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Legal documentsAcceptable Use Policy

Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

Version 1.0 — last updated 23 September 2026

This policy sets the rules for using Tideward. Tideward holds personal data about seafarers, who often work far from home and depend on the companies that recruit and employ them. These rules protect those seafarers, the companies that work on the platform, and the platform itself.

1. About this policy

1.1 Who we are

Tideward is operated by Rogue Star Marine Software Ltd, trading as RSM Software (company HE496769, registered office Pavlou Aggelinide 21, 3110 Limassol, Cyprus), referred to here as we, us and our. Full company details are on the Legal page.

1.2 Who this policy applies to

This Acceptable Use Policy (the Policy) applies to everyone who uses Tideward:

  • every Customer, meaning the seafarer or company that holds a tenant, and every User who signs in to a tenant;
  • anyone who connects a system to Tideward with an Integration key;
  • anyone who views a seafarer's profile through a Share link;
  • anyone who visits the public website.

It forms part of our Terms of Service (the Terms). Words defined in the Terms have the same meaning here.

1.3 Words we use

  • Tideward: the platform, meaning its portals, its API and integrations, Share links and the public website.
  • Tenant: an account on Tideward for a seafarer, a company (a manning agency, maritime operator, port agent or fleet owner) or a vessel. Users belong to tenants.
  • Unclaimed tenant: a seafarer or company that another company entered on Tideward and that has not yet claimed its own record. The company that entered it is its Steward until the claim.
  • Pool: the seafarers, vessels and companies a company works with on Tideward. A seafarer joins a company's pool only with their consent.
  • Seafarer data: any information about a seafarer held on Tideward, including their profile, documents and certificates, medical fitness records, bank details, sea service, contracts and next of kin.
  • Integration key: an API key, or a webhook signing secret, issued in a tenant's Integration Hub.
  • Share link: a link a seafarer creates to show the profile fields they choose to someone else. The seafarer can revoke it at any time.
  • Content: anything you upload, enter, send or publish through Tideward.

1.4 Responsibility for users and keys

A company Customer is responsible for its Users' compliance with this Policy, and for everything done with the Integration keys issued in its tenant.

2. Lawful recruitment

2.1 No fees charged to seafarers

Regulation 1.4 of the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC 2006) and its Standard A1.4 require that no fees or other charges for recruitment or placement, or for providing employment, are borne by the seafarer, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part. On Tideward this is a binding rule for every Customer, whether or not the country where you operate has ratified MLC 2006. You must not charge, or allow anyone acting for you to charge, a seafarer:

  • a registration, application, processing or placement fee;
  • a deposit, bond or other security for being put forward or placed;
  • any charge presented as the price of something else that is in fact a condition of being recruited or placed;
  • a deduction from wages to recover any of these.

The only costs MLC 2006 allows a seafarer to bear are obtaining their own national statutory medical certificate, national seafarer's book, and passport or similar personal travel document. The cost of visas is borne by the shipowner.

You must not require or ask a seafarer to buy a Seafarer plan, or any other product or service, as a condition of considering, recruiting or placing them. Browsing vacancies and expressing interest in them are free for seafarers on Tideward.

2.2 Licensed recruitment services

If you recruit or place seafarers, you are responsible for holding every licence, certificate or registration that the law requires of a seafarer recruitment and placement service where you operate. If you use another recruitment service or a sub-agent, you must make sure it meets the same requirements and does not charge seafarers fees. Tideward does not license, certify or vet recruitment services.

2.3 Genuine vacancies and honest terms

  • Publish only vacancies that exist and that you are authorised to fill.
  • Describe the position, vessel, wages, contract length and conditions accurately, and do not change them to the seafarer's disadvantage without telling them.
  • Do not use a vacancy, an offer or a contract on Tideward to mislead a seafarer or to obtain their data for another purpose.

2.4 No blacklisting

Do not use Tideward to keep or share lists, marks or other means intended to prevent or deter seafarers from gaining employment for which they are qualified, as Standard A1.4 of MLC 2006 prohibits.

2.5 Minimum age, forced labour and trafficking

  • Do not recruit anyone below the minimum age for work on board ship, which is 16 under Regulation 1.1 of MLC 2006, or higher where the law or the work requires it.
  • Do not use Tideward for any practice that amounts to forced labour, debt bondage or trafficking, such as keeping a seafarer's passport or seafarer's book against their will.

