Terms of Service
Last updated — 2026-04-08
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the Acarta website and web application at acarta.app, the Acarta mobile apps for iPhone and Android, the Acarta API, and any related services (collectively, the "Service"). The Service is operated by Väder AB, a company registered in Sweden ("Acarta," "Company," "we," "us," or "our").
By creating an account, signing in, checking in, or otherwise using the Service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be legally bound by these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service.
- § 01
What Acarta does
Acarta is a social field guide for architecture, monuments, public art, and landscapes. It lets you browse a map of places, check in when you visit them, track what you've seen, earn experience points and badges, follow friends, build lists, and read articles about the built world. The Service includes a website, mobile apps, a web application, and APIs.
Acarta is a discovery and tracking tool, not a travel agency or navigation provider. We do not guarantee that any place is open, safe, accessible, or still standing. Always confirm with the place itself before you travel.
- § 02
Eligibility
You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. In jurisdictions where the minimum age of digital consent is higher (for example 16 in some EU countries), you must meet that higher age. By using the Service you represent that you meet the applicable age requirement and have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms.
If you are under 18, you should use Acarta only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. The Service is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.
- § 03
Accounts and security
You are responsible for anything that happens under your account. Keep your sign-in credentials secret and don't share them. If you suspect your account has been compromised, contact hello@acarta.app immediately.
You may sign in with Apple or with Google. Your relationship with those sign-in providers is governed by their own terms. Acarta stores only the minimum identifier needed to keep you signed in.
- § 04
Licence to use the Service
Subject to your compliance with these Terms and payment of any applicable fees, Acarta grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to access and use the Service for your own personal, non-commercial exploration of the built world.
You may not, directly or indirectly: (a) resell, rent, or sublicense the Service; (b) reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code behind the Service; (c) scrape, harvest, or bulk-export data from the Service except through documented APIs and within documented limits; (d) use the Service to build a competing product; (e) circumvent any security, rate limit, or access control; or (f) use the Service in a way that would violate applicable law.
- § 05
Your content
You retain all ownership and intellectual property rights in the photos, check-ins, notes, lists, comments, and other materials you create, upload, or import into the Service ("Your Content").
You grant Acarta a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, process, transmit, adapt (for resizing and format conversion), and display Your Content solely as required to operate the Service for you and for other users according to the visibility settings you choose. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backups and logs retained for a limited period as described in our Privacy Policy.
For photos you attach to a place's public gallery, you additionally grant Acarta a non-exclusive licence to display them alongside the place on the map, in search results, and in place profiles visible to other Acarta users. You may delete such photos from the public gallery at any time.
We do not use Your Content to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models, and we do not grant any such right to our third-party processors.
- § 06
Photos and intellectual property
You represent and warrant that you own Your Content, or that you have all rights, licences, consents, and permissions necessary to upload, store, modify, and display it through the Service. This includes any photos you upload, import from your camera roll, or take inside the app.
You are solely responsible for ensuring that Your Content does not infringe any third party's copyright, trademark, publicity, privacy, or other rights. Acarta has no obligation to police, filter, or verify the legal status of user content, but we may remove content that we reasonably believe infringes rights, violates these Terms, or otherwise poses a risk to the Service or to other users.
Reference photos of places sourced from third parties retain their original license and attribution. If you want to reuse a reference photo, check the license inside Acarta before you do.
- § 07
Check-ins and location
Acarta check-ins are intended to represent real visits to real places. We verify the coordinates your device reports at the moment you tap Check in against the coordinates of the place. If they are far apart, we may reject the check-in.
You can retro-date a past visit that you remember — for example, a trip to Rome last summer — without fresh GPS verification. Retro-dated check-ins are clearly marked as such on your profile.
Do not fake check-ins. Spoofing your GPS, checking in at places you haven't visited, or otherwise manipulating the system to earn XP or badges you have not earned may result in your check-in being removed, your XP being adjusted, or your account being suspended.
- § 08
Community behaviour
Acarta is a small community. Keep it that way. Be kind to other users, credit the places you share, don't spam the feed, and don't use Acarta to harass anyone.
We may remove comments, check-ins, photos, profiles, or entire accounts at our reasonable discretion if we believe they violate these Terms or the spirit of the community. For repeated or serious violations we may suspend or terminate accounts without refund.
- § 09
Acceptable use
You agree not to use the Service to create, store, upload, or publish content that:
- is unlawful, defamatory, fraudulent, or misleading;
- infringes intellectual property, publicity, privacy, or other rights;
- depicts or sexualises minors in any way;
- promotes violence, terrorism, self-harm, or hate against a protected group;
- impersonates another person or misrepresents your affiliation;
- contains malware, spyware, or phishing material;
- spams or coordinates inauthentic behaviour on the feed.
You also agree not to (a) probe or attempt to bypass security or rate limits, (b) use the Service to generate training data for AI models, (c) run large-scale automation that degrades the Service for other users, or (d) resell raw access to the Service.
- § 10
Subscriptions and billing
Acarta is free to download, browse, and use. Some features — such as unlimited private folders, trip planning, and priority access to new cities — require a paid subscription.
