Acceptable Use Policy

Why these rules exist

Most of the people on SailCoach are children. They are between about eight and eighteen, they are here because they sail, and a lot of what the platform holds about them is personal: what a coach thinks of them, what they are worried about, photographs and video of them on the water, where they sail and when.

That single fact decides everything in this policy. A rule that would be fussy on a platform for adults is not fussy here. If you are an adult using SailCoach, you are a guest in a space built for children, and you are expected to behave accordingly.

The rest of this document is the detail. If you only remember one line, remember this one: behave as you would if the sailor's parent were standing behind you reading the screen.

Who this applies to

Everyone with a SailCoach account — sailors, coaches, parents, club officers, volunteers and administrators — and anyone accessing the platform without an account.

This policy forms part of the Terms of Service. Coaches, club officers and volunteers are also bound by the Code of Conduct, which sets a higher standard because of the position they hold.

These are the rules a sailor can lose their account for breaking, and most of our sailors are children — so they should exist in language a child can read. They do not yet. There is a plain-language page about privacy at Privacy for Young Sailors; there is no plain-language version of these rules. We are writing one.

Treating people well

Do not:

• harass, bully, threaten, intimidate or humiliate anyone, including in a direct message, a session note, a comment, a reaction or a report;
• write coaching feedback that attacks a sailor rather than their sailing. There is a real difference between "your starts are costing you the first beat" and "you bottled it again". The first is coaching. The second is not, and on a platform where a twelve-year-old reads it on their own phone, it is not acceptable;
• use a sailor's private assessment, medical note, weight, rating or percentile to belittle, shame or punish them;
• discriminate against or abuse anyone because of their age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity;
• post sexual content, violent content, content that promotes self-harm or eating disorders, or content that promotes hatred or extremism;
• pressure a sailor about their body weight. Weight is recorded on SailCoach as an optional, private measurement with a specific and narrow purpose. It is not a target to push a child towards;
• encourage anyone to sail beyond their competence, ignore a safety briefing, or break the racing rules or a club's rules.

If you are a coach and you are angry, write it tomorrow.

Contacting children

• Do not use SailCoach to contact a child you have no coaching reason to contact. The messaging feature exists so a coach and a sailor, or a coach and a parent, can talk about sailing. It is not a general social feature and it is not a way to reach a child you happen to share a club with. The platform does not currently stop you: two members of the same club can open a direct conversation with each other with no connection, no parental approval and no notification to anybody. That fallback was built for club-wide messages, it is wider than it should be, and narrowing it is the first item on our safeguarding register — see Children's Code, standard 1. The rule stands whatever the software allows.
• Do not move a conversation with a child off SailCoach to a private channel — a personal phone number, a social media account, a gaming platform, a private group — where nobody can see it and no parent can review it. Club and coaching communication should be on the club's channels or here, where there is a record.
• Do not ask a child to keep a conversation secret from their parents or their club. Ever.
• Do not arrange to meet a child one to one outside a club or club-organised activity.
• Do not ask a child for personal contact details, photographs, or their location beyond what coaching genuinely requires.

What actually watches this. Messages on SailCoach are automatically checked against a short list of abusive words. There is no grooming detection. We have written a scanner for contact details being exchanged, requests to move to another app and secrecy language, and it is not connected to the sending of a message — so none of the phrases in the list above would trip anything today. Connecting it is our first safeguarding change and it has a date in the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy. We are not going to deter anybody with a control we are not running.

What does exist: messages cannot be edited or deleted, so what you send stays. Every message sent is logged with the time, the account, the IP address and the device, and every report is logged. A parent or guardian of a sailor under 18 can read their child's whole message history at any time, without asking anybody. That record, the report button, and the people who read a safeguarding email are what protect a child here today. It is written here so that everyone knows it before they type.

If any of this describes something you have seen, do not handle it yourself. Go to Reporting something at the end of this document.

Other people's data

A sailor's training record is theirs. A coach's access to it is a permission, not ownership.

