This is the full text of our Terms of Service. It is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
1. Introduction
Welcome to Cite, an app that helps people discover places, events, reports and area alerts around them. By accessing or using Cite (the “Service”), you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
2. Your account
You are responsible for the activity on your account and for keeping your credentials secure. You must provide accurate information and be old enough to form a binding contract where you live.
3. User content and behaviour
You retain ownership of what you post, and grant us a licence to host and display it in order to operate the Service. You are responsible for what you post, and it must not be unlawful, misleading, or harmful to others. We may remove content and suspend accounts.
4. Location and safety
Many features rely on location data, including your device location and locations provided by other users. Pins, events, reports and alerts are user-generated and can be incomplete, outdated or inaccurate. We do not guarantee the accuracy or reliability of any of it.
Always exercise your own judgment and prioritise your safety. Do not use the Service for emergency response or life-safety situations; contact your local emergency services instead.
Area alerts describe something happening over a stretch of ground: flooding, an outage, a closed road, a missing person. They are posted by other users and confirmed or disputed by other users. Confirming or disputing an alert inside Cite is a statement to other users of the app and nothing more: it does not report anything to the police, to a utility, or to any emergency service, and no such body receives it.
Telephone numbers shown in the app for emergency services and other organisations are provided for convenience. We do not operate those services and cannot guarantee that a number is current or that a call will be answered.
5. Missing-person alerts
An alert reported as a missing person names a real person, shows their photograph, and asks strangers to go looking. Extra rules apply to it, and breaking them is grounds for removing the alert and suspending the account behind it.
- You may not post one anonymously. The Service will not accept it.
- You must be entitled to share the details of the person concerned for this purpose, for example because you are a member of their family or household, or are acting with the agreement of somebody who is.
- You must not post one about somebody who does not want to be found, or where publishing their location or photograph could put them at risk.
- The details you give must be true to the best of your knowledge, and the contact number must be one that is actually answered.
- You must not post one as a joke, a test, or to draw attention to anything else.
Report the person missing to the police as well. Cite is not a substitute for doing so, and nothing you post here reaches them.
If you are the person named in an alert, or are responsible for them, you can have it removed by contacting us at cite@joincite.com. You do not need an account to ask.
6. Acceptable use
You agree that you will not, and will not attempt to:
- Use the Service for any unlawful purpose or in violation of any applicable law.
- Post an alert, report, or pin describing something you know is not happening, or confirm one you have not seen for yourself.
- Post content about another person that identifies them without a proper reason for doing so, or that is intended to harass, expose, or endanger them.
- Use the reporting or flagging tools to suppress content you simply disagree with.
- Access or use the Service in a way that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair our systems.
- Scrape, crawl, or harvest data from the Service without our prior written consent.
- Reverse engineer or otherwise attempt to derive source code except where permitted by law.
- Circumvent any access controls, security measures, or usage limits we put in place.
7. Paid plans for businesses
Businesses can buy the Standard plan (US$30 a month) and sponsored placements (US$15 a week) at joincite.com/business. Prices are in US dollars.
Cite sells these plans directly and handles its own customer service and refunds. Card payments are processed by HandyPay on our behalf.
The Standard plan renews every month until you cancel it, which you can do at any time from your dashboard. Cancelling stops the next charge, and the plan runs to the end of the period you have already paid for. A sponsored placement runs for seven days from payment. Refunds are covered by our Refund Policy.
A status set on a plan that has lapsed does not reach the map. A sponsored line is read before it is shown, and we may decline a line, or remove a placement, that breaks these Terms.
8. Selling on Cite
Approved sellers can show a shop on the map, including a shop that moves, with what it sells and how it takes payment. These rules apply to anybody who sells through Cite, as a person or as a business.
- Cite is not a party to your sales. Valare 2K does not buy, sell, hold, deliver or take payment for anything a seller lists. A sale is between the seller and the buyer, and so is any refund, complaint or dispute about what was sold.
- You need permission to sell where you sell. You are responsible for any licence, permit or food-handling certificate your selling requires, and for permission from a landowner, a campus or any other authority over the place you sell. Approval on Cite is none of those.
- What may not be sold. You must not list or sell anything illegal where you sell it; weapons, ammunition or explosives; drugs or other controlled substances, or prescription medicine; alcohol, tobacco or vapes, unless you hold the licence the law requires and sell only to people of legal age; stolen or counterfeit goods; live animals; sexual services or sexual content; or anything else we tell you is not allowed.
- Your listing must be true. The shop's name, photos, stock, selling area and payment details must be accurate, and you must not use a name or photographs that belong to somebody else.
- Approval, suspension and removal. A person checks every seller before their shop can go live. A person applying to sell gives a photograph of a student or government ID, which is used only for that check. For a business, an approved claim to a place covers that place. We may decline an application, and may suspend or remove a shop at any time, including while it is open, if it breaks these Terms, if we receive reports about it, or where we need to protect buyers, sellers or the Service. We will tell you why where we can.
- Reports. Anybody can report a shop. We review reports, and may ask you for information, pause your shop while we look into it, or end your ability to sell.
- Location while open. A shop that moves shares the position of the phone selling for it only while it is open, as our Privacy Policy describes. Sharing stops if the shop leaves its selling area, where that is switched on, and a shop that stops reporting its position closes by itself.
- Drivers. A business that adds drivers to a place is responsible for them, and for what they do with that place's shop while it is open.
- Plans. Applying is free. Going live needs Cite Plus, for a person, or the Standard plan for that place, for a business. Cite Plus is bought and managed through the App Store or Google Play, under their terms. Approval is not withdrawn because a plan lapses.
Buy from a seller using your own judgment. We check who a seller is, not what they sell, and we make no promise about the quality, safety or legality of anything sold.
9. Third-party services
The Service relies on third parties for maps, hosting, storage, authentication, notifications and payments. Their terms and privacy practices apply to their own processing.
10. Termination
You may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account in the app. We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these Terms or where necessary to protect the Service or its users.
11. Disclaimers
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent permitted by law.
12. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss arising from your reliance on user-generated content.
13. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. If we make material changes we will take reasonable steps to notify you, such as updating the date at the top of this page or providing an in-app notice.
14. Contact
Cite is owned and operated by Valare 2K. Questions about these Terms can be sent to cite@joincite.com. For billing and refunds, email cite@joincite.com or call +1 (876) 237-9984.