2.6 Tideward is a mediator

Tideward is software and a mediator. It is never the employer of any seafarer, and it does not make hiring decisions. You remain responsible for your recruitment and employment decisions, for your employment agreements with seafarers, and for your obligations under maritime, labour, tax and immigration law. Records kept on Tideward are evidence that helps you meet those obligations; they do not certify that you have met them. The Mediator & employment notice sets this out in full.

3. No discrimination

3.1 The rule

Do not use Tideward to treat a seafarer or any other person less favourably because of their race, colour, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, pregnancy or maternity, marital or family status, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion or belief, political opinion, disability, age, or trade union membership or activity, or any other characteristic protected by the law that applies to you.

3.2 Lawful requirements

The rule in section 3.1 does not stop you from applying a requirement that the law imposes, such as a flag-state rule on nationality, a minimum age or a medical fitness standard, or a requirement that is genuinely necessary for the job and proportionate.

3.3 Adverts and searches

Do not publish adverts, or apply search filters or selection criteria, that exclude people on the grounds in section 3.1 unless section 3.2 permits it.

4. Using seafarer data

4.1 Only for its purpose

Use Seafarer data only to recruit, crew, employ and manage the seafarers you work with, and to meet your legal obligations towards them. Do not use it for any other purpose, including unrelated marketing, and do not sell, rent or give it to anyone who is not entitled to it. For company Customers, our Data Processing Addendum sets out how we process Seafarer data on your behalf; you remain responsible for having a lawful basis for your own processing and for giving seafarers the information data protection law requires.

4.2 Entering a seafarer or a company

  • Before you enter a seafarer, a company or a vessel, search Tideward for it and use the existing record where there is one. Do not create a duplicate of a person, a company or a vessel. Enter a vessel under its correct IMO number.
  • Enter a seafarer only if you have a lawful basis to hold their data, and enter it accurately.
  • As Steward of an Unclaimed tenant, you keep its record accurate and use it only for the purposes in section 4.1. When the seafarer or company claims the record, your right to edit it directly ends, and you propose changes through the change-request process instead.
  • Do not claim a tenant unless you are that person, or you are authorised to act for that company.

4.3 Pools and consent

A seafarer joins your pool only with their consent. Ask for it honestly: tell the seafarer who you are and why you want them in your pool, and do not mislead or pressure them. Respect a seafarer's decision to leave your pool.

4.4 Medical and financial data

Medical fitness records and bank details are among the most sensitive data on Tideward. Give access to them only to the Users who need it for the seafarer's employment, fitness for duty or pay, and do not copy them out of Tideward except for those purposes. Next-of-kin details are data about other people and may be used only to contact them in an emergency or where the law requires.

4.5 Other companies' records

  • Do not try to reach any record your tenant is not entitled to see.
  • Do not try to work out, through Tideward, which other companies a seafarer currently works with.
  • If data about another tenant reaches you by mistake, do not use it, and tell us at legal@rsm-software.com.

4.6 Profiles shared through a Share link

If a seafarer shares their profile with you through a Share link, use it only to consider them for work. Do not publish it, pass it to anyone who does not need it for that purpose, or keep copying from it once the seafarer has revoked the link.

5. Accounts and access

  • Each User signs in with their own login. Do not share a login or a password, including to avoid paying for additional user seats.
  • Give accurate details when you register a tenant or a User, and register a company only if you are authorised to act for it.
  • Keep your password secret, and use multi-factor authentication where your portal offers it.
  • Company administrators must remove a User's access promptly when that person leaves or no longer needs it.
  • Do not pretend to be another person or company.

6. No scraping, bulk export or resale

You must not:

  • use robots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to collect data from the portals, from Share links, from job adverts or from the public website. Search engines may index the public pages of the website in line with its robots rules;
  • download or export Seafarer data in bulk, or systematically, except through the export features Tideward provides and only for your own records and the purposes in section 4.1;
  • use Tideward, or data taken from it, to build or feed a competing product or database;
  • resell, sublicense, rent or provide Tideward to anyone outside your tenant, or run it as a service for others, unless we have agreed it in writing;
  • get round plan limits, seat counts, access rights, rate limits or other technical restrictions;
  • copy, decompile or reverse-engineer Tideward's software, except to the extent the law allows it despite this restriction.

7. Security

7.1 No security testing without written permission

Do not scan, probe, penetration-test or load-test Tideward, or test any of its security measures, unless we have given you written permission in advance. Ask at legal@rsm-software.com.

