Terms of Use

Last updated: 11 July 2026

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

Ephemeros ("Ephemeros", "we", "us", "our") is a collaborative re-photography platform operated by Willem van Zyl t/a "CLC Agency", based in South Africa. Users capture repeat photos of fixed viewpoints ("spots") with the Ephemeros mobile app, building a long-term visual record of how places change. These Terms of Use ("terms") govern your use of the Ephemeros website at ephemeros.app, the Ephemeros mobile application, and the related APIs and services (together, the "service").

By creating an account or using the service you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle your personal information. If you do not agree, do not use the service. You can contact us at hello@ephemeros.app.

If you are a consumer in South Africa, nothing in these terms limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 ("CPA") that cannot lawfully be limited. If you use the service from another country, mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence continue to apply to you where the law says they must.

2. Eligibility and age

You must be at least 13 years old (or the higher minimum age required in your country) to use the service. If you are under 18 (a "child" under the South African Protection of Personal Information Act, "POPIA"), you may only use the service with the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian, who must agree to these terms on your behalf and accepts them for you. By using the service you confirm that you meet these requirements.

3. Your account

• Provide accurate registration details and keep them up to date. Email verification is required before the account can be used.
• Keep your password confidential. You are responsible for activity on your account; tell us immediately at hello@ephemeros.app if you suspect unauthorised use.
• One account per person. Do not impersonate anyone or misrepresent an affiliation.
• Your username and profile can be publicly visible; you can control this with the public-profile, leaderboard, nearby-discoverability, and friend-activity settings in your profile.

4. The service

The service lets you create spots, capture aligned repeat photos with the in-app camera, organise spots into lists, share spots via links and QR codes, earn points and badges, and view timelapses of how spots change. Photos are captured with technical metadata (location, compass heading, device orientation, air pressure, device model) that makes the alignment system and the scientific record work.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the service, and may set and change operational limits (for example the one-capture-per-spot-per-day limit and the minimum distance between spots). We will give reasonable notice of material changes where practicable. The service may be temporarily unavailable for maintenance.

5. Capture integrity

Spot photos may only be taken with the in-app camera at the actual location. Do not attempt to submit imported, edited, staged, AI-generated, or misattributed images, or to falsify capture metadata. The scientific value of the platform depends on this, and violations may lead to content removal and account suspension or termination.

6. Your content and the licences you grant

You keep the copyright in every photo you upload. Ephemeros never takes ownership of your work — we act as a steward of the record you help build. Instead, by uploading a photo (including its capture metadata: location, timestamp, compass heading, device orientation, air pressure, device model, and alignment data) you grant the two separate, non-exclusive licences below. Because both are non-exclusive, you always remain free to use, publish, and license your own photos however you wish.

6.1 Open licence to the public — science stays free

You license the photo and its capture metadata to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, so that researchers and anyone else can use them freely with attribution. This open grant takes effect only when the photo is approved and made publicly visible on the service — photos that are pending, declined, or on private spots are not publicly released under it. Attribution under this licence is your username as displayed on the service, or "Anonymous Ephemeros contributor" where you have deleted your account or chosen anonymity. Once a photo has been publicly released under CC BY, copies already obtained by others remain licensed even if the photo is later removed from the service — that is how open licences work, and we are upfront about this asymmetry.

6.2 Commercial licence to Ephemeros

You also grant Ephemeros a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable, and transferable licence to use the photo and its capture metadata for any purpose, explicitly including display, reproduction, adaptation, processing (including timelapse generation and AI-assisted analysis), inclusion in research datasets, marketing, and commercial licensing of curated datasets and services (see section 11 for what commercial use funds and the commitments we make about it). This grant survives account deletion and content anonymisation. You accept both grants by a separate, explicit checkbox at registration.

You warrant that:

• you hold all rights needed to make this grant;
• any identifiable persons in a photo have consented to its capture and to the uses described above;
• your content does not infringe anyone's intellectual property, privacy, or other rights, and does not violate any law.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree not to enforce moral rights against Ephemeros or its licensees in a way that would prevent the uses licensed above (your right to be credited is respected through your username where it is displayed, or "Anonymous" where you have deleted your account or chosen anonymity). The same two licences apply to spot names, descriptions, and other text you contribute. Feedback and suggestions you send us may be used without restriction or compensation.

7. Lawful access and safety

• Only create spots and capture photos at places you may lawfully access. On private land, obtain the landowner's or occupier's permission first. Do not trespass.
• Obey all local laws, signage, and restrictions (nature reserves, railways, restricted areas, cultural sites, photography bans).
• You capture at your own risk. Assess your surroundings — traffic, terrain, cliffs, water, weather, wildlife, and other hazards — before and while capturing. Ephemeros suggests viewpoints created by other users; we do not inspect locations and make no representation that any spot is safe or lawful to visit.
• Do not create spots that point into private homes or otherwise invade anyone's reasonable expectation of privacy.
• Landowners and affected persons may request removal via our takedown form.

8. Acceptable use

You must not:

• upload content that is unlawful, defamatory, hateful, harassing, sexually explicit, or that depicts or encourages violence or dangerous activity;
• upload photos of identifiable people without their consent, or of children in any inappropriate context;
• use the service to stalk, monitor, or harass any person, or to document private property for improper purposes;
• scrape, bulk-download, or systematically extract content or data from the service other than through the researcher export API under an agreement with us — the open licence in section 6 governs your reuse of content you obtain lawfully, but it is not a licence to bulk-harvest our servers;
• probe, disrupt, overload, or circumvent security or rate limits, reverse engineer the apps, or access the API other than through documented endpoints;
• use the service to send spam or for any commercial purpose we have not agreed to in writing;
• circumvent moderation, capture-integrity, or account restrictions (including by creating new accounts after suspension).

