Website & Acceptable Use Terms

1. About this document

These Website & Acceptable Use Terms are between you and Estate Wise Limited (Company No. 9374111) ("we", "us", "our"). They form part of our Terms & Conditions and govern your licence to use the My Dog Rules web application (the "Service"), the standards for content you contribute, and the conduct rules that keep the Service working for everyone. Words defined in the Terms & Conditions have the same meaning here.

2. Your licence

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Service, through its intended interfaces (including as an installed progressive web app), for your own personal, non-commercial use, in accordance with these terms and the Terms & Conditions.

That's a licence to use the Service — not a transfer of ownership. Everything else stays ours or our licensors'.

In plain English: You get a personal key to use the app. The app, its data, and its content remain ours. Use it yourself, don't share your login, contribute good content, and don't harvest or resell what's inside.

3. Accounts and account sharing

• One person, one account. Your account is personal to you. Don't share your login credentials, and don't use anyone else's account.

• Households: family members who want to use the Service should create their own accounts and subscriptions. Premium benefits apply only to the subscribed account.

• No commercial pooling: don't share, pool, or resell access to a Premium account (for example, circulating one login among a club or business). If you'd like a team, club, or commercial arrangement, contact us — we'd love to talk.

• Security: keep your password confidential and tell us promptly at support@mydogrules.co.nz if you suspect unauthorised use of your account.

• Truthfulness: provide accurate account information, including your age attestation at signup.

4. What we own — intellectual property

The Service and everything in it is protected by the Copyright Act 1994, the Trade Marks Act 2002, and other intellectual property laws. Our protected material includes:

• The software, source code, and user interface of the Service;

• Our database compilations — the selection, verification, enrichment, structuring, and arrangement of dog-access rules, locations, boundaries, hazards, venues, and related data;

• Original text, summaries, descriptions, and editorial content, including AI-assisted content we have commissioned, curated, and arranged;

• Our safety-signal methodology and its outputs;

• Graphics, icons, map styling, and visual design; and

• The "My Dog Rules" name, logo, and branding.

4.1 Public source material

Some information is derived from public sources — for example council bylaws and policies (which are themselves excluded from copyright under section 27 of the Copyright Act 1994) and government geospatial data published under open licences such as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. We acknowledge and attribute those sources, and your freedom to obtain such material from the original public source is unaffected by these terms. What these terms protect is our work: the compiled, enriched, structured, and presented form of that material within the Service.

4.2 Third-party attribution

Map display and place data are supplied by Mapbox, whose place data is derived from OpenStreetMap — © OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Their attribution (the Mapbox wordmark and "© Mapbox © OpenStreetMap") is displayed on every map in the Service as a condition of our licences. You must not remove, hide, or obscure any attribution, copyright, or trademark notice displayed in the Service.

5. Content you contribute — reviews and photos

Reviews and photos from real dog owners are the best part of the map. To keep them safe and lawful:

5.1 Your licence to us

You keep ownership of your content. You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example resizing, re-encoding, and stripping embedded metadata from photos), publish, display, moderate, and remove your reviews and photos as part of operating, improving, and promoting the Service. Because reviews are public contributions displayed without your name, this licence survives the deletion of your account — our Privacy Policy explains what's deleted and what's retained, and you can ask us to remove specific contributions at any time.

5.2 Your warranties

Each time you post, you warrant that:

• You took the photo or wrote the content yourself, or otherwise have the right to publish it;

• It is lawful, and doesn't infringe anyone's copyright, privacy, or other rights;

• No identifiable person shown in a photo objects to its publication; and

• It's honest — reviews should reflect your genuine experience of the place.

5.3 Content standards

Don't post content that is unlawful, objectionable, defamatory, harassing, hateful, or sexually explicit; that discloses someone else's personal information without their consent; that is spam or advertising; or that is misleading (including fake or paid-for reviews). Photos should be of the place — not primarily of identifiable people who haven't agreed to appear.

5.4 Hosting, moderation, and takedown

• We host, we don't author: user content doesn't represent our views, and we don't pre-vet review text. Responsibility for user content rests with its author.

• Photo screening: photos are held privately and screened automatically before publication, and are published only after passing.

• Report it: anyone can report a photo or review via the in-app report control or support@mydogrules.co.nz. Reports queue for human review — a single report doesn't automatically remove content, which protects contributors from misuse of the report button, but we act promptly on genuine problems.

