Terms of Use

googlymaps. Version 1.0, effective 25 August 2026.

This version has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. It is published so the app can work and so you can read the rules before you post, and it is written to be accurate about what actually happens. It is not a finished legal document, and it will be reviewed before googlymaps is offered widely. If anything here matters to you, say so: [email protected].

The version number above is not decoration. When these terms change materially you will be asked to accept the new version before you can post again, and the record of what you accepted is stored against that exact version number. A typo fix does not bump it, because being asked to re-accept for a typo trains people to tap through without reading, which is worse than the typo.

Accepting these Terms, and the Privacy Policy, is a separate, explicit step, gated on what you're about to do. Before your first pin, and before your first report of somebody else's, whether or not you hold an account, you are asked to accept the current version of these Terms and the current version of the Privacy Policy. Browsing needs none of this. What we record is narrow and deliberate: which document, which version, and when, and nothing else, kept as evidence rather than deleted on the usual schedule. When either document changes materially, a new version is published and you are asked to accept it again before you can post or report again; a non-material change, a typo, a clarification that changes nothing in substance, does not bump the version and does not ask you to do this twice. Where you hold an account, the acceptance is recorded against it; if you delete the account, the acceptance record survives but the link to you is removed, so what is left names a document, a version, and a moment, and nobody. Where you do not hold one, because you reported anonymously, there was never a link to remove: the record is anonymous from the moment it is made. The Privacy Policy, Section 2.10, has the full detail.

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of googlymaps (the "App"), operated by Mr Luca Intini, an individual trading as a sole trader in Australia, ABN 55 717 595 882, of U 36 18 Wellington St, East Perth WA 6004, Australia ("we," "us," or "our"). Browsing the public map needs no account and no agreement to these Terms at all. By creating an account, posting a pin, or reporting one, you agree to these Terms in the way the paragraph above describes. If you do not agree, you can still browse; you cannot post or report.

You can reach us at [email protected] for anything at all. This is the single address for support, reports, appeals, takedowns, copyright notices, privacy requests, and communications from authorities.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect and use your data and is incorporated into these Terms by reference. Our plain-language guide, How googlymaps works, describes the same rules in everyday terms; where it and these Terms differ, these Terms govern.

1. Eligibility and minimum age

1.1. You must be at least 16 years old to post content on googlymaps. This applies everywhere in the world, with no exceptions and no country-specific carve-outs.

1.2. Where the check happens. We ask for your date of birth to verify eligibility, and we do not accept a self-certification checkbox in place of a stated birthdate. The minimum age is enforced when you post: your first pin is refused unless your account carries a confirmation that you are at least 16. It is not enforced by blocking account creation. Where you sign in through a third-party provider such as Apple or Google, that provider does not give us a date of birth, so an account can come into existence before we know your age; what that account cannot do is post. If you state a date of birth that shows you are under 16, it is rejected at the point you give it.

1.2A. We do not retain your date of birth. The date is checked and then discarded: we record only a timestamp confirming that the check was passed, and the date itself is never written to our database. See the Privacy Policy, Sections 2.2 and 7.

1.2B. The check is enforced server-side. The minimum age is a condition applied in our database when a pin is written, not a check performed by the app on your device, and it cannot be bypassed by a modified client, a direct API call, or an out-of-date version of the App.

1.3. We do not offer a parental-consent pathway. If you are under 16 you may not use any posting feature of the App, with or without a parent's or guardian's permission, and a parent or guardian cannot create or operate an account on your behalf.

1.4. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will suspend the account, unpublish and delete every pin that account has posted, and delete the associated personal data, subject to the limited retention described in the Privacy Policy.

1.5. Browsing the public map does not require an account and has no age gate. Only posting a pin requires an account and a verified age.

2. What googlymaps is

2.1. googlymaps lets you photograph a real-world object with real, physical googly eyes attached to it, pin it to a map at the object's location, and share it publicly. Anyone can browse the public map without an account; posting requires an account, and requires you to have accepted the current version of these Terms and of the Privacy Policy, as the preamble describes.

2.2. Every submitted photo passes an automated review before it is published. That automated review checks two things and only two things: (a) whether the photo genuinely shows physical googly eyes attached to a real object, and (b) whether the photo contains prohibited explicit or unsafe content under Section 3.2(a) to (c). Where the automated review is not confident, the photo is held for a human moderator instead of being published or rejected.

2.3. Pins are published anonymously. A published pin shows the photo, the location, and how accurate that location is, and nothing that identifies you: no name of any kind, no picture, no account identifier, and no pseudonym, handle or code that would let anyone link two of your pins to the same person. There is no profile page anywhere in the App or on the website, and no interface that lists one account's pins to anyone but that account's owner. When you are signed in, your own pins are marked as yours in your own view. We retain internally which account posted which pin, and our moderators and the operator can see it for moderation, reports, appeals, enforcement, and legal obligations, Section 5.7 explains that we do not disclose it to a reporter. Sponsored pins under Section 10.1 are the single exception: they are attributed to the business that paid for them. The Privacy Policy, Section 2.6, sets this out in full.

2.3A. A pin has no title and no description. The App provides no field in which to write text on a pin, and no pin carries any text you wrote. The automated review in 2.2 examines images only, so free text on a pin would be published without review; the field therefore does not exist. Text you write elsewhere (in a report under Section 5, or in an appeal under Section 4) is sent to us and is never published.