7.2 What is never allowed

  • Getting round sign-in, tenant separation or any other security measure.
  • Reaching, or trying to reach, data or accounts you are not entitled to.
  • Uploading or sending malware, or anything else designed to damage or interfere with a system.
  • Overloading or disrupting Tideward, or interfering with other people's use of it.

7.3 Reporting a weakness

If you come across a security weakness, report it to legal@rsm-software.com straight away. Do not use it, do not reach more data than you need to show that it exists, and do not disclose it to anyone else until we have fixed it. We will not treat a good-faith report that follows this section as a breach of this Policy.

8. Integration keys

8.1 What they are

A User with the right to manage integrations, normally a company administrator, can issue Integration keys in the tenant's Integration Hub, where the Plan includes it, to connect another system to Tideward. A key belongs to the tenant. What is done with it is recorded in the audit trail against the key and against the User who issued it.

8.2 Keeping keys secret

A key is shown once, when it is issued. We keep only a fingerprint of it and cannot show it to you again; if it is lost, rotate it. Store keys in a secrets manager or an equally secure place. Never put a key in source code, in a web page or app that runs on a user's device, in a public repository, or in an email, a support ticket or a chat message.

8.3 Using keys

  • Issue a separate key for each connected system, and name it after that system.
  • Use a key only for the system it was issued for and only through the documented API.
  • Send through a key only data that belongs in your tenant and that you are entitled to process.
  • Keep the volume of requests reasonable, and do not use a key to load-test Tideward.

8.4 Rotating and revoking keys

  • Revoke a key you no longer use.
  • Rotate a key when someone who knew it leaves or changes role, and at once if it may have been exposed.
  • Replace a key when the User who issued it leaves, because the key continues to act in that User's name.
  • If you think a key has been misused, revoke it and tell us at legal@rsm-software.com.

9. Content rules

9.1 Documents and records

  • Upload only documents that are genuine, and that belong to the seafarer, vessel or company whose record they are placed in.
  • Never upload a forged or altered certificate, a certificate that belongs to someone else, or a document you know to be false.
  • Keep ranks, sea service, qualifications and company details accurate.

9.2 What Content must not contain

Content must not:

  • break the law, or help anyone else to break it;
  • infringe anyone's intellectual property, privacy or confidentiality;
  • be defamatory, threatening, harassing, hateful or obscene;
  • include malware or anything else harmful;
  • be spam or unsolicited advertising.

Comments and assessments you record about a seafarer, a company or a vessel must be honest and based on fact.

9.3 Expressing interest in a vacancy

Express interest only in vacancies you genuinely want to be considered for. Where the employer is not on Tideward, your interest and your Share link are emailed to the recruiter named on the advert, so do not use this feature to send messages in bulk. Our Sourced job adverts notice explains how it works.

9.4 Job adverts from other sources

Some job adverts on Tideward come from third-party job boards. Each one names the job board it was published on, with any credit that board's terms require, and the source's own terms apply to them. Do not copy them out of Tideward in bulk. Our Sourced job adverts notice explains how adverts are collected and how to ask for one to be taken down.

10. Reporting a breach

If you believe someone is breaking this Policy, tell us at legal@rsm-software.com, with enough detail for us to find the tenant, the record or the Content concerned. Concerns about personal data can also go to dpo@rsm-software.com.

11. Enforcement

11.1 What we may do

If we reasonably believe this Policy has been broken, we may do one or more of the following, in proportion to the breach:

  • ask you to put it right within a stated time;
  • remove or disable Content, including adverts;
  • require you to rotate or revoke an Integration key;
  • restrict features, or suspend access for a User or for the whole tenant;
  • end your subscription or account under the Terms of Service;
  • report the matter to a competent authority where the law requires it or allows it.

11.2 How we investigate

Tideward keeps an audit trail of changes that names the User who made each one. We may review it, together with other records of how Tideward was used, to investigate a suspected breach, and only as far as the investigation needs.

11.3 Telling you and your answer

Unless the law, the safety of a person or the security of Tideward prevents it, we tell you what we have done and why. You can answer, or ask us to reconsider, by writing to legal@rsm-software.com.

11.4 Suspension and your data

Suspending a tenant does not delete its data. Fees for a period of suspension caused by a breach are not refunded, as our Refund and cancellation policy explains.

12. Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy. The version and date at the top show which version applies. We tell Customers about material changes before they take effect, as the Terms of Service describe.

13. Contact