GroupUP Terms of Use

Who can use GroupUP

You need to be 18 or older to make a GroupUP account, post anything, or join anything. GroupUP arranges meetings between strangers in the real world, which is not something we are willing to put minors into.

Reading public pages does not need an account. Doing anything — joining, hosting, messaging, following — does.

You also need to be allowed to use GroupUP under the law where you live, and not be someone we have previously removed.

Your account

• Use a real name or a name people will recognise you by. Do not pretend to be someone else.
• One account per person.
• Keep your login to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you.
• Tell us straight away if you think somebody else has got into your account.

What GroupUP actually does, and what it does not

GroupUP is a noticeboard and a messaging tool. People and businesses put up plans; other people say they are coming; everyone talks in a chat. That is the whole of it.

GroupUP is not:

• the organiser of anything you attend — the person or business who posted it is;
• a guide, an instructor, a chaperone, or a safety supervisor;
• an insurer, and we do not carry insurance for anything you do;
• a check on whether an event is legal, safe, suitable for you, or even real;
• a party to any deal, payment, or arrangement you make with anyone you meet here.

We do not endorse any user, host, group, business or event by letting it appear on GroupUP.

We do not vet anyone

To be completely clear, because it is the thing people most often assume: we run no criminal record checks, no sex offender register checks, no identity verification, no reference checks and no qualification checks on anybody using GroupUP. A profile is simply what that person typed in.

If we ever add a check of any kind, it will be described on this page and you should still not treat it as a guarantee about a person.

The risk you are taking

You use GroupUP, and you meet people through GroupUP, at your own risk. You understand and accept that:

• people are not always who they say they are, and someone you meet could be dishonest, unpleasant, unwell, intoxicated, or dangerous;
• activities arranged here — hiking, climbing, riding, water sports, sport of any kind, driving to a meeting point, drinking, going to a stranger’s home or business — can hurt you, and some of them can kill you;
• venues, equipment and vehicles belonging to other people may be unsafe, and nobody at GroupUP has looked at them;
• plans get cancelled, hosts do not turn up, and descriptions are sometimes wrong.

Knowing all of that, you take on those risks yourself and you agree not to hold GroupUP or ACG responsible for injury, illness, loss, theft, damage, harassment or anything else that happens at, on the way to, or as a result of something arranged through GroupUP. This is what people call an assumption of risk: you have been told plainly, and you are choosing to go anyway.

Nothing here takes away rights the law says you cannot sign away — for example, we are not trying to excuse our own fraud, or death or injury caused by our own negligence, where the law does not allow that.

How to behave

While using GroupUP, do not:

• harass, threaten, stalk, bully or intimidate anyone, on GroupUP or after meeting them through it;
• post anything hateful, sexual, violent or otherwise inappropriate, or anything involving minors;
• lie about who you are, or set up an event you have no intention of running;
• use GroupUP to sell, spam, recruit, scam, or push people to another site;
• break the law, or organise something illegal;
• take someone’s details from GroupUP and use them for anything they did not agree to;
• scrape, copy in bulk, overload, break into, or poke at how GroupUP works;
• ignore somebody who has blocked you, or make a new account to get around a block or a removal.

If someone crosses a line, block them and report them. You can report a person, an event, a group or a message from the page it is on.

What you post stays yours

Your photos, event descriptions, messages and everything else you put on GroupUP belong to you. You are not handing them over.

You do give us permission to store your content and show it where it is meant to appear — your profile, the event page, the group chat, the feed, and previews of those pages elsewhere. That permission is free, worldwide, and lasts as long as the content is on GroupUP. It exists so we can run the product, and for nothing else. Remove the content or delete your account and that permission ends, apart from copies other people already saw or saved and routine backups that age out.

Only post things you are allowed to post. If you put up a photo, it should be yours to put up.

Public means public. Public events and public groups can be read by anyone at all, with no account, and can be picked up by search engines. A public profile can also be opened by anyone who has the link and no account — but profile pages are the one thing we ask search engines to leave out, so a person is not turned into a search result. Post accordingly.

Businesses on GroupUP

Some events, offers and pages come from businesses that use ACG. Any booking, payment, ticket, discount or refund is between you and that business, under whatever terms they set. We are not the seller and we do not stand behind what they offer.

Cost

Browsing GroupUP and joining things on it is free. If we ever charge for something, the price will be shown before you agree to it.

Ending things

You can stop using GroupUP whenever you like, and you can delete your account — see the Privacy Policy for how, and for what deleting removes.

We can suspend or remove an account, or take down content, if someone breaks these terms, puts other people at risk, or if we have to in order to protect GroupUP or the people on it. Where it is reasonable to do so we will say why, but for safety reasons we may not always be able to. The parts of these terms about risk, liability and content carry on applying after an account ends.

No promises about the service

GroupUP is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against everything, or that anything on it is accurate. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Limit on what we owe you

To the fullest extent the law allows, GroupUP and ACG are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost goodwill, arising out of GroupUP — including anything done by another user, anything that happens at a meet-up, and any event that is cancelled or misdescribed.

Where we are liable at all, our total liability for everything connected to GroupUP will not be more than the greater of (a) what you paid us in the three months before the problem, or (b) one hundred US dollars ($100). GroupUP is free, so for most people that is $100.

Some places do not allow limits like these. If you live somewhere that does not, this section applies to you only as far as it is allowed.

If you cause a problem for us

If someone brings a claim against us because of what you posted, what you did on GroupUP, or how you behaved towards someone you met through it, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with that claim, as far as the law allows.

Which law applies

[PLACEHOLDER — TO BE COMPLETED BEFORE LAUNCH] The governing law and the place where disputes are handled have not been set for GroupUP yet. This paragraph must be replaced with real terms, chosen with legal advice, before GroupUP opens to the public.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, we will change the “last updated” date at the top of this page, and for anything important we will try to tell you in the app as well. Carrying on using GroupUP after a change means you accept it.

Getting in touch

Questions about these terms, or something you need to report to a human: email hello@aggregatecommunitygroups.com and put “GroupUP” in the subject line. That address reaches ACG, the team that runs GroupUP.

[PLACEHOLDER] GroupUP does not have its own support address or a published postal address yet. Both need to be set up before launch, and this section updated.

These terms were written to be readable rather than clever, and they have not been reviewed by a lawyer. A qualified lawyer should check them before GroupUP opens to the public.