Terms of Use

FirstMate is a trading name of SpectraKey Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales under company number 07208132, with its registered office at 13 Hazelwood Close, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, HP5 3DR.

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean SpectraKey Ltd. "You" means you, the person using the app.

You can reach us at hello@firstmate.app about anything in this document.

FirstMate is an app for people who cruise the inland waterways. It records your trips using your phone's location or a GPS unit aboard your boat, counts the locks and bridges you pass, shows canal features on a map, and lets you share what you have done with other boaters you have connected with.

It is a logbook and a companion, not a navigation system and not a safety device.

You must be at least 16 years old to create a FirstMate account. If you are under 16, you may not sign up, and we will close any account we find belongs to someone younger.

This is not a judgement about who belongs on a boat; children crew boats every summer. It is about the account: FirstMate records continuous precise location and publishes it to other people, and we are not willing to publish a child's movements that way. A younger crew member can be aboard a trip somebody else is recording without having an account of their own.

You must also be able to enter into a contract with us, and not be barred from using the app under any applicable law.

You need an account to use FirstMate. However you get in – a password, an emailed link, or your Google account – give us an email address you can actually receive mail at. If you choose a password, choose one you do not use elsewhere and keep it to yourself.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think somebody else has got into it, change your password and tell us at hello@firstmate.app.

One account per person. Do not share one, and do not create one for somebody else.

FirstMate is not a navigational aid. Do not use it to make decisions that your safety, or anyone else's, depends on.

The canal network, locks, bridges, tunnels, moorings and services shown in the app come from third-party sources: OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenCanalMap and the Canal & River Trust. We pass that data on largely as we receive it. It is incomplete in places, out of date in places, and wrong in places. Some navigations are barely covered at all.

In particular:

• A feature shown on the map may not exist, may be closed, may be under repair, or may not be where the map puts it.
• A feature that exists may not be shown at all.
• Depths, headroom, lock dimensions, stoppages, closures and restrictions are not shown, and nothing in the app should be read as telling you a route is passable by your boat.
• Distances, lock counts and times are estimates calculated from your recorded track. They are for interest, not for planning a passage.
• GPS positions can be wrong, delayed or absent: under bridges, in tunnels, in cuttings, and whenever your phone loses signal or its battery runs down.

Always navigate using your own eyes, proper charts and guides, signage on the ground, and the current notices published by the navigation authority for the water you are on. You are responsible for the safe handling of your boat and for the safety of everybody aboard it, at all times.

Never operate the app while working a lock, handling lines, or steering where doing so would take your attention off the water.

Recording a trip means the app collects your precise location continuously, including while it is in the background and your screen is off. Android will show a notification for as long as that is happening. You choose when to start and stop; nothing is recorded when you are not recording a trip.

Continuous GPS uses a lot of battery. On a long day it may flatten your phone, and a flat phone records nothing. Keep a charger aboard if the record matters to you.

The app needs location permission to work, and background location permission to keep recording with the screen off. You can withdraw either at any time in your device settings; recording will stop working, but the rest of the app will not.

We cannot guarantee that any particular trip will record completely or accurately. Signal drops, operating systems suspend apps, batteries die and devices fail.

Your trips, photographs, reviews, boat details and everything else you put into FirstMate remain yours. We do not claim ownership of any of it.

So that we can actually run the app, you give us a licence to store, copy and display your content, both to you and to the other boaters you have chosen to share it with. The licence is worldwide, non-exclusive and royalty-free, lasts as long as you keep the content in the app, and exists only for the purpose of operating and improving FirstMate. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in backups that get overwritten in the ordinary course.

We will not sell your content, licence it on to anyone else, or use it in advertising.

Only upload content you have the right to upload. If you photograph other people, be reasonable about it: get their agreement before you post a picture of them.

FirstMate is a small community. Do not:

• harass, threaten, impersonate or abuse anyone;
• post anything unlawful, defamatory, obscene, or hateful;
• post anything that infringes somebody else's copyright or privacy;
• upload deliberately false information about the waterways, including false reports about hazards or the condition of a feature;
• use the app to track or follow another person without their knowledge;
• attempt to break, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the app or the services behind it;
• scrape, bulk-download or resell data from the app;
• use another boater's account, or try to reach data you have not been given access to.