2.3B. A pin's location comes from your device's GPS and from nothing else. The App does not permit placing a pin by tapping or dragging the map, or by entering coordinates. A fix less accurate than 50 metres is refused; the App requests a sharper fix while you compose the submission and keeps the best one obtained. The accuracy of the fix is stored with the pin and published with it, as a radius on the map and as a stated figure on the pin's detail page. The published figure is rounded up to the nearest 5 metres, so it takes one of ten values between 5 and 50; the exact reading stays in your own view of your own pins and is not published, because a precise per-device accuracy figure next to a precise coordinate would be a weak fingerprint of your handset.

2.4A. Points and the public chart. Each accepted pin showing a googly eye you have not posted before earns 10 points. Duplicate submissions of the same googly eyes are detected by comparing a perceptual hash of each accepted photo against your earlier accepted photos, and score once. A discarded photo costs 1 point. A photo that is rejected, and a pin that had already been published and is later taken down for breaching Section 3, both count as discarded, and each is worth minus 1. A score can go negative; this is intentional. No penalty is applied while a decision is still pending: a submission awaiting its first review, or a rejection under appeal under Section 4, costs nothing until the outcome is final. Deleting your own pin under Section 9.4A is a separate mechanism with its own, different cost, set out there, and is not combined with the minus-1 penalty in this clause. Rank, points and an account number generated by us are shown on a public chart. The account number is a plain integer assigned in the order accounts are created, starting at 0; it is never reassigned, so a deleted account's number is retired rather than reused. The chart does not lead to a pin list: no user's pins can be listed by anyone other than that user. Points, rank and account number have no cash value, confer no rights, buy no advantage under these Terms, and points and rank may be recalculated or reset if we detect manipulation.

2.4B. Country flags. Each pin that earns points under Section 2.4A also earns the flag of the country in which it was taken, the first time you earn it: a second or subsequent accepted pin in the same country earns no additional flag for that country. A pin that is rejected earns no flag, and, consistently with Section 2.4A, a duplicate submission earns no flag either. A pin taken somewhere our systems cannot assign to a country, including international waters, earns no flag; this never prevents the pin from being published. The country is determined by us, offline, from the pin's own published coordinates, against boundary map data we hold ourselves rather than by calling an outside mapping or geocoding service, and the result is not independently verified. A flag is not a statement by us, or by you, about the status, sovereignty, or ownership of any territory, and is not to be relied upon as such by you or by any third party. Flags are shown next to your account number on the public chart under Section 2.4A and never on a pin. Flags have no cash value, confer no rights, and may be recalculated or reset on the same basis as points and rank under Section 2.4A.

2.4. The other rules in Section 3 are not checked before publication. Rules about identifiable people, private residences, location accuracy, intellectual property, and spam are enforced by human moderators, and in practice most often after somebody reports a pin. A pin appearing on the map does not mean we have verified that it complies with those rules.

3. Content rules: what's allowed and what's forbidden

3.1. Allowed. Photos of real objects with real, physical googly eyes (plastic craft eyes with a wiggling pupil, or similar stick-on wiggly eyes) physically attached to them, submitted with an accurate location.

a. The eyes must be physically present on the object and physically photographed. Digitally added, drawn, filtered, or edited-in eyes are not allowed, and neither are eyes that are simply part of an object's normal manufactured design.

b. The object can be almost anything real: statues, appliances, vehicles, buildings, street furniture, food, plants, and similar. Animals and pets are explicitly allowed as the object the eyes are attached to, provided the animal is not distressed or harmed and the eyes are applied safely and removed afterwards.

c. The photo must be one you took yourself. Photos taken from the internet or from someone else are not allowed.

3.2. Forbidden. You may not submit, and we will remove, any photo that contains:

a. Nudity, sexual content, or sexually suggestive material of any kind;

b. Gore, graphic violence, or content intended to shock or disturb;

c. Vulgar, hateful, harassing, or discriminatory material;

d. An identifiable person as the subject of the photo. googlymaps is about objects, not people. Photos whose main subject is a recognisable individual are not allowed, even with their consent. Incidental bystanders in the background of an otherwise object-focused photo may be permitted, but a person may never be the point of the photo. Please avoid capturing recognisable faces at all where you can;

e. Private property that reveals the location of someone's home (for example, a house number, front door, or other identifying detail of a private residence) unless it is your own property or you have the owner's clear permission;

f. Content that is illegal in the place where it was taken or where it will be viewed, infringes someone else's intellectual property or privacy rights, or misrepresents the photo's actual location;

g. Spam, advertising, or repeated low-effort submissions.

3.3. Location accuracy. A pin must be at the actual location of the googly eyes. The App captures the location from your device's GPS and offers no other route to a location (Section 2.3B). Deliberately falsifying a device location so that a pin appears somewhere the eyes are not is a breach of these Terms.

3.4. Submission limit. You may submit at most 10 pins per account in any rolling 24-hour period, measured continuously rather than by calendar day. Every submission counts against this limit regardless of its outcome, including a submission that is later rejected and a pin you subsequently delete yourself under Section 9.4A; deleting a pin does not restore the slot it used. We impose this limit because every submitted photo is reviewed by an automated classifier, and, where that review is not confident, by a human moderator, both at a real cost to us per submission, and the limit bounds how much load a single account can place on either. Once you reach the limit, further submissions are refused until enough of the rolling 24 hours has elapsed to free one up, and the App shows you how many submissions you have left and when the next becomes available. Attempting to circumvent this limit is a breach of these Terms.

3.5. We may update this list from time to time to address new abuse patterns. A material change to it bumps the version number described in the preamble and requires you to accept the new version before you can post or report again; where required, we also notify users directly in the App.

4. Moderation and appeals

4.1. Automated review. When you submit a pin, an automated image model checks it against the rules in Section 2.2. Based on that check, your pin is either published, rejected, or held for human review when the automated system is not confident.

