Terms of Use

1. Acceptance and eligibility

By downloading, accessing, or using Places or this website, you agree to these Terms and the Privacy Statement. If you do not agree, do not use Places.

You must be legally able to enter this agreement. Places is not directed to children under 13. If you are below the age of legal majority where you live, a parent or guardian should review these Terms and supervise your use.

In these Terms, “Places,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to the developer of Places identified on its App Store product page. You can contact us at chen@stpdchen.com.

2. What Places provides

Places is a personal location journal. It lets you save Places and photos, browse them on a map and in a geographic library, create Trips, import suggestions from authorized photos, and—when using iCloud mode—use synchronization, social previews, follows, notifications, and collaborative Trip sharing.

Local-only mode keeps a journal on one device and does not include iCloud synchronization, social features, or shared Trips. Features can vary by device, operating-system version, permissions, iCloud status, country, and service availability.

3. Your account, device, and permissions

You are responsible for your device, Apple ID and iCloud security, network access, backups, permissions, and activity performed through your account. Keep your device passcode and Apple credentials confidential and tell us if you reasonably believe Places data has been misused.

You control whether to grant Location, Photos, and Notifications permissions. Some features will not work without the relevant permission. You are responsible for reviewing photo suggestions, map search results, addresses, and imported content before saving or sharing them.

4. Your content and the permission you give us

You retain ownership of content you create or upload, including names, notes, photos, and Trip content. You represent that you have the rights and permissions needed to use and share that content and that it does not violate law, privacy, publicity, or intellectual property rights.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, process, format, transmit, display, and share your content only as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, support, and improve Places, follow your settings and sharing instructions, enforce these Terms, and meet legal obligations. This license ends when the content is deleted from systems we control, subject to reasonable technical, legal, safety, backup, recipient-copy, and service-provider retention.

5. Public previews, profiles, and shared Trips

In iCloud mode, Places automatically creates reduced public previews for synchronized Places so social features can work. Public profiles, relationship records, and reduced previews may be visible to other users. Hide from Discovery removes your profile from Find People but does not make public records confidential, remove existing followers, or delete previews.

When you invite people to a Trip or enable eligible link sharing, accepted recipients can currently view and edit the shared Trip. Only share with people you trust. A participant may change content or keep a screenshot, export, or other copy. The owner is responsible for managing access and may remove participants or the shared Trip, but Places cannot retrieve copies someone already saved elsewhere.

Do not use a public profile, preview, Trip title, Trip note, or shared image to expose another person's home address, real-time whereabouts, sensitive personal information, or content they did not authorize you to share.

6. Acceptable use

You may not use Places to:

• break the law, violate another person's rights, or encourage harmful conduct;
• harass, threaten, stalk, impersonate, exploit, or invade another person's privacy;
• publish hateful, sexually exploitative, violent, deceptive, or otherwise abusive content;
• spam, manipulate follows, distribute malware, probe security, or interfere with the service;
• scrape, harvest, or misuse profiles, previews, identifiers, or shared content;
• reverse engineer or copy Places except where applicable law or an open-source license permits it; or
• use maps, locations, or Trips for emergency response, surveillance, safety-critical decisions, or unlawful tracking.

7. Reporting, blocking, and moderation

Places includes basic reporting and blocking tools. We may review reports, restrict visibility, remove public or shared content, limit features, preserve relevant evidence, or suspend access when reasonably necessary to address suspected abuse, safety, legal, security, or Terms violations. We do not promise to monitor every item or resolve every dispute between users.

Submit reports honestly and provide only information needed to explain the concern. Misusing reports, retaliation, or knowingly false reports can itself violate these Terms.

8. Location and photo accuracy

Photo metadata, geocoding, map search, addresses, coordinates, suggested names, routes, and dates can be incomplete, stale, or wrong. Places is a journal, not a navigation, emergency, rescue, medical, or personal-safety service. Verify important information independently and stay aware of real-world conditions.

9. Apple and third-party services

Places relies on Apple services such as the App Store, iCloud, CloudKit, Photos, Maps, geocoding, MetricKit, notifications, and system sharing. Your use of those services is also subject to Apple's terms and privacy practices. We do not control their availability, processing, security, or changes.

Links to external websites or content are provided for convenience. We are not responsible for third-party services or content and a link does not imply endorsement.

10. Availability, changes, and data risk

We may add, change, limit, suspend, or discontinue features to maintain security, comply with law, respond to platform changes, or improve the product. Places may be interrupted by network, iCloud, device, software, maintenance, migration, or other failures.

Keep independent copies of content you cannot afford to lose and review exports before relying on them. We do not guarantee that every item, edit, notification, migration, import, or collaboration change will be available, synchronized, delivered, or recoverable.

11. Deletion, suspension, and termination

You can stop using Places at any time. In-app deletion controls can remove individual items or eligible account data as described in the Privacy Statement. Deletion can require the owning iCloud account and network access, and it cannot remove recipient copies, exports, Apple service records, or certain safety, legal, reset, or recovery records.

We may restrict or terminate access to social or shared features if you materially violate these Terms, create safety or security risk, expose us or others to legal liability, or if required by law or Apple. Sections that by their nature should survive termination remain effective, including rights, responsibility for prior conduct, disclaimers, and liability limits.

12. Places intellectual property

Places, its website, software, design, brand, icon, text, and other materials—excluding your content and third-party materials—are owned by or licensed to the developer and protected by applicable law. These Terms do not grant rights to use the Places name, marks, or visual identity except as needed for ordinary personal use of the app.

13. Disclaimers

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Places and the website are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, uninterrupted operation, accuracy, security, or data preservation. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so some of this section may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the developer will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost data, memories, travel, profits, goodwill, opportunities, or service access arising from or related to Places. Where liability cannot be excluded, it will be limited to the amount you paid specifically for Places during the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Applicable consumer law may provide rights that cannot be limited by these Terms.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when the product, platform, or legal requirements change. The Last updated date identifies the current version. When required, we will provide additional notice. Your continued use after an update takes effect means you accept the revised Terms, except where law requires a different form of consent.

16. Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent to chen@stpdchen.com. Please include enough context to identify the issue, but do not send passwords, full data exports, private photos, or precise home addresses unless specifically necessary.