, defect reporting, and predictive maintenance across their fleets, cutting downtime, lowering costs, and freeing technical teams to focus on high-impact, strategic initiatives.

This Privacy and Cookie Policy ("Policy") applies to our Customers and if you want to know more about our services.

The Policy explains how we collect your Personal Data and why we are allowed to do so (on what legal basis), how Personal Data provided will be used by us, and the cookies on our Website. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your Personal Data and how we will treat it.

For the purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the UK Data Protection Act 2018 the Data Controller is AskChief Ltd. "Personal Data" has the meaning given in the UK GDPR.

We will only collect information that is necessary for us to provide you with our services. If we do not need the information, then we will only collect it if you agree (consent). However, if certain information is necessary but you do not want us to collect it, unfortunately we will not be able to provide the services to you. We will flag this to you in each case.

"You" (or "you") means a marine superintendent, chief engineer and/or other relevant stakeholder at a marine or shipping company that accesses or interacts with our Website and Services. "Authorized Users" includes any employees, contractors, and/or other users who access or interact with our Website and Services, as authorized or procured by You.

Our appointed representative in the European Union (EU)

If you are based in the UK/EEA and have concerns or questions about your Personal Data, you can contact our representative. Their contact details are AskChief Legal (legal@askchief.ai).

Your personal information

Information we collect and use

We collect and use some or all of the following types of information from you when you use the Website or when we provide our services:

Information that you provide by filling in forms on our Website.
Information you or an Authorized User provide when reporting a problem with the Website or our Services.
Personal details for you, such as first name, last name, email address, country of location, time zone, language or any other information input when using the Website or our Services.
Personal details for an Authorized User such as first name, last name, gender, country of location or residence, native language or any other information input when using the Website or our services.
Financial and billing information e.g. your invoices and payment receipts/confirmation (but not your credit or debit card details).
If you or an Authorized User contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence including email addresses.
We may also ask you or an Authorized User to complete surveys that we use for research purposes, although response is not mandatory.
Technical information such as details of your or an Authorized User's visits to the Website including, IP address, traffic data, weblogs and other communication data, and the resources that you or the Authorized User accesses.
Device type, browser type, and language.

We do not collect any special categories of data about you (i.e. information about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health, and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

This Website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins (such as our payment provider) and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our Website, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit.

Uses made of your information

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your Personal Data, and the reasons to do so. We have also provided reasons why collecting certain information is important for us.

Note that we may process your Personal Data for more than one reason depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please contact us if you need details about the specific reason we are relying on to use your Personal Data if this is not provided below.

Purpose/Activity	Type of data	Reason for using your Personal Data and why we are allowed to do so
To register you as a new customer	First name, last name, email address	Performance of a contract with you i.e. so that we can provide you with our services
To manage our relationship with you which will include: (a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy; (b) Asking you or an Authorized User to leave a review, testimonial or take a survey	First name, last name, email address	(a) Performance of a contract with you i.e. so that we can provide you with our services; (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation i.e. we are required to do so by law; (c) Necessary for our legitimate interests i.e. to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services
To administer and protect our business and this Website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data)	First name, last name, email address, technical information	(a) Necessary for our legitimate interests i.e. for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and for the growth or improvement of our business; (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation i.e. we are required to do so by law
To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, customer relationships and experiences	Technical information	Necessary for our legitimate interests i.e. to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business
To make suggestions and recommendations to you or an Authorized User about goods or services that may be of interest	First name, last name, email address and marketing preferences	Necessary for our legitimate interests i.e. to develop our products/services and grow our business

Change of purpose

We will only use your Personal Data for the reasons for which we collected it, unless we reasonably think that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is very similar to the original reason. If you wish to get an explanation as to how using the Personal Data for the new reason is closely related with the original reason, please contact us. If we need to use your Personal Data for an unrelated reason, we will tell you and we will explain the reason which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may use your Personal Data without your knowledge or consent, as we have explained in the table, where this is required or permitted by law.