4.2. Human review. Held pins are reviewed by a person before any final publish or reject decision is made on them. Content that is genuinely borderline is routed to human review and is never auto-rejected. For example classical nudity in public art, such as googly eyes attached to a statue's backside.

4.3. Right to a human look. You may ask a human moderator to review any decision that affects your content or your account, including a rejection at submission, the removal of a pin that had already been published, and any warning, suspension, or termination. We will not treat an automated decision as final without offering you this option.

4.4. Statement of reasons. If we reject or remove your pin, or take action on your account, we will tell you:

a. what we did (removed, refused to publish, restricted visibility, suspended or terminated the account) and for how long;

b. the facts and circumstances we relied on, including whether the decision was triggered by a report from another person;

c. which rule under Section 3, or which other legal or contractual basis, the decision was based on;

d. whether automated means were used in detecting the content, in making the decision, or both. For most submissions the detection and the initial decision are automated, and we will say so; and

e. how to appeal to us under Section 4.5, and that you also have the right to pursue out-of-court dispute settlement and judicial redress under applicable law, including the EU Digital Services Act.

4.5. How to appeal. Use the in-app appeal option on the affected pin, or contact us at [email protected]. You have 7 days to appeal, and a rejected photo is retained for 14 days so that it still exists when the appeal is reviewed (Privacy Policy, Section 5). We acknowledge appeals on receipt and aim to decide them within 7 days. If a case is complex and will take longer, we will tell you before the 7 days are up and give you a revised estimate.

4.6. Repeat appeals. You may appeal up to three times on the same pin. The limit is enforced by our systems, not by a moderator's discretion, and the fourth attempt is refused. A second or third appeal is most useful when you have new information to give us; repeating the first one word for word rarely changes the outcome. When the three are used, the decision on that pin stands.

We say three rather than one deliberately. An earlier version of these Terms said one, which sat badly next to 4.7: telling you that appealing is free and then allowing exactly one of them is a penalty with a different name.

4.7. A good-faith appeal is never penalised. Appealing in good faith carries no consequence for your account, whether the appeal succeeds or fails. It is not a strike, it is not a warning, it is not counted against you under Section 9, and losing an appeal is not evidence of anything. The penalty in these Terms is for dishonesty, not for being mistaken. We commit to this in terms because the opposite rule would deter honest users from contesting a wrong decision, and every mistaken rejection would go unchallenged. The appeal form invites you to explain why your submission might look borderline; an honest explanation given there will never be used against you.

4.8. Abuse of the appeal process. Appealing content that is clearly prohibited under Section 3.2, in bad faith (that is, asserting a justification you do not believe) is a breach of these Terms and results in permanent termination of the account under Section 9.1A. This applies to dishonesty, not to disagreement: a genuine belief that the content was permissible, however wrong, is not bad faith and is covered by 4.7.

5. Reporting and takedowns

5.1. One reporting route. Every pin has a Report button on its detail page in the App and on the website. You do not need an account to report a pin. This is the primary route for everyone, users and non-users alike. You do need to have accepted the current version of these Terms and of the Privacy Policy first, in the way the preamble describes; that is a one-tap agreement made at the report form itself and is not the same thing as holding an account.

5.1A. Reporting without an account: what that route does, and what it deliberately does not do. Reporting while signed out goes down its own narrow path, and we would rather set out its limits here than let you find them:

a. A captcha comes first. An anonymous report is accepted only after a challenge is solved. Without it the button would be an open write endpoint on the public internet.

b. It is rate limited: at most five anonymous reports an hour from one source. We identify a source by a one-way keyed hash of it, held with a counter and a clock hour and deleted after 24 hours. We do not store the address itself, and nothing in that counter links a source to a report.

c. Only a pin that is live on the map can be reported this way. For anything else (a pin already taken down, something not tied to one pin, a legal notice) use the mailbox in 5.3, which has none of these limits.

d. One pin holds at most 20 unresolved anonymous notices at a time. Beyond that, further anonymous copies about the same pin are not queued. At 20 open notices the moderation signal is saturated and a 21st does not change the decision; the pin is already in front of a human. If you think a pin has been missed, email us.

e. The confirmation you get back is deliberately uninformative. It says that we have your report and nothing else: not whether the pin exists, not whether it is still published, not what state it is in. Every pin's identifier is public, so an answer that differed between those cases would let anybody use the report button to probe the map for what we have taken down. That is a privacy control for the person who posted the pin, not evasiveness towards you.

f. An anonymous report has nothing for us to reply to. If you want to be told what we decided under 5.4(b) and 5.7, put an email address in the form (it stays optional, see 5.2(d)) or write to us at the address in 5.3. Where you give us no way to reach you, we still review the report on the same timescale; we simply cannot come back to you.

5.2. What the report form asks for. To make a report that we can act on, and, under Article 16 of the EU Digital Services Act, to make a report that gives us actual knowledge of illegal content, the form lets you provide:

a. a reason category (for example: not googly eyes, explicit content, privacy concern, wrong location, intellectual property, other);

b. a free-text explanation of why you think the content is unlawful or breaks our rules;

c. the exact location of the content, which is pre-filled with the pin's link and identifier when you report from the pin itself, and which you can enter manually otherwise;

d. your name and email address, so we can acknowledge the report and tell you the outcome. Optional except where you are reporting content as unlawful, and never required for reports concerning child sexual abuse material or similar offences; and

e. a confirmation that you believe in good faith that the information in your report is accurate and complete.