9. Moderation and enforcement

Submitted content (spots, photos, lists, names) is subject to review by our moderators, assisted by automated checks including AI image review. We may decline, remove, or restrict any content that violates these terms, our community rules, or the law, and may suspend or terminate accounts for violations. Trusted contributors may have content approved automatically; trust can be revoked. Declined photos are permanently deleted 30 days after being declined; you may contact us within that window to appeal a decision. Content that is declined or removed is withdrawn from public display and from future datasets — the public open licence in section 6 never takes effect for photos that were never approved. We are not obliged to store or provide copies of removed content.

10. Points, badges, and leaderboards

Points, badges, streaks, and leaderboard positions are for engagement only. They have no monetary value, cannot be sold or transferred, and may be adjusted, recalculated, or removed at any time (for example when content is declined or removed).

11. Open data, research datasets, and commercial use

A core purpose of Ephemeros is building an open scientific record. Approved public photos and their capture metadata (coordinates, heading, device orientation, air pressure, device model, weather, AI tags) are openly licensed under CC BY 4.0 (section 6.1) and may be shared with researchers and the public, including through the researcher export API. Contributor identity in such datasets is limited to your username or "Anonymous" — never your email address or other contact details. Private spots are excluded from public pages and exports. Researchers' access to the export API is governed by the Researcher Data Access Agreement.

Separately, under the commercial licence in section 6.2, Ephemeros may license value-added data products commercially — curated and quality-checked collections, aligned recapture series, structured time-series, bulk delivery, API access, and support. We make the following commitments about commercial use:

• The open science layer is free and stays free. Commercial licensing never removes, restricts, or paywalls the openly licensed data.
• We never grant anyone exclusive rights over your work. Every commercial licence we issue is non-exclusive, and your own rights in your photos are never affected.
• Contributors are not paid for contributions. Commercial revenue funds the operation and development of the platform. We state this openly, rather than have you discover it later.

12. Intellectual property in the service

The service — including software, design, branding, timelapses we render, and datasets we compile — is owned by or licensed to Ephemeros and protected by intellectual-property laws. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the apps and website for their intended purpose. Map data is derived from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors).

13. Account deletion

You can delete your account at any time in the app or by emailing us. Deletion anonymises your personal information: your name and username are replaced with "Anonymous", your email address is removed, and your avatar, devices, friendships, and notifications are deleted. Photos and spots you contributed are retained and displayed as "Anonymous", and remain usable under both licences in section 6 — copies already released under the open licence cannot be recalled, and attribution in future datasets shows "Anonymous". This consequence is repeated in the deletion confirmation flow. See the Privacy Policy for details.

14. Third-party services and app stores

The service relies on third-party providers (content delivery, AI review, push notifications, analytics — listed in the Privacy Policy) and may link to third-party sites. We are not responsible for third-party services. If you install the app from Google Play or the Apple App Store, the store's terms also apply to the download; Google and Apple are not parties to these terms and have no obligations to you regarding the service.

15. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Please read this section carefully — it limits our liability to you.

The service is provided free of charge, "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose, that content (including user content, alignment data, weather data, and AI-generated tags or descriptions) is accurate, or that any spot location is safe or lawful to visit.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Ephemeros, its operator, and contributors will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, loss of data, or loss of profits arising from your use of the service, and our total aggregate liability for any claim is limited to ZAR 1,000 or the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim (whichever is greater).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, intentional misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law — including the CPA for South African consumers and equivalent consumer laws elsewhere.

16. Indemnity

Note: this clause requires you to cover certain losses. To the extent permitted by applicable law, you indemnify Ephemeros and its operator against claims, damages, and reasonable costs arising from: (a) content you upload (including infringement or privacy claims by third parties); (b) your breach of these terms; or (c) your unlawful access to any location. This indemnity does not apply to the extent a claim results from our own unlawful conduct or gross negligence.

17. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially or repeatedly breach these terms, if required by law, or if we discontinue the service. Where reasonable, we will notify you and give you an opportunity to respond. Sections that by their nature survive termination (including 6, 11, 15, and 16) continue to apply.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. For material changes we will give notice (for example by email or an in-app notice) before they take effect. Continued use of the service after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree, stop using the service and delete your account. The "Last updated" date above reflects the current version.

19. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, and you consent to the jurisdiction of the South African courts — except that if you are a consumer residing elsewhere, you keep the protection of mandatory laws, and the right to bring proceedings in the courts, of your country of residence. Before litigating, please contact us at hello@ephemeros.app — most issues can be resolved informally. South African consumers may also refer disputes to the National Consumer Commission.

20. General

• If any provision is found unenforceable, the remainder stays in force, and the provision applies to the maximum extent permitted.
• We may assign these terms as part of a transfer of the service; you may not assign them without our consent.
• Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• These terms, the Privacy Policy, and the registration consents are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the service.
• Communications and notices may be sent electronically (Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002).

21. Contact

Ephemeros — operated by Willem van Zyl t/a "CLC Agency", South Africa.
Email: hello@ephemeros.app
Takedown requests: ephemeros.app/takedown