Shiptrail

Privacy and terms

What Shiptrail keeps while you find ships, what it never does, and the terms for using it.

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Last changed 3 November 2026

A cargo ship in silhouette against a low sun on the Western Scheldt, a plume of smoke trailing from her funnel
Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0

Privacy

Shiptrail has no accounts, no ads and no tracking across other sites. It never sells or shares what it counts. Here is everything it keeps, and everything your browser fetches from others while you use it.

What Shiptrail counts

  • A visitOnce per browser session the page sends one small note: the site that sent you (its name only, never the page), the kind of page you landed on (and its address, only for ship, port, hub and guide pages, which are public), whether the map opened a ship, a port, a route, a replay or a search (never which one), the campaign tag of the link you followed if it carried one (its utm_source or ref), your rough region (as Cloudflare reads it from your connection), your local hour, whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer, your browser's first language, whether you opened the installed app, and whether this browser has been here before. Visits are counted by the hour. Your address, your browser's full name, any identifier and any time finer than the hour are never kept.
  • A searchWhen you search the map for a ship that is not on it (three letters or more), Shiptrail counts the words, your rough region, local hour, device and language, and whether a ship was found, by the hour. While you type, a one-way scramble of your address and browser joins your keystrokes into one search; it lives in memory for that moment and is never stored.
  • The installed appHow many times it was opened each hour, and how many of those were a device's first that day. Two numbers and the hour.
  • What the servers recordErrors and the machines' own health, never a visitor's address. When one address sends too many requests, the log says how many were refused and a scrambled tag for the network, not the address.
  • CookiesNone for visitors.

What stays on your device

Your settings (units, time zone, clock, text size, map style and layers), where you left the map, your saved ships (My ships), the last five ships you opened from the search box, a 15-minute copy of the names of the ships on the map so the search box need not download them on every page, and a flag saying this browser has been here before. The browser also notes that this session has been counted, how far back the Back button can go and when the map last reloaded itself, and keeps the installed app's last check-in.

All of it is kept in your browser's storage and never sent to Shiptrail, except two yes-or-no answers: "been here before" in the visit note above, and whether an open of the installed app is the device's first that day. Clearing the site's data in your browser removes them.

Who else your browser talks to

To draw the map and the pages, your browser fetches from these services, which see your connection's address and what was asked for, under their own policies:

  • CloudflareCarries every request to Shiptrail.
  • Map tiles and chartsCARTO, OpenFreeMap, OpenStreetMap, OpenSeaMap, and NOAA's nautical charts when you choose them.
  • cdnjsCloudflare's library host, for the map's drawing library.
  • Ship photosWikimedia Commons, and now and then the photo's own host, for a photo found through Openverse.
  • RainViewerFor weather radar, when you turn it on.
  • Open-MeteoFor the weather on a ship's page.

Agents and crawlers

Search engines, assistants and other crawlers are welcome on every page. Shiptrail's MCP endpoint, /mcp, described on Shiptrail for agents, logs no tool call; an error is logged with the tool's name and no address. Shiptrail counts MCP calls per tool and per hour, with the name of the client that connected, never what was asked and never an address, kept 30 days.

search_ships asks the same search as the map's box for ships off the map, so an agent's ship search is counted like a person's: the words, rough region, hour, device and language, kept 30 days.

Questions

Write to [email protected] about anything on this page.

Terms

  • Free to useLook up ships and ports, link to any page, quote and cite what you find with a link back, and build Shiptrail into your own tools through the pages or the MCP endpoint described on Shiptrail for agents.
  • Not for navigationPositions, destinations and arrival times are what ships broadcast over AIS, relayed by receivers and passed on as they come. Crews type destinations and ETAs by hand, positions can be minutes old or wrong, and some waters are not covered. Never use Shiptrail to steer, plan a passage or make a safety decision.
  • As isShiptrail is offered as is, with no promise that it is complete, correct, current or always online, and the people who run it are not liable for anything that comes from using it.
  • Be kind to itCrawlers and agents may read every page. /api/ is the site's own plumbing and is not a public API: use the pages or the MCP endpoint instead. Each address has a fair share of requests a minute; past it, the site asks you to wait (429 with Retry-After). Do not try to get round the limits, overload the site or pass it off as your own.
  • ChangesThese terms and this policy may change as the site does; the date at the top of the page says when they last did.

Credits

Each source is credited the way its provider asks. The whole list, ports and sea routes included, is in About's Data sources and credits.