Only (a) is mandatory: a category alone is enough to start a review. The other fields make the report substantially more useful, and are what an Art. 16 notice requires.

5.3. If you cannot use the form, or you are reporting something that is not tied to a single pin, email [email protected] with the same information. This is the same queue; it is not a slower or lesser route.

5.4. What we commit to. We are a small operation with no round-the-clock moderation team, so we make one commitment and we intend to keep it:

a. we acknowledge every report automatically on receipt. A report filed while signed in, or by email, carries a reference you can quote and can be followed up; a captcha-gated anonymous report gets an on-screen confirmation and no reference, for the reason in 5.1A(e);

b. we review and decide on reports within 7 days of receipt, and tell the reporter the outcome and what redress is available to them if they disagree, wherever the reporter has given us a way to reach them (5.1A(f));

c. reports in the highest-severity categories (child safety, sexual content involving minors, and threats of imminent harm) are triaged ahead of everything else and acted on as fast as we physically can; and

d. where a case is genuinely complex, we tell the reporter before the 7 days are up and give a revised estimate.

We deliberately do not promise a 24-hour turnaround on all reports. We would not be able to honour it, and under Article 14 of the EU Digital Services Act a published moderation commitment is enforceable.

5.5. What happens while a report is being reviewed. A reported pin stays visible while we review it, unless the report falls into one of the highest-severity categories in 5.4(c) or the content appears manifestly illegal, in which case we hide it immediately and decide afterwards.

5.6. Outcome notice to the pin's owner. When we remove or restrict a pin in response to a report, we tell the pin's owner what was removed and why, with the statement of reasons required by Section 4.4, and how to appeal.

5.7. Outcome notice to the reporter. Where we have contact details for the reporter, we tell them what we decided and why, and that they may pursue out-of-court dispute settlement or judicial redress if they disagree. Where a report was filed anonymously and left no contact details, there is nobody to send that notice to; the review still happens on the same timescale, and 5.1A(f) says how to be told. We do not tell the reporter the pin owner's identity, and the public map never showed it in the first place (Section 2.3).

5.8. Misuse of reporting. Repeatedly filing manifestly unfounded reports, or using the reporting mechanism to harass someone, is a breach of these Terms and may lead to your account being restricted.

6. Blocking and muting other users

6.1. You can block another user. From any pin's detail page, you can block the person who posted it. You need an account to block someone. There is no profile page of any kind, public or otherwise. Pins are anonymous under Section 2.3, so a pin is the only route to the person behind it, and blocking does not tell you who that person is.

6.2. What blocking does. When you block from a pin:

a. that photo is hidden from you, from your map and from every list and view in the App, immediately, for as long as the block stands. It is that photo. Blocking does not hide the same account's other photos, and 6.3A explains why, because the reason is the point;

b. the block against the account is recorded, and it counts. An account blocked by many different people is a signal our moderators act on. That record is kept on our side: it is never shown to you and it is never used to decide what you see; and

c. there is nothing else for a block to switch off. The App has no messages, no comments, no replies, no following and no user-to-user interaction of any kind, so there is no channel between you and another user for a block to close. An earlier version of this clause promised to cut off contact and to hide your pins from the person you blocked; neither describes anything the App actually has.

6.3. Blocking is private, reversible, and never identifies anybody. We do not tell the person you blocked, and there is no route by which they can find out. Your hidden list lives in your account settings: it shows you the photos you hid, so you can recognise them and unhide any of them whenever you like. It does not name, number, or otherwise identify the people who posted them. Blocking never returns an identity at any point, which is what keeps the feature from being the thing it is designed not to be.

6.3A. Why blocking is per photo, and what that costs you. Hiding every pin belonging to a blocked account would tell you which pins share an owner, the exact link that Section 2.3 and Privacy Policy Section 2.6 promise the public map does not provide. It would also be trivial to abuse: block one pin, see what else vanishes, unblock, repeat, and a whole neighbourhood is sorted by author in a few minutes. Rate limits do not fix that, making blocks permanent does not fix it, and adding decoy hiding does not fix it: any owner-wide filter a user can switch on and watch is an authorship test, however it is built underneath. So the filter acts on the photo you named, a photo you had already been shown and already singled out, and what disappears therefore tells you nothing you did not already know.

The cost of that choice is yours to carry and we would rather state it: hiding a second photo by the same person takes a second tap, and you cannot silence an account in advance. We would rather charge you a tap than hand every user a tool for taking the map apart by author.

6.3B. What blocking still reveals, stated rather than buried. One residual survives, and it is not really about blocking. When somebody deletes their account, every pin they posted goes at once, so several entries can leave your hidden list in the same moment, which suggests those photos shared an author. Anyone who records pin identifiers from the public map and watches sees the same thing, with no account and no block involved: it is a property of content being deleted, not of this feature. We blunt it by processing account deletions in scheduled batches inside the 7-day window in Section 9.4, so "the same moment" means "the same sweep" and a sweep covers several accounts. That mitigation works better as the app grows and is weakest while it is small.

6.4. Blocking is not reporting. Blocking hides someone from you; it does not tell us anything is wrong. If content breaks our rules, please report it as well (Section 5) so that we can act on it for everybody.

7. Your content and the licence you grant us

7.1. You retain ownership of the photos you submit. By posting a pin, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for technical purposes such as resizing, re-encoding, and metadata stripping), publicly display, and distribute that photo, its location, and the accuracy of that location, on the public map and elsewhere in the App, for as long as the pin remains published.

7.2. The licence is sublicensable and transferable only to the extent needed to (a) deliver your content through our hosting, storage, and content delivery providers, and (b) transfer the service as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, in which case the acquirer takes on these Terms.

