NCI Porthole

Terms of use

Last updated: 2 October 2026. These terms are between you and J W Lockton Ltd for the use of NCI Porthole.

Agreement

J W Lockton Ltd (company number 15303847) provides Porthole. Our registered office is Lockton House Business Centre, King Street, Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, LN12 2EQ, United Kingdom.

Using an invitation, signing in, or submitting a station application means you agree to these terms. If you are a Station Manager, Deputy, or other officer turning tools on for a station, you also agree on behalf of that station, and you confirm you have authority to do so. The station is then our customer for those tools.

These terms sit alongside the station’s constitution, standing orders, and charity rules. Where a station rule is stricter about behaviour on duty, follow that rule as well.

The service

Porthole helps an invited station plan watches, manage crew, and run the station tools that station has switched on. Access to the station side is by invitation. A public on-watch page, a public application form, and a public calculator may be available when the station publishes them.

Porthole supports station organisation. It does not replace Coastguard procedures, station standing orders, or emergency communications. In an emergency at sea call 999 and ask for the Coastguard.

Your account

  • Keep your password private and use a strong one.
  • Use the service for genuine station duties, notices, and the tools your role allows.
  • Do not post personal information about other people beyond what the station’s work needs.
  • Treat private calendar links as confidential. Anyone with the link can see the watches it lists.
  • Station Managers and Deputies may suspend or remove access when membership ends or these terms, or station rules, are broken.

Acceptable use

You must not:

  • try to access a station, account, or record you are not allowed to see
  • interfere with the service, or probe it for weaknesses
  • upload malware, or content you have no right to share
  • use the service to harass anyone, or to store information the station has no proper reason to hold
  • share your sign-in, or let someone else book or act as you

Intellectual property

We keep the Porthole software, design, and name. You keep the content your station and its members enter. You give us permission to host, display, and transmit that content so we can provide the service, and so the station can use its own records. That permission ends when the content is deleted, except for copies kept for the retention periods in the privacy notice and in the schedule below.

Availability

We aim for a reliable service. We do not guarantee uninterrupted access, and we may need to change, suspend, or withdraw a feature. A station should keep an offline fallback for critical lookout periods.

Data processing schedule

This schedule is the contract UK GDPR Article 28 requires between the station, as controller, and J W Lockton Ltd, as processor, for personal data the station controls. Our own separate purposes are described in the privacy notice. Words such as personal data, controller, processor, and processing have the meanings in UK GDPR.

Subject matter, duration, nature, and purpose

The subject matter is personal data entered in Porthole for that station. Processing lasts while the station uses the service, and for the retention periods needed to finish deletion, backups, and the station’s own retention settings. The nature of the processing is hosting, storing, displaying, organising, and transmitting that data, and sending the notices and exports the product provides. The purpose is to run the station’s rota and the tools the station has switched on.

People and types of information

Data subjects are members, applicants, next of kin, directory contacts, people named in incidents or letters, and anyone else an officer records. The types of personal data are those described in the privacy notice, including contact details, rota records, messages, and, where the station uses those tools, health information, disability information, and information about criminal offences.

Our obligations

  • We process station personal data on documented instructions from the station, including these terms and the actions officers take in the product, unless UK law requires something else. If we believe an instruction breaks UK data protection law, we will tell the station.
  • People who operate the service are under a duty of confidence and see station records only as needed to run and support the service.
  • We keep measures appropriate to the risk: access limited by station and role, passwords stored as hashes, session cookies that page scripts cannot read, and separation of each station’s records.
  • We will assist the station, so far as we reasonably can, with rights requests, security, breach notices, and data protection impact assessments that the station is legally required to carry out and that relate to Porthole.
  • If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting the station’s records, we will tell the station without undue delay and provide the information the station reasonably needs to meet its own duties.
  • When a station is removed, we delete its records from the live service. Copies in host backups are overwritten in the ordinary backup cycle and are not used for anything else.
  • On a reasonable written request, we will provide the information reasonably needed to show that we are meeting this schedule. That is the audit the law requires. It is not an open-ended inspection of the hosting provider.

The station’s obligations

The station is responsible for having a lawful reason for the personal data it enters, for telling people about that processing, for the accuracy of what officers type, and for not asking us to do something that would break data protection law. The station will name a person we can contact about privacy questions for that station.

Sub-processors and international transfers

The station gives us general permission to use sub-processors, and instructs us to host the live service in the Netherlands and to make the further transfers the privacy notice describes. Those transfers are required for email, optional push and WhatsApp, optional weather, optional greeting text, maps on the calculator, and the hosting provider’s control plane in the United States.

The sub-processors and recipients are Railway (hosting in the Netherlands, with its control plane in the United States), Resend (email), the member’s browser push service, Pushover where a member connects it, a WhatsApp gateway and WhatsApp where the station enables that channel, Davis WeatherLink where the station connects weather, a language-model host where the station uses one for a short group greeting, Esri, unpkg, and jsDelivr when the calculator is opened, and an alert destination we configure for service faults.

We will put a new kind of provider on this page before we start using it for personal data, or as soon as we reasonably can afterwards. A station that objects on reasonable data protection grounds may stop using the affected part of the service. We remain responsible for a sub-processor’s processing of station personal data to the extent UK GDPR requires.

Hosting in the Netherlands relies on the UK’s adequacy regulations for the European Economic Area. Transfers to the United States and other countries outside the UK and the EEA rely on the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the recipient is certified, and otherwise on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, as set out in the provider’s data processing terms.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that the law of England and Wales does not allow a contract to limit or exclude.

Subject to that, our total liability to a station, and to the people who use Porthole for that station, arising out of these terms or the service in any 12 month period, is limited to the charges that station paid us for Porthole in the 12 months before the claim arose. If that station paid no charges in those 12 months, the limit is £100.

Subject to the same rule, we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of goodwill, or for a decision taken in an emergency at sea. The station is responsible for its offline fallback during lookout.

Ending access

You may stop using Porthole at any time. A Station Manager or Deputy may remove a member. We may suspend access where these terms are broken, or where we need to protect the service or other stations. Sections that by their nature should survive, including the processing schedule, intellectual property, and liability, continue to apply.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales will hear disputes. If you use Porthole as a consumer, you may also bring a claim in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom where you live. Nothing in these terms takes away a right the law says you cannot sign away.

Changes

We may update these terms as the service changes. The date at the top will change when we do. Continuing to use Porthole after that date means the new terms apply. The current version is always this page.

Contact

Write to J W Lockton Ltd, Lockton House Business Centre, King Street, Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, LN12 2EQ, United Kingdom. Privacy details are in the privacy notice.