Marketing

In addition to the above uses we may use your or an Authorized User's information (and, where consented, permit selected third parties to use your information), to notify you or the Authorized User about goods or services which may be of interest to you. Where we do this, we will contact you or the Authorized User by electronic means (e-mail or SMS) only if you or the Authorized User have consented to such communication. If you or an Authorized User do not want to use your data in this way, please either (i) tick the relevant box situated on the form on which we collect data (for example, the registration form); (ii) unsubscribe from our electronic communications using the method indicated in the relevant communication; or (iii) inform us at any time by contacting us at the contact details set out below.

Sharing your information with others

We share Personal Data with the third party service providers (our "sub-processors") that we engage to host, operate and support our Website and Services. The complete and current list of our approved sub-processors, together with the purpose for which each is engaged and the region in which it processes data, is set out in Annex 2 (Sub-Processors) to our Data Processing Agreement, which forms part of our agreement with each Customer and is available on request. We do not share Personal Data with any third party that is not listed in that Annex, except as described below in this section.

Advertising

We use cookies and similar technologies on our public marketing website at www.askchief.ai to understand how that website is used and, where you have consented, for advertising and conversion measurement purposes. Where you submit your email address through a form on that website, we may share it in hashed form with Google to measure the effectiveness of our advertising. We do not use advertising or ad-personalisation cookies within the AskChief Platform, and we do not share Platform content or Customer documents for any advertising purpose.

We may share your or an Authorized User's Personal Data with any member of our corporate group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries.

We may also share your or an Authorized User's Personal Data with third parties:

in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may share Personal Data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets; or
if we or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case Personal Data held by us about our customers will be one of the transferred assets; or
if we are under a duty to share Personal Data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our Website Terms and Conditions or Terms of Service; or
to protect our rights, property, or safety or that of our affiliated entities and our users and any third party we interact with to provide the Website.

We may share your or an Authorized User's details in relation to selected third parties only, only where consented to such selected third parties, informing them about certain goods or services, which may be of interest to you or the Authorized User.

Except as explained and if necessary in order for us to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you, an Authorised User and us, we will not share your or an Authorized User's data with third parties unless we have asked you or the Authorized User and you or the Authorized User have given express agreement to do so.

Storing your data

Security

We maintain technical and organisational security measures appropriate to the risk. They are described in full in Annex 3 to our Data Processing Agreement, and in summary are:

Encryption in transit. All traffic between your browser or mobile device and our Services is encrypted using industry-standard protocols, maintained in line with prevailing good practice. Traffic between our application and our service providers is likewise encrypted in transit and authenticated using scoped, short-lived credentials.
Encryption at rest. All data we hold is encrypted at rest using industry-standard encryption, within storage services located in United Kingdom and European Union regions.
Access control. Access to Personal Data is restricted to personnel with a genuine business need, on a least-privilege basis. Multi-factor authentication is available on all accounts and can be enforced across a Customer's organisation on request.
Segregation. Each Customer's data is held in a logically segregated environment and is not commingled with the data of any other customer.

We will tell you, any affected Customer and any applicable regulator about a Personal Data breach where we are required to do so by law, and we will notify an affected Customer within 24 hours of becoming aware of a Personal Data breach affecting their data.

No method of transmitting information over the internet is completely secure. We take responsibility for applying the security measures described above, and those set out in our Data Processing Agreement, to the Personal Data and the Customer materials in our care.

Keeping your Personal Data up to date

If your or an Authorized User's Personal details change you may update them on the AskChief dashboard, or by contacting us using the contact details below. If you have any questions about how we use data collected which relates to you or an Authorized User, please contact us by sending a request by email to the contact details below.

If you or an Authorized User ask us to update Personal Data, we will do our best to update Personal Data within 14 days of any new or updated Personal Data being provided to us, so that the Personal Data we hold about you or an Authorized User is as accurate and up to date as possible.

How long we keep Personal Data

We will hold Personal Data like names, addresses, email addresses and contact details for as long as you or an Authorized User are subscribed to our services and for the period we are required to retain this information by applicable UK tax law (currently 6 years).

We will hold Customer Technical Data for as long as you or an Authorized User are subscribed to our services and for the duration defined by the DPA.

Where we store your Personal Data

All data we hold is stored and processed within the United Kingdom and the EU. Our infrastructure, including document storage, search indexes, application databases and the AI models used to generate responses, runs on the cloud providers listed in Annex 2 to our Data Processing Agreement, in United Kingdom or EU regions. We may move a given service between those providers, but always within the United Kingdom and the EU.

