Terms of Service — SkySpot SA

Version: 1.1

Effective date: 23 July 2026

Canonical legal pages:

1. About these Terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern access to and use of the SkySpot SA mobile application, website, and related services (together, the “Service”). The Service is operated by David Graeme Middleton, operating as SkySpot SA (“SkySpot”, “we”, “us”, or “our”).

When you create an account, SkySpot asks you to accept the then-current Terms and Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not create or continue using an account. Where a material update requires re-consent, access to relevant account functionality may depend on accepting the new version.

Important consumer notice: Before accepting, read Sections 5, 16, and 17 carefully. They contain aviation and safety warnings, limitations of liability, and an indemnity that may create risk or obligations for you. Nothing in those sections removes rights or liabilities that applicable law does not permit SkySpot to exclude. By selecting the acceptance control, you acknowledge that these provisions were specifically drawn to your attention.

The canonical copy of these Terms is published at https://skyspot.co.za/legal/terms-of-service.

2. Eligibility and age

The Service is intended only for users aged 18 or older. By creating an account, you confirm that:

  • you are at least 18;
  • you have legal capacity to enter into this agreement;
  • you are not prohibited by applicable law from using the Service; and
  • the information you provide during registration is truthful and current.

SkySpot currently uses a self-attested 18-or-over signup control and does not offer a verified-parental-consent pathway. If we reasonably believe an account is operated by a person under 18, we may suspend or remove it.

3. Your account

3.1 Creating and protecting an account

You may register using an email address and password or a supported third-party sign-in provider. You are responsible for protecting your credentials and for activity under your account, except to the extent applicable law provides otherwise.

Tell us promptly at support@skyspot.co.za if you suspect unauthorised access. SkySpot may require reauthentication for sensitive actions such as phone verification or account deletion.

3.2 One active account and accurate identity

You may not operate duplicate, misleading, impersonating, or ban-evasion accounts. You must keep account and profile information reasonably accurate and must not falsely claim an identity, qualification, affiliation, permission, or authority.

At initial signup, and again if re-consent is required, SkySpot records the Privacy Policy and Terms version identifiers you accepted. The consent record also includes an acceptance time, an 18-or-over attestation, the acceptance source, and, where available, app version and platform. These records are used to administer consent and do not make an unpublished draft effective.

4. The Service

SkySpot is a community platform for South African radio-control, first-person-view, and drone pilots. Features can include:

  • community flying spots and registered fields;
  • map, airspace, NOTAM, weather, and field information;
  • check-ins, hearts, follows, vouches, ratings, trust signals, points, XP, levels, leaderboards, and badges;
  • profiles, pilot discovery, comments, field edits, field photos, reports, and moderation;
  • a vendor directory and WhatsApp-group directory;
  • optional phone verification, seller Number Check, and notifications; and
  • free or paid features introduced under additional purchase terms.

We may improve, replace, suspend, or retire features. Safety and community information can change quickly, and availability is not guaranteed.

5. Aviation, location, weather, and safety information

The Service is informational. It is not a flight-authorisation, air-traffic, navigation, emergency, or legal-compliance system.

You remain responsible for:

  • operating aircraft safely and lawfully;
  • checking current official requirements and restrictions, including applicable South African Civil Aviation Authority requirements, Civil Aviation Regulations, notices, local bylaws, landowner permissions, club rules, and field procedures;
  • obtaining any required approval, permission, licence, insurance, or competency; and
  • checking authoritative airspace, NOTAM, weather, and aerodrome information before every flight.

User-submitted spots, fields, photos, comments, check-ins, and reports may be incomplete, inaccurate, unsafe, unauthorised, or out of date. Inclusion in SkySpot is not an endorsement or permission to fly. If you are uncertain whether a flight is safe or lawful, do not fly.