Do not:

• share a sailor's training data, coach notes, feedback, private assessment, race analysis, GPS tracks, ratings or percentiles outside SailCoach — in a club newsletter, a WhatsApp group, a selection meeting document, a social media post, a blog, or anywhere else — without the sailor's agreement, and the agreement of their parent where the sailor is under 18. Showing a child's analysis to their own parent is fine. Circulating it is not;
• share a sailor's medical note, emergency contact, date of birth, phone number or home details with anyone who does not need it for the coaching or the session in front of them. A squad medical note is readable by every coach listed on that squad, not only by the one running the group that day — which makes this a rule rather than a limit the software imposes. Read what you need for the sailors in front of you, and let it go no further;
• use the sailor history and sail-number lookup to build up information about a child you do not coach. Looking up your own results, or the results of a sailor you coach, is what the feature is for. Systematically researching other people's children is not. We do not log these lookups today — restricting the lookup to your own sail numbers and the sailors you coach, rate-limiting it and logging every query are dated commitments in our DPIA. Until then nothing catches this, and the rule rests on you;
• use anyone's data for marketing, recruitment, scouting, journalism or research without asking them first;
• take a screenshot of another user's private content and pass it on, except when you are reporting a concern to us, to a club welfare officer or to the police — in which case please do.

If you receive data you should not have, tell us at [email protected] and delete it.

Images and video of children

Photographs and video of children are the area where good intentions cause the most harm, so the rules are absolute:

• Do not upload a photograph or video of a child without the permission required by the Photography, Video and Image Use Policy. That means the permission of the child's parent, and the child's own agreement where they are old enough to give it.
• Do not upload an image of a child in a state of undress — changing, showering, in swimwear out of the water.
• Do not caption or tag an image in a way that identifies where a child will be at a given time.
• Do not download an image of a child from SailCoach and repost it anywhere else.
• If a parent or a sailor asks for an image to be taken down, take it down. You do not get to argue about it first.
• Never upload sexual images of a child. This is not a platform rule, it is a criminal offence, and we will report it to the police immediately and without warning you.

Being who you say you are

• Do not create an account in someone else's name, or let someone else use yours.
• Do not claim to be a coach when you are not, and do not claim a qualification, a DBS check, an RYA award or a safeguarding certificate you do not hold. Qualification records are verified by clubs, not by us; the free-text "certifications" box on your profile and the qualifications list on a public coach page are verified by nobody at all, and nothing on the screen tells a parent which is which. That makes a false entry there something a parent simply believes. Entering one is a serious breach of this policy and we will tell the club.
• Do not claim another sailor's race record, results or track as your own, and do not link a sail number to your account knowing it belongs to somebody else.
• Do not misrepresent a sailor's results, ratings or history to a club, a selector or a governing body.
• Do not create an account for a child without being their parent or having their parent's agreement.

Race results and race data

SailCoach holds published race results and GPS tracking collected from public sources, including results about people who have never used the platform. Treat that corpus with more care than the source websites did, not less.

Do not:

• bulk-export, republish or redistribute the results corpus, the identity clusters or the GPS tracks;
• use it to compile lists, rankings or dossiers about named sailors outside SailCoach, particularly named children;
• upload a results file, a tracking export or a spreadsheet that contains personal data you have no right to share;
• enter false results to move your own rating, or somebody else's;
• attempt to defeat the checks that keep self-reported results from carrying the same weight as official ones.

Results shown on SailCoach can be wrong. If you spot an error in a record about you or your child, tell us at [email protected] and we will correct or remove it — see Your Data Rights.

Security and automated access

Do not:

• attempt to access an account, a club, a squad or a record you are not entitled to see, including by changing an identifier in a URL or an API request to see what comes back;
• scan, probe, fuzz, brute-force or load-test the platform;
• scrape the platform, or access it with a bot, crawler, script or automated tool. Our API is for our own applications. If you want programmatic access, ask at [email protected];
• circumvent rate limits, authentication, access controls or the moderation and audit logging;
• upload malware, or content designed to break, overload or interfere with the platform or anyone using it;
• reverse engineer the platform other than to the extent the law says you may.