7.3. Promotional use. You also grant us a licence to use your published pin (the photo and its location) in screenshots and material promoting googlymaps itself, for example app store listings and social posts about the App. This promotional licence ends when the pin is deleted, except for material already printed or published, which we will not reissue. We will never sell your photo to a third party or license it for someone else's advertising.

7.4. After removal. Beyond the licence above, we may keep a copy of removed or rejected content only as needed for moderation, appeal, legal, and fraud-prevention records, and only for the periods set out in the Privacy Policy. That copy is not published.

7.5. You confirm that you have the right to submit the photo, that it does not violate anyone else's rights, and that it complies with Section 3.

7.6. We may remove any pin at our discretion, including before completing a full review, if we reasonably believe it violates these Terms or the law.

8. Copyright: notice, counter-notice, and repeat infringers

8.1. Notice of claimed infringement. If you believe content on googlymaps infringes your copyright, send a notice to [email protected] including:

a. your physical or electronic signature;

b. identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed;

c. identification of the material you say is infringing, and enough information for us to locate it (the pin's link or identifier);

d. your contact details;

e. a statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and

f. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

8.2. What we do. On receiving a complete notice, we remove or disable access to the material and notify the user who posted it, including a copy of the notice.

8.3. Counter-notice. If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the same address containing your signature, identification of the removed material and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification, your contact details, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the courts identified in Section 15. We will forward the counter-notice to the person who filed the original notice and may restore the material after 10 business days unless they tell us they have filed an action seeking a court order.

8.4. Repeat infringers. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are repeat copyright infringers. Three upheld infringement notices against the same account will normally result in termination.

8.5. Designated agent. Notices under this Section should be addressed to [NEEDS DECISION: DMCA-AGENT, whether a US DMCA agent registration will be filed with the US Copyright Office, which is what US safe harbour requires. If it is, the agent is Mr Luca Intini at the address in the preamble, contactable at [email protected], and that must be stated here as well as filed].

9. Account suspension and termination

9.1. We may warn, temporarily suspend, or permanently terminate your account if you:

a. Repeatedly post content that violates Section 3;

b. Attempt to circumvent moderation (for example, by resubmitting rejected content, submitting false locations, evading rate limits, or abusing the appeal process);

c. Harass other users, or misuse the reporting mechanism to target others in bad faith;

d. Violate these Terms, the law, or give us false information, including a false date of birth, whenever you give it to us.

9.1A. The escalation ladder. We publish what leads to what, because a rule nobody can see is not a rule:

The penalty is for lying, not for being wrong. A user who misjudged a rule is not treated as a user who knew the rule and asserted otherwise.

9.2. We use a graduated approach where practical (warning, then temporary suspension, then termination), but we terminate immediately, without a prior warning, in the two cases marked "permanent" in 9.1A and for other severe violations.

9.2A. A permanent termination is permanent, and it survives deletion of the account. A ban that ended when the banned person deleted their account and registered again would not be a ban. Accordingly:

a. You may not create or use another account after a permanent termination, whether under the same sign-in identifier or a different one. Doing so is a further breach of these Terms and that account will be terminated as well.

b. We keep a one-way cryptographic hash of the sign-in identifier under which an account was permanently terminated, indefinitely, and we compare the hash of each new signup against it. We do not store the identifier itself. This is disclosed in full, including the trade-off it involves, in Section 2.9 of the Privacy Policy.

c. This record is not erased by a deletion or erasure request. Everything else about the account is deleted on the schedule in the Privacy Policy; the ban record and its hash are retained. Section 5 of the Privacy Policy lists it as one of the three categories that survive erasure.

9.3. You may appeal a suspension or termination using the process described in Section 4.5. Appealing it costs you nothing under Section 4.7.

9.4. You may delete your account at any time, from within the App. Deleting your account removes your ability to post and unpublishes and deletes the pins you have already published, in line with the Privacy Policy. Deleting your account does not lift a ban (9.2A), does not erase a supporter-tier transaction record, which Australian tax law requires us to keep for five years (Section 10.15A), and does not erase the record that you accepted a version of these Terms or the Privacy Policy: that record survives, but the link between it and your account is removed, so what remains no longer identifies you (Privacy Policy, Section 2.10). Deleting a single published pin without deleting your account is a separate action, governed by Section 9.4A.

9.4A. Deleting a single pin. You may delete, at any time, a pin you posted, and only a pin you posted. Deleting a pin reverses the 10 points it earned under Section 2.4A; this is not the same as, and is not added to, the minus-1 penalty for a discarded photo. We refuse the request in three cases:

a. the pin is still awaiting its first review and has not yet been published, so there is nothing published to delete;

b. the pin was already rejected, in which case the minus-1 penalty under Section 2.4A stands and deleting it would achieve nothing; or

c. the pin has an open report against it under Section 5, until that report is resolved.

Deleting a pin removes it from the public map immediately. The underlying photo is retained for 14 days after deletion before it is permanently removed from storage, the same period a rejected photo is retained under Section 4.5 and the Privacy Policy, Section 5, for legal and safety reasons, and it is not visible to anyone, including you, during that period. The App requires you to confirm the deletion and discloses this 14-day retention before you confirm.

10. Sponsored pins, ads, rewards, and the supporter tier

10.1. Sponsored pins. We may allow businesses or third parties to place sponsored pins on the map. Sponsored pins are always clearly and visibly labelled as "Sponsored" (or similar) and are visually distinguishable from user-submitted pins. A sponsored pin is attributed to the business that paid for it. That attribution is what the sponsor is buying, and it is the only exception to the rule in Section 2.3 that pins carry no attribution. It names a business, not a private individual.