- Where you pay. Paid subscriptions are purchased and billed through the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, depending on your device. Acarta is not a direct seller of these subscriptions; the store processes the payment.
- Cancellation. You can cancel a subscription at any time from your Apple ID or Google Play account settings. Access continues through the end of the paid period. Acarta cannot cancel a store-managed subscription on your behalf.
- Refunds. Refund requests for store-managed subscriptions are handled by Apple or Google under their policies. Contact them directly. If you believe you are entitled to a refund under EU consumer protection law, email us at hello@acarta.app and we will help.
- EU right of withdrawal. If you are a consumer in the EU/EEA, you have a 14-day right of withdrawal from the date of purchase of digital content. By starting to use the paid features during that period you expressly consent to the immediate provision of digital content and acknowledge that your right of withdrawal ends once access begins, to the extent permitted by Swedish law.
- Price changes. We may change plan prices. Apple or Google will notify you before any renewal at a new price, and you may cancel before it takes effect.
Subscription state is managed for us by RevenueCat on top of the App Store and Google Play billing systems.
- § 11
Place data and third-party sources
Acarta compiles its place catalogue from openly licensed third-party sources, our own research, and user contributions. We preserve the original attribution and license for every image and fact. If you see a place page where the attribution is missing, wrong, or a photo is miscategorised, tell us at hello@acarta.app and we will fix it.
Nothing in these Terms grants you a licence to the underlying third-party data beyond what its original license permits.
- § 12
Copyright and takedowns
Acarta respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same. If you believe content on Acarta (for example, a photo attached to a place page) infringes your copyright, send a takedown notice to hello@acarta.app with:
- identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed;
- a direct URL or the Acarta asset identifier of the allegedly infringing material;
- your contact details (name, email, postal address);
- a statement made in good faith that use of the material is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
- a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are, or are authorised to act on behalf of, the rights holder;
- your physical or electronic signature.
On receipt of a valid notice we will remove or disable access to the material, notify the affected user, and record the takedown. The affected user may submit a counter-notice using the same email address. Acarta may suspend or terminate accounts of users who are subject to repeat infringement notices. The same process applies, with local adaptation, to take-down requests under the EU Digital Services Act and comparable laws in other jurisdictions.
- § 13
Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, if your use creates legal, security, or reputational risk for Acarta or other users, if required by law, or if your payment method fails and is not resolved after a reasonable grace period.
You may stop using the Service at any time by deleting the app and, if you wish to erase your data, requesting account deletion from your settings, by email, or via acarta.app/privacy/data-deletion. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive termination (including Your Content, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law) will continue to apply.
- § 14
Third-party services
The Service depends on third-party infrastructure and providers, including but not limited to Vercel (hosting), Neon (Postgres), Cloudflare R2 (media storage and CDN), Mapbox (maps), Apple and Google (sign-in, billing, and push), RevenueCat (subscription state), Resend (email), and Anthropic (translation). We select providers we trust, but outages or errors in those services may affect the Service. We are not responsible for downtime, data loss, or damages caused by third parties, and our liability for such events is subject to the limitations below.
- § 15
Disclaimer of warranties
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR SECURE, OR THAT ANY PLACE DATA WILL BE ACCURATE, UP TO DATE, OR COMPLETE. YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
This disclaimer does not affect any statutory rights that cannot be waived or limited under applicable consumer protection laws, including those of the EU/EEA.
- § 16
Limitation of liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, VÄDER AB SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST DATA, GOODWILL, REPUTATIONAL HARM, OR DAMAGES RESULTING FROM PHYSICAL INJURY OR TRAVEL DECISIONS MADE BASED ON INFORMATION IN THE SERVICE, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
IN NO EVENT SHALL OUR TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY TO YOU EXCEED THE GREATER OF ONE HUNDRED EUROS (€100) OR THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU PAID TO ACARTA IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; in those jurisdictions, our liability will be limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.
- § 17
Indemnification
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Väder AB and its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) Your Content; (b) your use of the Service; (c) your violation of these Terms; or (d) your violation of any law or of the rights of any third party.
- § 18
Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of Sweden, without regard to conflict of laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be resolved by the competent courts of Sweden. If you are a consumer resident in the EU/EEA, nothing in this section affects mandatory consumer protection rules of your country of residence.
- § 19
Mobile apps and app stores
If you downloaded Acarta from the Apple App Store, you acknowledge that these Terms are between you and Väder AB only, and not with Apple. Apple is not responsible for Acarta or its content. Apple has no obligation to furnish any maintenance or support services with respect to the Service. In the event of any failure of the Service to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price (if any); to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Apple will have no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to the Service. Apple and Apple's subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms as they relate to your license to the iOS app.
If you downloaded Acarta from the Google Play Store, your use is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service.
- § 20
Changes to these terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be communicated by email or by a notice in the Service, and by updating the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree to a change, your sole remedy is to stop using the Service and cancel your subscription.
- § 21
Contact
If you have any questions about these Terms, contact us at hello@acarta.app or by post at:
Väder AB
Stockholm, Sweden