Terms & Conditions

Crime Reporter is not an emergency service. In an emergency, call the police, your armed response provider, or an ambulance first. Reports logged here are a community record and are not monitored around the clock by anyone with a duty to respond.

• You must be 18 years or older, or have the consent of a parent or legal guardian, to create an account.
• You must give an accurate name, email address and residential address, and keep those details up to date.
• Access to a neighbourhood is granted by that neighbourhood's admin. Admins may approve, decline, suspend or remove a member.
• One account per person. You are responsible for everything done through your account and for keeping your sign-in details safe.

You accept these terms and the Privacy Policy when you create an account and, where you have not yet done so, before you report an incident, upload a photo, comment on a report, request to join a neighbourhood, or volunteer for a patrol. We keep a record of each acceptance, including the version accepted and the date and time.

Under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, ticking the acceptance box is a valid electronic signature of this agreement. If we publish a materially updated version, we will ask you to accept it again before you continue using the reporting features.

You agree to use Crime Reporter honestly and lawfully. You must not:

• submit a report you know to be false, exaggerated or malicious, or file reports to intimidate, defame or harass a person;
• name or identify a suspect in a way you cannot support, or accuse a person of a crime as if it were established fact;
• post the personal information of another person, including photographs, addresses, vehicle details or identity numbers, where you have no lawful basis to do so;
• upload content that is unlawful, hateful, discriminatory, obscene, or that infringes another person's rights;
• encourage vigilantism, retaliation, or any action outside the law;
• copy, scrape, resell or publish data from the app outside your neighbourhood without the neighbourhood admin's written permission;
• attempt to bypass the app's visibility, membership or security controls, or to access reports you are not entitled to see.

Filing a false report may be a criminal offence. Serious or repeated breaches may lead to removal from a neighbourhood, closure of your account, and, where appropriate, referral to the police.

You keep ownership of the reports, descriptions and photographs you submit. You grant Marius Wannenburg a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, display, adapt for privacy masking, and share that content inside the app, strictly according to the audience you selected for the report and the settings of your neighbourhood.

You confirm that you have the right to submit each photograph or description, and that submitting it does not breach another person's privacy or intellectual property rights. Photographs are stripped of embedded location and camera metadata before they are stored.

• You choose who may see each report and each photograph: members, moderators only, or the public suburb page where your admin allows public sharing.
• Exact street addresses are never released to non-members. Anyone who is not an active member of the neighbourhood sees a street-level or approximate location at best, and that masking is applied on our servers, not in your browser.
• You may report anonymously. Anonymity hides your identity from other members, but your account is still linked to the report internally for abuse handling and legal compliance.
• Neighbourhood admins and moderators may edit report status, hide or remove photographs that breach these terms, and adjust neighbourhood-wide visibility defaults.

If you set up or administer a neighbourhood, you take on additional responsibilities. You agree to approve only genuine residents, to use members' contact details and addresses solely for neighbourhood watch purposes, to keep emergency contact lists accurate, and not to export or distribute member or incident data beyond that purpose. You act as an operator on our behalf in respect of the personal information you handle, and you must apply the safeguards described in the Privacy Policy.

Patrol shifts, zones and volunteer sign-ups are a coordination tool only. Volunteering is voluntary and at your own risk. Neither Marius Wannenburg nor the neighbourhood is your employer, and nothing in the app authorises you to detain, search, or use force against any person.

We aim to keep the app available and accurate, but we provide it on an "as is" and "as available" basis. Features may change, and maintenance, third-party outages or network failures may interrupt access. We may change these terms; the version and effective date shown at the top of this page always reflect the current version.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, Marius Wannenburg is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, or loss arising from: the accuracy or completeness of reports submitted by other users, decisions you take based on information in the app, delays or failures in any emergency or private security response, or the acts of other members, admins or third parties. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for gross negligence or intentional wrongdoing.

You indemnify Marius Wannenburg against claims arising from content you submit in breach of these terms.

You may close your account at any time by contacting us. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or that is used to file false reports. When an account closes, incident records may be retained in the neighbourhood's community record as described in the Privacy Policy, and records of your acceptance of these terms are kept as long as the law requires.

These terms are governed by the laws of South Africa. Disputes must first be raised with us in writing so that we can try to resolve them. If that fails, disputes fall under the jurisdiction of the South African courts. Privacy complaints may also be taken to the Information Regulator (South Africa).

Marius Wannenburg · Adcam Ai · privacy@example.com · South Africa

See the Privacy Policy for how we process personal information under POPIA.