10.2. Sponsored pins must still comply with Section 3's content rules.

10.3. We are not responsible for the products, services, or claims made by sponsors, and a sponsored pin's presence on the map is not an endorsement by us.

10.4. Advertising. The App displays advertising, including third-party advertising, and this is how the App is funded. No advertisement ever overlays the map viewport. Ads appear on content pages, and one full-screen interstitial ad may appear after a successful submission. In regions that require prior consent, we ask for that consent through a certified consent mechanism before serving ads at all; see the Privacy Policy, Section 4.

10.5. We do not knowingly serve behaviourally targeted advertising to users we know or should know are minors, and we do not enable it for logged-out visitors, whose age we cannot know.

10.6. Rewarded video and rewards. We may offer you the option to watch a video advertisement voluntarily in exchange for a reward within the App. Rewards are always optional, have no cash value, cannot be bought, sold, transferred, or exchanged for money, and may be changed or withdrawn at any time. If a reward affects how prominently a pin is displayed, that pin is labelled as promoted in the same way a sponsored pin is, so nobody sees paid or reward-driven prominence without being told.

The supporter tier (10.7 to 10.22)

10.7. What you are buying. The supporter tier is a single, one-off payment that permanently removes advertising from your account. Once it is active, we stop showing you interstitial ads, display ads on content pages, and rewarded-video offers, on every device where you are signed in to that account.

10.8. What you are not buying. The supporter tier is not a subscription. It does not renew, it is not charged again, and there is nothing to cancel. It gives you no other advantage of any kind: no priority in moderation, verification, or appeals, no boost to how prominently your pins appear, and no exemption from Section 3's content rules or from any enforcement action under Section 9. Paying us does not buy leniency.

10.9. Sponsored pins are a separate thing from advertising units. As Section 10.1 explains, sponsored pins are paid placements rendered on the map as map content. [NEEDS DECISION: SUPPORTER-SPONSORED-PINS, whether the supporter tier also hides sponsored pins from the map, or removes only the advertising units in 10.7. This must be answered before the tier is offered for sale: we cannot ask somebody to pay for "no ads" without saying, in this clause, whether a paid placement on the map is one of the ads they are getting rid of. Whichever answer is chosen must be stated here plainly and must match the App, the Privacy Policy §4, and the store listing.]

10.10. Price. The price is a fixed amount per currency, not a live conversion, and is currently US$3 / A$4.50 / EUR3 / GBP2.50. The price shown to you at the moment of purchase is the price that governs. For purchases made inside the iOS or Android app, the price is set and displayed by Apple or Google in your local currency and, where applicable, includes local taxes. We may change the price for future purchases; a change never affects a purchase already made.

10.11. The entitlement is identical however you pay. Whichever currency you paid in and whichever of the routes in 10.12 you used, you receive exactly the same thing.

10.12. Who you are buying from. This matters for refunds, so it is worth reading:

a. On the website, you buy from us. We are the merchant of record. Payment is taken through Revolut Pay. Your payment details are entered with Revolut and are never received or stored by us.

b. Inside the iOS app, you buy through Apple In-App Purchase, and Apple is the merchant of record. Your purchase is governed by the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions in addition to these Terms.

c. Inside the Android app, you buy through Google Play Billing, and Google is the merchant of record. Your purchase is governed by the Google Play Terms of Service in addition to these Terms.

We are required by Apple's App Store Review Guidelines and Google Play's Payments policy to use those payment systems for purchases made inside the apps. This is not a choice we make about your money; it is a condition of distributing the App at all.

10.13. It is tied to your account, not your device. The entitlement attaches to your googlymaps account. Sign in on a new phone, a second device, or the website, and it follows you. Uninstalling the App, changing device, changing operating system, or switching between the web and the apps does not remove it. It is personal to you: it cannot be transferred, sold, gifted, shared between accounts, or merged with another account, and it has no cash value.

10.14. What "permanently" means. It means for the life of your account, for as long as googlymaps operates. It does not mean we guarantee the App will run forever. [NEEDS DECISION: SUPPORTER-SERVICE-END, what we commit to if googlymaps ceases to operate, or if we stop showing advertising altogether so that the tier no longer removes anything. Counsel must set this, including whether any remedy is owed beyond the non-excludable statutory rights in 10.17. Do not publish this clause with the question open.]

10.15. If you delete your account, the entitlement dies with it, and we cannot bring it back. We want to be blunt about this, because it is a real trade-off and you should know it before you pay, not after:

a. Our Privacy Policy promises that deleting your account erases your personal data. Restoring a purchase to a new account would require us to keep the payment identifiers that link you to it, indefinitely, after you had asked us to erase your data.

b. We have chosen the erasure promise. Deleting your account deletes the entitlement permanently. If you sign up again afterwards, it is a new account with no purchase attached, and you would have to buy the tier again if you wanted it.

c. So: if you want to keep the ad-free upgrade, do not delete your account. Deleting the App is fine, and signing back in restores everything. Deleting the account is the irreversible one.

d. Where a store's own restore mechanism would still recognise a past purchase after account deletion, that is a matter between you and that store; we cannot reattach it to a googlymaps account we no longer hold any record of.

10.15A. One record does survive: the transaction itself, for five years. We are obliged by Australian tax and business record-keeping law to retain records of transactions for five years, and a supporter purchase is such a record. So if you delete your account or exercise your right to erasure, we delete the entitlement, the account, and everything else, and we retain the date, amount, currency, payment rail, transaction identifier, and any refund or chargeback against it. That record is never published, and it is deliberately not used to restore an entitlement to a re-registered account. This is not a choice we can waive; if you would prefer we hold nothing about you at all, do not buy the tier. The Privacy Policy, Sections 2.7 and 5, says the same.