Researching a vulnerability is welcome; testing one on live data is not. If you think you have found a security flaw, report it to [email protected] under the Security and Vulnerability Disclosure Policy. That policy is the authorised route: follow it and we will not treat your research as a breach of this policy or pursue you for it. Do not access, modify or retain anybody else's data while investigating, and do not publish the flaw before we have had a chance to fix it.

What happens when a rule is broken

We respond proportionately. Where we can, we start at the bottom of this ladder; where a child is at risk, we start at the top.

We may also correct or withdraw data — for example removing a false qualification, unlinking a wrongly claimed race record, or telling a club that a claim made to them through SailCoach was untrue.

Where we go outside the platform. If we believe a child has been harmed or is at risk of harm, we will pass information to the child's club and its welfare officer, to the RYA, to the relevant local authority's children's services or designated officer, or to the police — whichever is appropriate. We will do that whether or not the person concerned agrees, and if telling them first would put a child at greater risk or interfere with an investigation, we will not tell them first. The Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy sets out how those decisions are made.

We will always tell you in writing what we have decided and why, unless doing so would put a child at risk or obstruct a police investigation.

Appealing a decision

If we restrict, suspend or remove your account or your content, you can challenge it.

• Email [email protected] within 28 days, quoting the decision and saying why you think it is wrong. Send any evidence you have.
• An appeal is handled as a stage 2 review under the Complaints Policy: we acknowledge it within 2 working days and give a decision within 20 working days. If it is going to take longer, we will tell you why and when to expect an answer.
• We will set out our reasoning in writing, and tell you what we relied on.
• The Complaints Policy sets out the independence we guarantee at each stage, including what we do when the only person who could otherwise review a decision is the person who made it. That policy governs; nothing here narrows it.
• An appeal does not lift a restriction while it is being considered, and where a child's safety is the issue, the restriction stays in place until the appeal is decided.
• We cannot reverse a referral to the police or to children's services, and we will not withdraw one because you have appealed.

If you are unhappy with how we handled a complaint or an appeal, the Complaints Policy explains how to escalate it. Where your complaint is about your personal data, you can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Reporting something

There are two routes, and it matters which one you use.

If a child may be at risk — this is urgent

Email [email protected].

That address is monitored, and we acknowledge every message to it within one working day. Tell us what you saw, where, when, and who was involved. Do not investigate it yourself, and do not confront the person.

Use this route for anything involving a child's safety or welfare: inappropriate contact with a child, grooming behaviour, sexual content, bullying, a disclosure a child has made to you, an image that should not be there, or an adult behaving in a way that worries you — whether it happened on SailCoach, at a club or anywhere else you have reason to tell us about.

If a child is in immediate danger, call 999 first. Then tell us. The Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy sets out what we do next, including when we refer a matter on without the reporter's agreement.

Everything else

Email [email protected].

You can also use the report button on the message itself, but know what it does today: the report is recorded and the message is flagged, and nothing alerts anybody. There is no screen that shows the queue, and for a direct message started in the app the report does not reach the club's administrators either — in practice only we can retrieve it, by going and looking. Use the button if you want the record; use the email if you want an answer. If a child may be at risk, use the route above instead.

We acknowledge reports to [email protected] within 2 working days. Use this route for spam, abusive language, false qualifications, misuse of someone's data, a disputed result, scraping, or any other breach of this policy that does not put a child at risk. The Complaints Policy sets out the full process.

Reports made in good faith are welcome even when they turn out to be nothing. We would much rather look at ten things that were fine than miss the one that was not. Deliberately false or malicious reports are themselves a breach of this policy.

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This is version 1.0.0 of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective 17 September 2026. It is reviewed annually, and sooner if something we learn tells us it should be.