6. Community rules and acceptable use

You must not use the Service to:

  1. break the law or facilitate unlawful or unsafe aviation;
  2. endanger a person, aircraft, property, privacy, protected site, or public safety;
  3. post illegal, infringing, harassing, hateful, threatening, defamatory, deceptive, fraudulent, sexually explicit, or otherwise harmful content;
  4. exploit, harm, or target a child;
  5. impersonate another person or misrepresent an affiliation, qualification, identity, location, transaction, or authority;
  6. submit false, misleading, retaliatory, coordinated, paid-for, spam, or manipulated spots, fields, comments, vouches, ratings, reviews, check-ins, reports, or directory records;
  7. upload media without the rights and permissions required for SkySpot to host and display it;
  8. post identifiable people without an appropriate basis or expose private homes, sensitive facilities, confidential information, or another person’s location or contact details;
  9. collect, scrape, harvest, sell, or misuse another user’s personal information or public-profile data;
  10. probe, reverse-engineer, disrupt, overload, bypass, or gain unauthorised access to the Service, its security controls, quotas, rules, APIs, or infrastructure;
  11. distribute malware or malicious code;
  12. create sockpuppet accounts, evade a ban, or bypass safety, trust, eligibility, rate-limit, or moderation controls;
  13. use bots or automated collection except through a public interface expressly authorised by SkySpot; or
  14. use the Service for unlawful direct marketing or unsolicited electronic communications.

Additional community guidelines may apply once published through the Service. A guideline cannot remove a non-excludable statutory right.

7. Your Content

7.1 Ownership

You retain ownership of content you submit, such as profile information, text, spots, field contributions, photos, comments, reports, reviews, and feedback (“Your Content”).

7.2 Licence needed to operate the Service

You grant SkySpot a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for technical display, moderate, publish, display, and distribute Your Content only as reasonably needed to operate, secure, improve, and provide the Service and its community features.

This licence ends when the relevant content is deleted, except to the extent that:

  • useful community content is retained in anonymised form as described in the Privacy Policy;
  • limited records must be retained for safety, abuse prevention, disputes, or legal compliance;
  • content has already been shared by another person outside SkySpot’s control; or
  • a temporary provider backup or cache has not yet completed its ordinary lifecycle.

Uploaded media is removed through the approved account-deletion outcome described in Section 8.3 and the Privacy Policy.

7.3 Your promises about content

You confirm that you have the rights, permissions, and lawful basis needed to submit Your Content and grant the licence above; that the content does not infringe another person’s intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, confidentiality, or other rights; and that it complies with these Terms.

7.4 Current photo and media features

Current normal-user media features are:

  • an initial point-of-interest (flying-spot) submission may include photos uploaded by the submitter;
  • after a point of interest is approved, its submitter can use the owner edit flow to add or remove photos;
  • users can contribute field photos through a moderated field-photo submission flow; and
  • eligible users can upload an optional custom profile photo.

Normal-user vendor-image and WhatsApp-group-cover uploads are not currently supported. Existing media for those features may remain readable or be managed by administrators.

Submission does not guarantee approval or continued display. We may reject, hide, or remove media that breaches these Terms, is unsafe, is no longer supported, or is the subject of a valid rights or legal request.

7.5 Vouches and trust

Vouches are community opinions, not identity checks or transaction guarantees. While your account is active, an individual vouch cannot be retracted through the normal client flow.

When an account is deleted:

  • vouches given by that account and vouches received by that account are deleted;
  • affected surviving users’ current vouch counts, rating, and trust badges may be recomputed from remaining vouches; and
  • previously awarded points and XP, monthly history, level, point history, and unrelated badges are not reversed by that trust recomputation.

SkySpot may investigate or remove invalid vouches and may flag suspicious mutual or coordinated activity for moderation.

8. Moderation, reports, suspension, and termination

8.1 Moderation

We may investigate, reject, hide, restore, limit, or remove content; restrict features; suspend or ban an account; preserve evidence; or notify an appropriate authority where reasonably necessary to enforce these Terms, protect people or the Service, or comply with law. Moderation may be automated in part, but material enforcement can be reviewed through the available support process.

8.2 Reports and banned users

Eligible current, non-banned users may submit ordinary in-app reports using the supported reporting flows. Banned users cannot use those ordinary in-app paths. A banned user, or anyone unable to use the in-app flow, may send an urgent safety, legal, privacy, or abuse matter to support@skyspot.co.za.

