Terms and takedowns
This page describes what Spot Your Corner does, who owns the photographs on it, and how to get something taken down. It is written as a plain account of how the app works rather than as an agreement, and everything on it can be checked against the code.
What the app is
People photograph a dish and post it to the place that serves it. One post — a spot — is a photograph, an optional caption, the dish it is of, and the place it was taken at. Those three things get pages of their own: a dish page, a place page, and a profile page for the person who posted.
Reading is open to anybody, with no account. Posting, reporting and saying you want to try something need one.
Who owns a photograph
The person who took it. Posting a photograph here does not hand its ownership to us and is not a general licence to it. What posting does is put it on the pages it belongs to — the dish, the place, the poster’s own profile, and the feed that ranks those dishes — which is what posting it is for.
The app makes three resized copies of every upload so that pages load, and serves those. It does not sell them, license them onward, or use them anywhere else. Whether that ever changes is on the list at the foot of this page; it has not changed today.
The same sentence is in the footer of every page on this site.
Reporting something from inside the app
Every dish, place and profile page carries a Report button, and so does every individual photograph on a dish page. It opens a short form: pick a reason, add a note if you want to, send.
The reasons are:
- Spam or advertising
- Offensive or abusive
- Wrong place
- Not a photo of food
- Something else
Reporting needs an account. That is deliberate: a report is read by a person, and a queue that anybody can fill anonymously stops being one anybody can work. Reports go into that queue, and whoever works it can hide or remove the thing reported.
If you have an account, this is the route to use — it is faster than the one below, and it points at the exact thing you are complaining about.
Getting something taken down
If a photograph here is yours and somebody else posted it, or it shows you, your home or your business and you want it gone, you do not need an account to say so. Write to us.
Please include:
- the link to the page it is on, and which photograph on that page you mean;
- what the problem is — you took the photograph, or it is of you, or it should not be public for some other reason;
- enough for us to believe you: for a photograph of your own, where else it exists or that you hold the original;
- how to reach you, so we can tell you what happened.
A complaint that arrives will be read and acted on. The same controls the in-app queue uses apply — anything complained about can be hidden while it is being looked at, and removed if the complaint holds. How quickly we answer is on the list below; we are not going to put a number on it that nobody has committed to.
Signing in, and what that stores
Accounts sign in with Google. What Google hands us is the account id that identifies you to us, the email address on that account and whether Google has verified it, and the display name the account carries. We ask for nothing else — no contacts, no calendar, no profile picture — and we never see your Google password.
On top of that the app stores what you give it: the handle you choose (once — it cannot be changed), a short bio if you write one, the cuisines you pick during the optional onboarding questions, and everything you post — spots, photographs, captions, the dishes you say you want to try or have tried.
Each sign-in also creates a session row: a hash of the token your browser holds — not the token — the browser’s user-agent string, and when the session was made, last used, and expires. Signing out revokes it.
Closing an account marks it closed rather than erasing the rows, so that reports filed about or by it survive for whoever has to look at them. Full erasure on request is possible and is done by hand.
Where the photographs are kept
Uploaded photographs are stored on Cloudflare R2. The app resizes each upload into three sizes there and serves those; the file you sent is not published as you sent it.
That re-encoding is also what removes the EXIF metadata a phone attaches to a photograph — including the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. Publishing somebody’s home location because they photographed dinner is a real harm, and none of that data survives the upload. The one thing a spot does carry is the place you chose to post it to, which is a restaurant rather than a person.
Still to be decided
These are open questions rather than answers we have left out. Each one is a decision the owner of this app has to make before it launches, and a plausible-sounding guess here would be indistinguishable from a checked answer:
- Who operates Spot Your Corner — the name and country of the person or company behind it, which is also what decides whose law applies and where a dispute would go.
- How quickly a complaint is answered, and whether that is a promise or a target.
- How long removed photographs and closed accounts are kept before they are deleted for good, and what is kept afterwards for the moderation record.
- Whether photographs may ever appear anywhere other than the pages they were posted to — in an app-store screenshot, say. Today they do not.