10.16. Refunds: where to ask. Ask whoever sold it to you. For purchases made inside the iOS or Android app, Apple and Google are the merchant of record and refunds are requested from them, under their published refund policies and any statutory rights you have. We cannot issue a refund for a purchase we did not take payment for. For purchases made on the website, ask us at [email protected].

10.17. Rights we cannot exclude, and do not try to. Nothing in 10.16 or anywhere else in these Terms limits the following:

a. Australian consumers. Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth)). Among other things, digital products supplied to a consumer must be of acceptable quality, fit for any disclosed purpose, and match their description. If the supporter tier has a major failure (for example, you pay and the advertising does not stop), you are entitled to a refund, and you may also be entitled to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. If the failure is not major, you are entitled to have the problem fixed within a reasonable time, and if it is not fixed, to a refund. These rights are in addition to anything we offer voluntarily, and no clause in these Terms takes them away.

b. EU, EEA and UK consumers. You normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract for digital content without giving a reason. That right is lost where you have asked for the content to be supplied immediately and acknowledged that you lose the right by doing so, which is what happens when you choose to remove the ads and they stop straight away. We will ask for that express request and that acknowledgement at the point of purchase, and we will confirm both to you. [NEEDS DECISION: SUPPORTER-EU-WITHDRAWAL, counsel to settle the exact purchase-flow wording, the confirmation sent on a durable medium, and whether to waive the point entirely and simply honour a 14-day refund on web purchases, which is simpler to operate and cheaper than getting the consent flow wrong.]

c. Your mandatory consumer rights under the law of the country where you habitually reside, as described in Section 15.2.

10.18. Our own refund policy, beyond those rights. [NEEDS DECISION: SUPPORTER-REFUND-WINDOW, whether we offer a voluntary no-questions-asked refund on web purchases, and if so for how many days after purchase. A number must be chosen and stated here. Do not publish a vague promise; a published refund commitment is enforceable, and at US$3 the cost of honouring a generous window is likely lower than the cost of arguing about it.]

10.19. What happens when a purchase is refunded, reversed, or charged back. If a payment is refunded, reversed, charged back, or otherwise not received or retained by us (whether by you, by your bank, or by Apple or Google), the entitlement ends and advertising resumes on your account. You have not paid for the tier, so you do not have it. This is not a penalty and it is not treated as a breach of these Terms. [NEEDS DECISION: SUPPORTER-REFUND-REVOCATION, whether revocation takes effect immediately on notification of the refund or chargeback, or after a short grace period. There is no billing period to fall back on, because this is a one-off payment, so "at the end of the period" is not an available answer.]

10.20. Fraudulent chargebacks. Deliberately reversing a payment while continuing to use the entitlement, or repeatedly disputing payments in bad faith, is a breach of these Terms and may lead to action under Section 9. An honest dispute is not a breach, and asking for a refund is never a breach.

10.21. Nothing else in the App costs money. Posting pins, browsing the map, reporting, appealing, and blocking are all free and always will be. The supporter tier is the only thing we sell to users, and buying it is entirely optional.

10.22. Age. The supporter tier requires an account, so the minimum age in Section 1 applies to it. Purchases made inside the apps are also subject to Apple's and Google's own age, payment, and family-sharing rules.

11. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

11.1. The App and the map are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy of pin locations, availability, or fitness for a particular purpose, to the fullest extent permitted by law.

11.2. We do not pre-verify every fact about a pin (for example, that a photographed object is still physically present at that location), and as Section 2.4 explains, several of our content rules are enforced after publication rather than before it. Use the map at your own judgment.

11.3. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of or relating to your use of the App, and our total liability for any claim relating to the App is limited to [NEEDS DECISION: LIABILITY-CAP, the App is free to use, so a cap tied to "amounts you have paid us" is zero for almost every user and at most the price of the supporter tier (US$3 or its local equivalent, Section 10.10) for the rest; counsel must set an amount and confirm whether a cap of this kind is enforceable at all against a consumer, under both the Australian Consumer Law (which restricts limiting liability for breach of a consumer guarantee, and which Section 10.17(a) expressly preserves for supporter-tier purchases) and EU/UK consumer law, and given that it cannot limit liability under GDPR Art. 82].

11.4. Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability where the law does not allow it to be limited or excluded. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, for breach of mandatory consumer-protection rights, including the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, which cannot be excluded, and for any liability under Article 82 of the GDPR.

12. Your indemnity to us

12.1. If you are using the App other than as a consumer, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against any claim, loss, liability, or reasonable cost (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of content you submit, your breach of these Terms, or your infringement of a third party's rights.

12.2. This Section does not apply where you are using the App as a consumer, and nothing in it limits any mandatory consumer rights you have under the law of your country of residence.

12.3. We will notify you promptly of any claim we intend to seek indemnity for, and will not settle it without your consent, which you will not unreasonably withhold.

13. Apple App Store and Google Play

13.1. These Terms are between you and us, not Apple or Google. Where you obtained the App from the Apple App Store or Google Play, the following applies in addition to everything above.