If you break these rules we may remove content, suspend your account, or close it (see section 14).

If you see something here that breaks these rules, tell us: every trip, comment, review, profile and boat in the app carries a Report action. We aim to look at every report within a few days. We will not tell the other boater who reported them, and we will not tell you what we decided. If we remove something of yours, you will be told, and you can ask us to look again at hello@firstmate.app.

You can create a boat, add other boaters to it as crew, and connect a GPS unit aboard so trips are recorded even when everybody's phone is off.

Only add a boat you actually own or have permission to add, and only add crew who have agreed to it. Crew can see the boat's live position and its track history, and can edit the content of trips recorded with it, so add people you trust with that.

If you connect a GPS unit, you are given an ingest key once and only once. Keep it secret. Anyone holding it can push positions to your boat as though they were the unit itself. If you lose it or think it has been exposed, remove the boat's GPS configuration and set it up again.

We are not responsible for the GPS hardware itself, its cellular connection, or anything it does or fails to do.

FirstMate is in beta. It has bugs, it changes often, and features may appear, change or be withdrawn without notice.

We provide the app as it is. We do not promise that it will be available at any particular time, that it will be free of faults, that data will not be lost, or that it will keep working with your device or its operating system.

Keep your own record of anything you would be upset to lose. Do not treat FirstMate as the only copy of anything that matters.

We may change, suspend or discontinue the app, or any part of it, at any time. If we decide to shut FirstMate down altogether, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to get your data out first.

The app itself – the software, the name, the logo, the folk tiles and the design – belongs to us or to the people we licence it from. These terms do not give you any right to it beyond using the app as intended.

The canal data is not ours, and is used under the licences its owners set. Those licences, and the attribution they require, are listed in the app under Settings → About → Data sources. Our extract of the OpenStreetMap data is a derived database and is shared under the same Open Database Licence.

Map imagery is provided by Mapbox and is subject to their terms.

How we handle your personal data, and precise location in particular, is set out in the Privacy Policy, which you can read in the app under Settings → About → Privacy Policy or at firstmate.app/legal/privacy. It forms part of these terms.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit or exclude. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are unaffected by anything written here.

Subject to that:

• we are not liable for any loss that was not reasonably foreseeable when you started using the app;
• we are not liable for losses arising from your reliance on canal data, distances, lock counts, positions or times shown in the app, given what section 5 says about them;
• we are not liable for business losses; FirstMate is for personal use, and if you use it for any commercial purpose we have no liability to you for loss of profit, business, contracts or goodwill;
• we are not liable for loss or corruption of data, given what section 10 asks you to do about your own copies;
• we are not liable for the acts or omissions of other users.

Where our liability is limited but not excluded, and to the extent the law permits, our total liability to you in any twelve-month period will not exceed £100 or the amount you have paid us in that period, whichever is greater. FirstMate is currently free, so in practice this is £100.

You can stop using FirstMate whenever you like. To close your account for good, go to Settings → Account → Delete account. That deletes your profile, your trips, your reviews, your saved places and your plans, and any boat you own together with everything its GPS recorded. It cannot be undone.

We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we shut the service down. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right. If we close your account for breaking the rules, you may not sign up again without our agreement.

Sections that by their nature should survive the end of this agreement – your content licence for anything left in the app, our property, liability, and law – do survive it.

We will update these terms from time to time, as the app changes or as the law does. The version and date at the top of this document tell you which one you are reading.

If we make a change that materially affects your rights, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Carrying on using FirstMate after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, close your account.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, and may bring proceedings in its courts.

If you are unhappy with something, please tell us first at hello@firstmate.app; most things are quicker to fix that way. To report something another boater has posted, the Report action in the app (see section 8) reaches us faster. For anything about your personal data, see the Privacy Policy, which explains how to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Company

SpectraKey Ltd (trading as FirstMate)

Company number

07208132

Registered office

13 Hazelwood Close, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, HP5 3DR

Contact

hello@firstmate.app