• Our discretion: we may remove, hide, or decline to publish any content at our discretion, including where we reasonably believe it breaches these standards or the law.

• Illegal content: if we identify content that we reasonably believe is illegal (including objectionable material under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993), we quarantine it immediately so it cannot be viewed, and we preserve it rather than deleting it, so that evidence is available to the authorities. We may report such material to the Department of Internal Affairs or other appropriate New Zealand authorities, and we will not notify the uploader where notice could prejudice an investigation or is not required by law. A deletion request does not defeat this — see our Privacy Policy.

6. Acceptable use — the ground rules

6.1 Don't take the data

• Don't scrape, crawl, spider, harvest, or bulk-download content or data from the Service, whether manually or with bots, scripts, or automated tools;

• Don't systematically extract or re-use any substantial part of our databases;

• Don't copy, republish, redistribute, sell, licence, or commercially exploit Service content or data — including feeding it into a competing product, dataset, or AI training corpus; and

• Don't access the Service by any means other than the interfaces we intentionally provide.

6.2 Don't break or burden the Service

• Don't interfere with or disrupt the Service, its servers, or networks, or impose an unreasonable load on our infrastructure (we apply rate limits — respect them);

• Don't probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, or bypass any security, authentication, moderation, rate-limiting, or paywall measure (including the one-trial-per-person control);

• Don't introduce viruses, malware, or other harmful code; and

• Don't reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Service, except to the limited extent New Zealand law expressly permits despite this restriction.

6.3 Don't abuse the AI features

• The AI assistants (and their spoken playback) are for genuine questions about your dog — don't use them in an automated or bulk fashion, for unrelated purposes, or to run up processing costs;

• Don't attempt to manipulate the assistants into producing harmful, unlawful, or off-purpose output, or to extract underlying prompts, source data, or model behaviour; and

• Don't rely on, or attempt to elicit, AI answers about legal access or leash rules — the assistants are designed to defer those questions to the rules panel.

6.4 Don't misuse the platform

• Don't use the Service for any unlawful purpose or in breach of any law, including the Dog Control Act 1996 and council bylaws;

• Don't impersonate anyone or misrepresent an affiliation;

• Don't use the lost & found tools to publish another person's information without their consent, or for any purpose other than genuinely reuniting a dog with its owner; and

• Don't frame, mirror, or embed the Service without our prior written consent.

Ordinary use is exactly what we want — checking rules, sharing a link to a park page with a mate, printing a poster for your own lost dog, or quoting a small snippet with attribution. None of the rules above is aimed at that.

7. Outbound links

The Service links out to third-party websites — government and council websites, event directories, lost-pet listing services, venue websites, social networks, and others. Those sites aren't ours: we don't control their content, accuracy, or privacy practices, and a link isn't an endorsement. The specific sites we link to may change over time. Anything you do or post there — including publishing a lost-dog listing or sharing a poster to social media — is governed by that site's own terms.

8. Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions, or corrections (for example, "this beach is now off-leash in winter"), you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use them to operate and improve the Service. We remain responsible for verifying rule information before publishing it, and we'll never present your tip as an official council statement.

9. If the rules are broken

• We may investigate suspected breaches and take proportionate action: a warning, content removal, rate-limiting, feature restriction, or suspension or termination of your account.

• For serious breaches — unlawful content, security attacks, bulk data extraction, or commercial exploitation of our content — we may terminate immediately without notice and pursue any remedies available at law, including under the Copyright Act 1994.

• If we terminate your account for breach, no refund is payable, except to the extent the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 requires otherwise.

• Sections 4 (Intellectual property), 5.1 (Your licence to us), 8 (Feedback), and this section survive termination or deletion of your account.

10. Changes, law, and interpretation

• We may update these terms as the Service evolves; material changes will be notified as described in the Terms & Conditions.

• These terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction.

• Nothing in these terms limits your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986 as a consumer, or any statutory permission that cannot be excluded by contract.

How to contact us

Questions, feedback, or a wagging complaint? We would genuinely like to hear from you.

• Company: Estate Wise Limited (Company No. 9374111), trading as My Dog Rules

• Email: support@mydogrules.co.nz

• Phone: +64 21 205 6078

• Address: 123 Grovenor Drive, Orewa, Auckland, New Zealand