Support is not an emergency-response service. Contact the appropriate emergency service or public authority where immediate assistance is required.

If you believe moderation was mistaken, contact support with enough information to identify the action. We will consider the request in good faith but do not promise reinstatement.

8.3 Account deletion

You may request permanent account deletion in Account Settings. Deletion requires deliberate confirmation, an online connection, and recent reauthentication.

The deletion cascade removes account and relational data, both directions of vouches, and uploaded media. Useful community records may be retained with identifying account fields anonymised where applicable. The username reservation is released and the username may later be used by another person.

Deletion spans Firestore, Cloud Storage, and Firebase Authentication and is not one atomic cross-service transaction. A failed or interrupted attempt may be incomplete. An error or unconfirmed response is not treated as success; the app provides a recovery path to retry deletion or sign out locally. More detail appears in the Privacy Policy.

A limited banned-account safety record may be retained for ban enforcement and abuse prevention as described in the Privacy Policy.

8.4 Effect of termination

When your account is terminated or deleted, your right to use account-only features ends. Provisions that by their nature must continue—including safety responsibilities, licences that expressly survive for limited retained records, intellectual-property rights, disclaimers, liability limits, dispute provisions, and general terms—continue to the extent permitted by law.

9. Public profiles and discovery

Current +10 pilot search, leaderboard, and Hall of Fame surfaces use the sanitised server-owned discovery record described in the Privacy Policy. During the bounded Phase-A compatibility period for supported +9 clients, signed-in users retain legacy list access to full user documents, which can expose additional profile, trust, and account-state fields described in the Privacy Policy. Phase B is intended to remove that compatibility access only after +10 adoption is separately evidenced and authorised.

The +10 discovery record includes searchable username, display name, avatar if any, level, lifetime points, monthly points, and verified flight-session count. A private, incomplete, or banned profile is not eligible for that ordinary +10 projection, although community content submitted elsewhere may remain visible according to that feature and the Privacy Policy.

You may use discovery information only through ordinary Service features and not for scraping, profiling, harassment, unsolicited marketing, or other misuse.

10. Optional phone verification and Number Check

Phone verification is optional and uses Firebase Authentication. It does not prove legal identity, ownership of goods, honesty, competence, or transaction safety.

The Service stores limited phone-verification information and server-only derived recovery state. An eligible user can enter a seller number they already possess and receive only a match or non-match result against a phone-verified account; SkySpot does not reveal the verified number. Valid eligible checks consume a daily per-buyer, per-profile quota whether they match or not. Sensitive verification changes require recent authentication.

Do not rely on phone verification or Number Check as your only anti-fraud measure. Use independent judgement and safe transaction practices.

11. Points, XP, badges, rankings, and availability

Points, XP, trust signals, badges, streaks, rankings, and similar features are revocable, non-cash community features. They have no monetary value, cannot be sold or transferred, and may be corrected where awarded through error, abuse, or invalid activity.

The account-deletion trust recomputation described in Section 7.5 does not reverse surviving users’ historical point or XP awards merely because a related vouch is removed. This does not prevent correction of separate fraud, abuse, or technical error.

12. Vendors, groups, and transactions between users

Vendor listings, reviews, WhatsApp groups, vouches, ratings, and phone-verification signals are provided for community convenience. SkySpot does not guarantee a vendor, group administrator, buyer, seller, product, service, licence, insurance, identity, or transaction.

SkySpot is not a party to transactions between users or vendors and does not hold transaction funds. You are responsible for due diligence, lawful marketing, consumer obligations, tax, delivery, payment, and dispute handling that applies to your activity.

13. Third-party services

The Service relies on third parties such as Google Firebase, Google Maps Platform, Open-Meteo, and OpenAIP. Their data, terms, privacy practices, outages, limits, and changes are outside SkySpot’s direct control. Your use of a third-party feature may also be subject to that provider’s terms.

