Vessels above a modest size broadcast their position continuously under maritime safety regulations. The signal is logged and republished on consumer trackers. The pattern of where a vessel sits, for how long, in which company, is widely readable by anyone with a free account.

Even where the principal is not the registered owner, the vessel is usually associable with them through any of several routes: the management company, the captain's professional history, the port records on arrival, the journalists who watch this class of vessel and connect movements to known beneficial owners.

What the published pattern shows is significant. It shows where summers are spent, which other vessels share an anchorage, when meetings happen that do not appear in any other record. For some principals this is acceptable; for others it is precisely the kind of detail they had assumed was theirs.

The signal can be reduced through measures permitted by the rules, but it cannot be eliminated. The work is to understand the present picture and to act, where action is sensible, on what it suggests.