Our infrastructure is resilient, and our backups are geographically redundant within the EU and the United Kingdom, so that we hold the backups needed to restore the service in the event of a regional failure.

We will tell you or an Authorized User if data we collect will be sent to or stored at a destination outside the United Kingdom and/or the EU. If we send Personal Data to a country that does not have adequate safeguards in the view of the United Kingdom and/or EU authorities, we will put in place standard contractual clauses approved by the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office and/or the EU Commission, together with any other appropriate safeguards needed.

If you would like to be informed on how Google may use your Personal Data, including for non-personalised and personalized advertisements that are shown to you and others, please review Google's Privacy & Terms site.

If you would like further information, please contact us (see "Contact" below).

Information that is not Personal Data

Much of what the AskChief Platform holds is not Personal Data: your Company's vessel technical documentation, equipment manuals, safety management system documentation, maintenance and defect records, inspection reports, and the outputs the Platform generates from them. This is your organisation's confidential commercial information, not information about an individual, so the data protection rights described in this Policy do not apply to it.

We handle it to the same standard. In summary: it is held in a logically segregated environment and never commingled with another customer's; we use it only to provide the Services to you; we do not use it to train, fine-tune or evaluate any AI model; we do not disclose it to anyone outside the sub-processors listed in Annex 2 to our Data Processing Agreement.

We may produce aggregated and anonymised statistics from the information in the Platform—for example, how often a class of equipment fails across the fleets we support. These statistics cannot be traced back to you, your organisation or any vessel, and we use them to operate and improve the Services and to produce industry benchmarks. We do not use your information to train AI models.

Those commitments are contractual, and are set out in Clause 11.2 and Clause 11.7.7 of our SaaS Agreement and in Clause 4, Clause 8 and Annex 3 of our Data Processing Agreement. This section is a summary for convenience and does not vary, add to or replace them.

Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation you and any Authorized Users have a number of important rights free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

access to Personal Data and to certain other supplementary information that this Policy is already designed to address
require us to correct any mistakes in information which we hold
require the erasure of Personal Data concerning you or an Authorized User in certain situations
receive the Personal Data concerning you or an Authorized User which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations
object at any time to processing of Personal Data for direct marketing
object to decisions being taken by automated means which produce legal effects concerning you or an Authorized User or similarly significantly affect you
object in certain other situations to our continued processing of Personal Data
otherwise restrict our processing of Personal Data in certain circumstances
claim compensation for damages caused by breach of any data protection laws.

If you or an Authorized User would like to exercise any of those rights, please:

email, call or write to us using the details below;
let us have enough information about who you or Authorized User are e.g. name, email address;
let us have proof of address (a copy of driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill); and
let us know the information to which your request relates, including any account or reference numbers, if you have them.

You or an Authorized User will not have to pay a fee to access Personal Data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if the request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with the request in these circumstances.

If you or an Authorized User wish to withdraw your consent at any time, please contact us at legal@askchief.ai or click Unsubscribe in any of our emails.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Our Services use artificial intelligence. Specifically, the Platform uses large language models provided by third parties, listed in Annex 2 to our Data Processing Agreement, to generate responses grounded in the documentation supplied by our Customers and in publicly available reference material.

You will always know when you are interacting with AI. The Platform identifies AI-generated content as such at the point of interaction.
Your data is not used to train AI models. We do not use your data, your prompts or queries, your organisation's documents, or the outputs generated for you, to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve any AI model, whether ours or a third party's. Our agreements with our AI model providers prohibit them from doing so.
Your data stays within your organisation. Information belonging to one Customer is never accessible from another Customer's environment, and no information from one conversation is carried into another.
AI output is advisory. Responses generated by the Platform are decision support. They cite the source documents they rely on, and they are not a substitute for professional judgement or for your organisation's own procedures.

We are the provider of an AI system for the purposes of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the EU AI Act), and we have assessed the Platform as not being a high-risk AI system under that Regulation. We keep that assessment under review and will update it if the Platform or the Regulation changes.