14. SkySpot intellectual property and feedback

SkySpot’s source code, brand, logos, interface, custom icons, documentation, and non-user content are owned by or licensed to SkySpot and are protected by applicable law. These Terms give you only a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use the Service for its intended purpose.

If you voluntarily provide ideas or feedback, you grant SkySpot a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use that feedback without an obligation to compensate you, provided this does not transfer ownership of Your Content generally.

For a copyright or other rights complaint, email support@skyspot.co.za with the work or right concerned, the in-app location, your contact details, and a good-faith explanation.

15. Privacy

Our processing of personal information is described in the Privacy Policy. The policy explains account deletion, discovery, reports, phone verification, international processing, security, retention, and POPIA rights. If these Terms and the Privacy Policy conflict on the description of personal-information processing, the Privacy Policy controls to that extent.

16. Disclaimers

The Service is supplied on an “as is” and “as available” basis to the maximum extent permitted by law. SkySpot does not promise that the Service or community content will always be available, uninterrupted, accurate, complete, current, secure, or fit for a particular flight, transaction, or purpose.

In particular, SkySpot does not warrant that:

  • airspace, NOTAM, weather, field, spot, or location information is suitable for a flight decision;
  • a submitted place is lawful, safe, authorised, or accessible;
  • a user, vendor, review, vouch, trust score, badge, phone signal, or group is genuine or reliable; or
  • content will be preserved indefinitely.

Nothing in these Terms excludes a warranty, remedy, liability, or consumer right that South African law does not permit us to exclude.

17. Limitation of liability and indemnity

17.1 Limitation

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, SkySpot will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive loss arising from the Service, community content, third-party data or services, an unsafe or unlawful flight, or a transaction between users.

Nothing limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including any liability that applicable law makes non-excludable.

17.2 Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify SkySpot and David Graeme Middleton against third-party claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising directly from your unlawful use of the Service, Your Content, infringement of another person’s rights, breach of these Terms, or your negligent, reckless, or unlawful operation of an aircraft, except to the extent caused by SkySpot’s gross negligence or other conduct for which liability cannot lawfully be excluded.

18. Changes to the Service and these Terms

We may change the Service or propose revised Terms. A revised Terms document must carry a new version and an approved effective date before publication. Material changes may be communicated in-app, on the website, or by email where appropriate.

Where the Service requires re-consent, SkySpot records the Terms and Privacy Policy version identifiers accepted. Continuing to use account functionality after a validly presented effective update may constitute acceptance only to the extent permitted by law and the actual consent flow.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa. Subject to any non-excludable consumer right or statutory forum, disputes are subject to the jurisdiction of competent South African courts.

Before formal proceedings, either party should give the other a reasonable opportunity to resolve the dispute informally through support@skyspot.co.za, unless urgent relief, a limitation period, safety, or law makes that inappropriate.

Nothing prevents a person from using a regulator, commission, tribunal, ombud, court, or other remedy available under POPIA, the Consumer Protection Act, or other applicable law.

20. General

  • Entire agreement: These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any feature-specific or purchase terms validly presented to you form the agreement concerning the Service.
  • Severability: If a provision is invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue to the extent possible.
  • No waiver: A delay or failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.
  • Assignment: You may not transfer your account or these Terms without consent. SkySpot may transfer the Service and these Terms as part of a lawful business transfer, subject to applicable consumer and privacy law.
  • No agency: These Terms do not create employment, partnership, joint venture, fiduciary, or agency relations between users and SkySpot.
  • Force majeure: Neither party is responsible for delay caused by events beyond reasonable control, subject to rights that cannot be excluded.
  • Language: The publication language is English.
  • Electronic communications: In-app and email communications may be used for account, consent, security, moderation, and legal notices where electronic delivery is permitted.

21. Contact

Service operator and Responsible Party: David Graeme Middleton, operating as SkySpot SA

Information Officer: David Graeme Middleton

Physical and correspondence address: 8 Hely Street, Ndabeni, Cape Town, 7405

Telephone: +27 72 446 1882

Support, rights, and legal contact: support@skyspot.co.za

SkySpot SA — South Africa’s RC, FPV and drone pilot community