All on-shore employees in Seatrans have attended GDPR information meetings and signed a ‘Seatrans Employee Data Protection Policy’ paper. In the course of 2019, all seafarers will be invited to do the same. We are not sure how to do that yet – maybe with the help of the crewing department.

That means that the captain will have to inform everyone on board about their right to see what information about them the company stores, and then sign an agreement about doing so in the future.

Once a seafarer leaves the company, they can demand that all the information the Company has about them be deleted, but I suggest that if anyone wants to come back in the near future, they will allow it to be stored – securely,” explained Trond Helland at the captains’ meeting at the Top2 seminar in Poland.

All personal data must be kept on board in a secure place. The DNV Navigator application is a safe place for keeping such information, and an operator must be qualified in advance in order to get access to the application. But what about information provided to the agents?

The agents have to prove that they also comply with the GDPR rules. We cannot visit and inspect every single one of them, so we expect them to  (proactively) tell us that their systems are in accordance with the required standards,” continued Helland. “However, Seatrans is committed to following up agents and making sure that they are GDPR-compliant, and there is an ongoing process of getting agents to sign a Data Protection Agreement.”