Our contractual commitments to Customers in relation to the EU AI Act, including the commitment not to use your data to train AI models, are set out in our SaaS Agreement and form part of our agreement with each Customer.

How to complain

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information.

The General Data Protection Regulation and the UK GDPR also give you the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the European Union (or European Economic Area) state or the UK where you work, normally live or where any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred.

The supervisory authority in the EU is: Hellenic Data Protection Authority, Kifissias 1-3, PC 115 23, Athens, Greece. Telephone: +30-210 6475600 or e-mail: contact@dpa.gr.

The supervisory authority in the UK is: Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF, United Kingdom. Telephone: 0303 123 1113. Website: ico.org.uk.

Changes to our privacy policy

We can change and update this Policy at any time. If you are a Customer, you will be informed of any changes we may make to our Policy in the future and you can find the new Policy on our Website, too. Your continued use of the services and the Website shall mean you have accepted the updated Policy.

Information about our use of cookies

Our Website uses cookies to distinguish you or an Authorized User from other users of our Website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our Website and also allows us to improve our site.

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive.

We use the following cookies:

Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our Website or make use of e-billing services.
Analytical or performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our Website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our Website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our Website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).

You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:

Cookie Title	Purpose	More information
refreshToken, AUTH_SESSION_ID, KEYCLOAK_IDENTITY, KEYCLOAK_SESSION, KC_RESTART	These cookies are essential for logging into the dashboard.
_gcl_au	Set by Google Ads (conversion linker) to attribute enquiries to the advertising campaign that led to them.
_ga, _ga_*	Used by Google Analytics, where enabled, to help us understand how visitors use our marketing website.
ph_phc_481bhKHO0bO1InVWAjDfhz76heEOoZQ7W1QqrgbBuxB_posthogph_phc_481bhKHO0bO1InVWAjDfhz76heEOoZQ7W1QqrgbBuxB_posthog_opt_out	Used by PostHog (our product analytics provider) to identify a user/session across page loads and to remember opt-out preferences.	PostHog documentation
ph_phc_*_posthog (within the Platform)	Set by PostHog inside the authenticated Platform to deliver feature flags and to understand how the Platform is used. These are not advertising cookies.	PostHog documentation

Where our cookies are used

It is important to distinguish between two parts of our service:

our public marketing website at www.askchief.ai, which uses strictly necessary, analytical or performance, and functionality cookies as described above; and
the AskChief Platform, the authenticated application used by our Customers and their Authorized Users ashore and on board vessels, which uses strictly necessary cookies required to authenticate a user and maintain a session, together with product analytics cookies set by PostHog which we also use to deliver feature flags. No advertising or ad-personalisation cookies are set within the Platform.

Third-party cookies

The cookies described above include cookies placed by the third-party providers named in the table above, being Google (Google Ads and, where enabled, Google Analytics) and PostHog (product analytics and feature flags). Each of those providers is engaged by us, acts under our instructions and is subject to a written agreement with us. We determine which providers may set cookies through our Website and the Platform, we are responsible for those cookies, and we keep the table above up to date.

Blocking or disabling cookies

Strictly necessary cookies cannot be disabled. They are required in order to log in to the Platform and to maintain your session. If you, an Authorized User, or a network policy, firewall or proxy blocks strictly necessary cookies, you will not be able to log in to or use the Platform.

Analytical or performance cookies and functionality cookies may be blocked or disabled without affecting your ability to log in to or use the Platform. Some Platform features are delivered using feature flags served by our product analytics provider; where that provider cannot be reached, those features may be unavailable, and the list of affected features is available from us on request.

Customers operating restricted network environments, in particular on board vessels, may block analytical and performance cookies and the associated third-party domains. Because feature flags are served over the same connection, we recommend that such Customers instead permit the analytics endpoint we publish, so that all Platform features remain available. On request, we will provide the list of domains and IP addresses required for this purpose.

On request, we will provide a Customer with the list of domains and IP ranges required for the Platform to operate, so that the Customer may permit only those endpoints on its network.

Except for strictly necessary cookies, all cookies expire no later than 12 months after they are set.

Contact

All questions, comments and requests regarding this Privacy and Cookie Policy should be addressed to legal@askchief.ai.

Last updated: October 2026