13.2. Apple. You acknowledge that:

a. this agreement is concluded between you and us only, and not with Apple, and we, not Apple, are solely responsible for the App and its content;

b. your licence to use the App is a non-transferable licence to use it on any Apple-branded device you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions;

c. Apple has no obligation whatsoever to provide any maintenance or support for the App;

d. in the event of any failure of the App to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price of the App (which is zero, since the App itself is free to download; refunds for an in-app purchase of the supporter tier are dealt with in Section 10.16); to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the App;

e. we, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claims by you or a third party relating to the App, including product liability claims, claims that the App fails to conform to any legal or regulatory requirement, and claims arising under consumer protection or similar legislation;

f. we, not Apple, are responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement, and discharge of any third-party claim that the App or your use of it infringes that third party's intellectual property rights;

g. you represent that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties; and

h. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms, and upon your acceptance of these Terms, Apple will have the right (and will be deemed to have accepted the right) to enforce these Terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.

13.3. Google. Where you obtained the App from Google Play, your use is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service, and Google is not a party to these Terms and has no responsibility for the App.

14. Contact points

14.1. General contact, reports, appeals, and takedown requests:

[email protected]

14.2. Privacy and data-protection requests: [email protected] (see the Privacy Policy). We operate one mailbox for everything; there is no separate privacy address.

14.3. Contact point for recipients of the service (DSA Art. 12). The address in 14.1 is our single electronic contact point for users and other recipients of the service to communicate with us directly and rapidly. We accept and reply to communications in [NEEDS DECISION: LANGUAGES, the official EU language(s) in which we accept and answer communications. We are established in Australia, not in a Member State, so there is no "language of the Member State of establishment" to fall back on; English is the operator's working language and counsel must confirm whether English alone is sufficient under DSA Art. 11(3) and 12(3)]. We do not rely solely on automated tools to communicate with you at this contact point.

14.4. Contact point for authorities (DSA Art. 11). The same address is our designated single point of contact for Member State authorities, the European Commission, and the European Board for Digital Services, in the same languages.

14.5. Legal representative in the Union (DSA Art. 13). [NEEDS DECISION: EU-LEGAL-REPRESENTATIVE, we are not established in the Union. A provider of intermediary services that is not established in the Union but offers services there must designate a legal representative in a Member State. Counsel must decide whether the DSA applies to googlymaps at this scale and, if so, who the representative is and in which Member State; the designation must then be published here and notified to that Member State's Digital Services Coordinator.]

15. Governing law and venue

15.1. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Western Australia and the Commonwealth of Australia, without regard to their conflict-of-law principles. Subject to 15.2, you and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Western Australia and of the courts competent to hear appeals from them.

15.2. Consumers. If you are a consumer, nothing in 15.1 deprives you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the law of the country where you habitually reside, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country. This matters in two places in particular:

a. Australian consumers. Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any guarantee, right, or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law (Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth)) that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted, or modified.

b. EU, EEA, and UK consumers. Nothing in 15.1 removes the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of your country of residence, and under EU law you may sue us, and may only be sued by us, in the courts of the country where you live. EU consumers may also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform where available.

[NEEDS DECISION: CONSUMER-CARVE-OUT, counsel to confirm 15.1 and 15.2 are drafted correctly and enforceably for an Australian sole trader serving consumers in the EU, the EEA, the UK, Canada, and the United States, and in particular that the Western Australian choice of law survives contact with the mandatory rules named above.]

16. General

16.1. Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, that provision is severed and the rest of these Terms remain in full force. Where possible, the severed provision is replaced by a valid one that comes closest to its original intent.

16.2. Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the App, and supersede any previous agreement or understanding about it. This does not limit liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.

16.3. Assignment. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms. We may assign or transfer ours to an affiliate or to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, provided your rights under these Terms are not reduced. We will tell you if we do.

16.4. No waiver. If we do not enforce a right or provision of these Terms, that is not a waiver of it, and does not stop us enforcing it later.

16.5. Force majeure. We are not liable for any failure or delay in performing our obligations caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, civil unrest, industrial action, epidemic, failures of the public internet, failures of a hosting or infrastructure provider, or government action. This does not affect your right to delete your account or your data.

16.6. Survival. Sections 7 (your content and the licence, to the extent of content already published or retained), 8, 9.2A (a permanent termination, the prohibition on re-registering, and the retained ban record), 10.15, 10.15A (the five-year transaction record), and 10.17 to 10.20 (the consequences of account deletion, the statutory rights we cannot exclude, and refunds and chargebacks), 11, 12, 15, and 16 survive termination of these Terms or deletion of your account, as does the record that you accepted a version of these Terms or the Privacy Policy, in the anonymised form described in the preamble and in Privacy Policy Section 2.10, along with any other provision that by its nature is intended to survive.

16.7. Notices. We give you notice by email to the address on your account, or by in-app notice, and a notice is treated as received when sent (email) or first displayed (in-app). You give us notice by email to the addresses in Section 14. It is your responsibility to keep your email address current.

16.8. No third-party rights, except as expressly stated in Section 13.2 in favour of Apple and its subsidiaries.

17. Changes to these Terms

17.1. We may update these Terms from time to time. A material change publishes a new version number, as the preamble describes, and, once it is published, you cannot post a pin or report one under it until you have explicitly accepted that version; where required, we also provide reasonable notice in the App before the change takes effect. A non-material change, a typo fix or a clarification that changes nothing in substance, does not bump the version and does not ask you to accept anything again.

17.2. You do not accept an updated version by continuing to browse, and browsing is never conditioned on it. You accept it, if at all, by tapping accept the next time you try to post or report, in the way the preamble and the Privacy Policy, Section 2.10, describe. If you would rather not accept the new version, you can keep browsing; you simply cannot post or report until you do, and you may delete your account under Section 9.4 if you would rather do that instead.

This document is a draft prepared for legal review and is not yet final.

Last update: 2026-08-25 AWST