Legal
Terms of Service
1. Who we are and what these terms cover
Bushlink ("Bushlink", "we", "us") is a mobile application that lets professional safari field guides log and share wildlife sightings with other trusted guides. The service is operated by Michiel Hendrickx, operating as Bushlink, established in Belgium, contactable at bushlink.app@gmail.com (the "Operator").
These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and the Operator governing your access to and use of the Bushlink application and related services (the "Service"). Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data and forms part of this agreement by reference.
By tapping to accept these Terms in the app, you confirm you have read and agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
Because the Service is in beta, features may change, break, or be withdrawn, and data handling is still being hardened. We tell you this plainly so you can decide accordingly.
2. Eligibility
To use the Service you must:
- be at least 18 years old;
- be a bona fide professional safari field guide, or a person with a legitimate professional role in the safari and conservation sector, and you warrant that this is true; and
- have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms.
The Service is not intended for tourists, members of the public, or anyone under 18, and is not directed at children. If we learn that an account belongs to someone ineligible, we may suspend or remove it.
3. Your account and verification
3.1 Registration.
You create an account using a phone number, an email address and password, or a Google or Apple sign-in. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account.
3.2 Verification.
To see other guides' shared sightings and to join communities, you must be verified. Verification requires you to submit a photograph of an identifying document (an ID or guide licence) so that we can confirm your professional status. A human reviewer assesses each submission and either approves or rejects it. We delete your verification document once a verification decision has been made — we do not retain it after that point. Until you are verified, you can log your own sightings but cannot view sightings shared by others.
3.3 Accuracy.
You agree to provide accurate registration and verification information and to keep your profile current.
4. Acceptable use and the anti-poaching rule
The entire purpose of Bushlink is to help guides share wildlife information without that information reaching anyone who would harm wildlife. This section is the most important in these Terms.
4.1 The anti-poaching rule.
You must not, and must not attempt to, and must not assist or enable any other person to:
- use the Service, or any data obtained through it — including blurred locations, species and park information, notes, photographs, timing data, or any other content — to locate, track, capture, harm, hunt, poach, harvest, or traffic any wild animal or its parts;
- share, sell, publish, or pass on any sighting data, location data, or media obtained through the Service to any person for any such purpose, or where you know or ought reasonably to suspect it may be used for such a purpose;
- attempt to defeat, reverse, average out, or otherwise undermine the location-blurring or any other safeguard in the Service in order to recover or approximate exact wildlife locations;
- scrape, harvest, bulk-extract, or systematically collect data from the Service by any automated or manual means; or
- use the Service in any way that breaches wildlife-protection, conservation, or anti-trafficking laws in any country in which you operate, including CITES-implementing legislation and national wildlife acts in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
4.2 Enforcement.
Breach of this section is a material breach. We may immediately suspend or terminate your account, preserve relevant records, and report you to conservation authorities, park authorities, and law-enforcement where we reasonably believe wildlife is at risk. We may seek injunctive relief without the need to post security, in addition to any other remedy.
4.3 General conduct.
You must also not: impersonate another person or guide; upload unlawful, infringing, or harmful content; harass other users; interfere with the Service's operation or security; or use the Service to break any applicable law.
5. Sightings, content, and the licence you give us
5.1 What you contribute.
When you log a sighting you may provide a species, location, group size, behaviour, a free-text note, and up to five photographs. You choose whether a sighting is shared with all verified guides ("All Guides") or only with specific communities you belong to.
5.2 What other guides see.
Other guides never see your exact location. Shared sightings display a blurred location (offset by approximately 500 metres), the species, and limited details. Your free-text notes and your identity as the author are not shown to other guides in the shared feeds. You acknowledge that any sighting you share is visible to the audience you select (all verified guides, or the members of the communities you choose).
5.3 Photographs.
You acknowledge that sighting photographs you upload are made available to the guides who can see that sighting via image links, and that those links may remain valid for a period after the sighting is no longer shown in feeds.
5.4 Your ownership; the licence to us.
You keep ownership of the content you submit. You grant the Operator a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable, perpetual licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example, to blur coordinates or strip photo metadata), and display your content for the purposes of operating the Service and, as further described in the Privacy Policy, to retain and use sighting records and photographs in pseudonymised form for wildlife conservation and scientific research, including after your account is deleted. This research licence survives termination of your account. (See section 8 and the Privacy Policy.)
5.5 Your warranties.
You warrant that you have the rights necessary to submit your content and to grant this licence, and that your content does not infringe anyone's rights or break any law.
5.6 Our moderation.
We may review, refuse, or remove content, and may withhold or revoke verification, at our discretion, to protect users, wildlife, or the integrity of the Service. We are not obliged to monitor content but may do so.
6. Communities
Verified guides may create or join private communities to share sightings with a trusted group. If you create or administer a community:
- you control who is approved into it, and you must approve only genuine, eligible guides, because membership grants access to shared (blurred) sighting locations;
- you must keep the community's join code confidential and use it responsibly; and
- you remain bound by the anti-poaching rule (section 4) in how you run the community.
If you delete your account, communities you created are not deleted; they continue without an administrator unless we decide otherwise.
7. No warranty on data; field-safety disclaimer
7.1 Sightings are user-reported.
Sightings are reported by guides and, where shown, corroborated by other guides. They are not verified facts. We do not warrant that any sighting is accurate, current, complete, or that any animal is or is not present at any location.
7.2 Field safety is your responsibility.
Guiding in the field, often near dangerous wild animals, carries real risk. You are solely responsible for your own safety, your guests' safety, and your field decisions. Do not rely on the Service as a safety tool. Nothing in the Service substitutes for your professional judgement, park rules, and applicable law.
7.3 Service "as is".
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, and we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free. This is beta software.
8. Account deletion — what is removed and what is kept
You can delete your account in the app (you will be asked to type DELETE to confirm). When you do, we delete: your login credentials, profile, avatar, any verification documents still held, community memberships, notification preferences, device tokens, and your reactions.
We do not delete your past sightings. Instead, we remove the link between you and them and retain the sighting records — including their photographs — in pseudonymised form for wildlife conservation and scientific research, as explained in the Privacy Policy. Communities you created are not deleted (see section 6).
We are transparent about this because it is a deliberate choice: wildlife observation data has lasting conservation value. By using the Service you accept that deleting your account does not delete your past sighting contributions.
9. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate your access at any time if you breach these Terms (in particular section 4), if required by law, or to protect users or wildlife. You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — including the research licence (5.4), the anti-poaching rule (4), disclaimers (7), liability (10), and governing law (12) — survive.
10. Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law:
- we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or special loss, or for loss of profit, data, or goodwill;
- we are not liable for any loss arising from your reliance on sighting data or from field decisions; and
- our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to EUR 100, or, where the law requires a higher minimum, the lowest amount the law permits.
Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any liability that mandatory Belgian or applicable consumer-protection law does not allow us to exclude.
11. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. If we make a material change, we will present the updated Terms in the app and ask you to accept them. We record the version you accepted and when. Continued use after a non-material change means you accept it.
12. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by Belgian law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and subject to any mandatory protections of the law of your country of residence that cannot be contracted out of.
Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms that cannot be resolved amicably will be finally settled under the CEPANI (Belgian Centre for Arbitration and Mediation) Rules of Arbitration by one or more arbitrators appointed under those rules. The seat of arbitration is Brussels, Belgium; the language is English. This does not prevent either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief from a competent court, in particular to protect wildlife under section 4.
13. Contact
Questions about these Terms: bushlink.app@gmail.com.