The MAS privacy policy

Email addresses and personal information

We will only collect personal information that you knowingly and willingly provide, by for example sending emails or completing on line forms. Your email address will only be used for the purpose for which you have provided it and it will not be added to a mailing list or used for any other purpose without your consent.

You are also protected under the Data Protection Act 1998, which we adhere to in full. Your personal details cannot be released to a third party under any Freedom of Information request. By recording a find through the MAS, the finder agrees to their contact details, as supplied, being automatically forwarded to the Receiver of Wreck. Records on the MAS database will not contain any personal information regarding the finder of an object or site.

Whilst you will remain the owner and copyright holder of any of your images you upload to the site, by uploading a photograph you grant us consent to unrestricted use of that image for the purposes of the Marine Antiquities Scheme and its associated website and app.

Further details are provided in The Crown Estate’s Fair Processing Notice.

Data tracking

If you visit the MAS website, we automatically gather and store the following information about your visit (via the use of Google Analytics) so that we can track the use of our website in order to make improvements and report on activities and resource usage:

• the IP address from which you access our website
• the name of the domain from which you access the Internet (e.g. aol.com, if you are connecting from an America Online account
• the type of browser and operating system used to access our website
• the date and time of your visit to the site
• the pages, files, documents and links that you visit
• the internet address of the website from which you linked to our site (i.e. the previous site you visited before you came to us)

What happens to the information collected?

The information above is stored and used in the aggregate only, in order to provide us with information about the general use of our site. We analyse these data to allow us to make improvements to the site: for example, if we find that some pages are rarely, or never visited, we may decide to remove or rewrite them.

What are cookies?

Cookies can be either persistent or session-based. Persistent cookies are small pieces of information sent to your browser by a website that you visit. They are stored on your computer, contain an expiry date, and may be used to track your browsing behaviour upon return to the issuing web site. You can set your browser to refuse cookies from any website you visit. If you choose to do that you can usually still gain access to most, if not all of the site, but you may not be able to conduct certain types of transactions (such as shopping) or take advantage of some of the interactive elements offered. Session cookies are short-lived, are used only during a browsing session, and expire when you quit your browser. Upon closing your browser, the session cookie set by the web site is destroyed and no personal information is maintained which might identify you should you visit the web site at a later date.