How Shippy Handles Your Data and Privacy
Shippy is Skylight's AI-powered maritime assistant. This article explains how Shippy handles information shared by users, and what organizations should consider when handling sensitive operational data.
The focus of the “information” and “data” in this article is user-specific data more likely to be sensitive, such as vessels of interest, areas of interest, telemetry data from private sensors, and investigative workflows and analytical methods for surfacing suspicious activity. The focus of this article is not about the protection of data that is already publicly available like AIS and satellite imagery, which is the vast majority of data that Skylight generates.
1. Where does my information go when I use Shippy?
Information shared with Shippy passes through Skylight's cloud infrastructure. Skylight data is hosted in Google Cloud's us-west1 region in Oregon, United States. Skylight does not currently support hosting data in other regions. Organizations with in-country hosting or data sovereignty requirements should discuss their needs with their Skylight Regional Manager.
Because Shippy uses Anthropic’s LLM models to process and generate responses, user-provided information is also processed by Anthropic’s services. It is unclear and can change any time where Anthropic processes and stores its data. See Where are your servers located? for more information on Anthropic’s policies. Long term, Skylight is keen on open-sourcing our agent service platform and making it possible for partners to run an open LLM – rather than Anthropic’s models – locally.
2. Are my questions to Shippy used to train Anthropic's AI models?
No, Anthropic is not allowed to use data sent through Shippy for model training under our permissions. Anthropic does not use inputs and outputs sent through its commercial API to train its general-purpose models by default.
3. Can other users see my Shippy conversations, such as searches, watchlists or investigations?
No, other Skylight users cannot see anything from your Shippy chat. Shippy is designed to retrieve account-specific information, such as Areas of Interest (AOIs), watchlists and recurring queries, only for the appropriate user account. Shippy operates on isolated per-user sandboxes that have strong network-level access controls that prevent cross-sandbox data access. Skylight has also set up tests that regularly evaluate cross-user privacy scenarios. These protections are designed to prevent other users from accessing information associated with your account, including watchlists and areas of interest that may reveal operational priorities or ongoing investigations.
4. Can the Skylight team see my Shippy conversations?
Yes. While Shippy conversations are not publicly visible to other users, the Skylight team can review user conversations to investigate errors, monitor performance of Shippy and improve the service.
5. What should I consider before sharing sensitive operational information?
Although queries are covered by the privacy policies listed here, users should take appropriate caution before sharing sensitive information, such as non-public vessel monitoring system (VMS) data, confidential watchlists, ongoing investigation details or operational methods. Users should ensure that doing so is consistent with their organization's data security, classification and information-sharing policies.
Shippy's account-level privacy protections and Anthropic's no-training arrangement do not eliminate all data security risks or replace an organization's own confidentiality and data sovereignty requirements.
Have further questions?
If your agency needs more information for an internal privacy or security assessment, contact your Skylight Regional Manager or support@skylight.global.
Related information
Skylight Resource Centre
Anthropic Privacy Center
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