Acceptable Use Policy

Effective date:

Not legal advice. This is a structured first draft generated to be reviewed by a licensed attorney in our operating jurisdiction(s) before publication. Do not rely on the language below as a final policy. The final, attorney-reviewed text replaces this draft at the same URL.

Open OPERATOR-INPUT items

• OPERATOR-INPUT: abuse contact email — typically abuse@dinerdecider.app or similar; must be monitored
• OPERATOR-INPUT: legal-notices email — same as on Terms of Service
• OPERATOR-INPUT: effective date — public effective date when finalized
• OPERATOR-INPUT: appeals window — 14 days recommended; confirm with counsel
• OPERATOR-INPUT: enforcement tier policy — adjust thresholds before public launch

1. Purpose

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") describes what you can and cannot do on Diner Decider. It supplements our Terms of Service — by accepting the Terms you also accept this AUP. Copyright take-downs are handled separately under our DMCA Notice and the procedure there controls for those specific claims.

We wrote this in plain English because we want everyone using the Service to actually read it. The short version: don't do anything illegal, don't be cruel to other people, don't try to break the Service, and don't try to scrape it or game it.

2. Prohibited content

You may not post, upload, share, or transmit any of the following on or through the Service:

1. Illegal content. Anything that violates the law where you live or where the Service operates from — including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorism content, content promoting or planning real-world violence, and the distribution of controlled substances or other regulated goods.
2. Copyright or trademark infringement. Photos you don't own and don't have a license to upload, screenshots of paywalled menus or copyrighted layouts, brand marks used to imply an endorsement that doesn't exist. See the DMCA Notice for the take-down procedure.
3. Hate speech, harassment, threats, or doxxing. Targeting someone — or a protected class of people — with abuse, slurs, threats, or the publication of private information (home address, phone, employer, family) without consent.
4. Sexually explicit content. Diner Decider is a dining app, not an adult platform. No sexually explicit photos or text in meal notes, restaurant descriptions, ratings, or — when public reviews ship in a future release — public posts.
5. Violent or graphic content. Gratuitous gore, real-world violence, or content glorifying self-harm.
6. Personal information of third parties without consent. This includes uploading photos of identifiable people (dining companions, restaurant staff, other patrons) when you have not obtained their consent. The Terms of Service requires you to obtain that consent before uploading.
7. Misinformation about restaurants. False health claims (e.g. "this restaurant gave me food poisoning" when it didn't), fabricated experiences designed to sabotage a business, paid astroturfing — including hiding a commercial relationship while leaving a review or rating.
8. Spam or commercial solicitation. Promotional content unrelated to a genuine dining experience, multi-level-marketing pitches, off-topic links, repeated copy-paste content across accounts.
9. Bot or AI content presented as authentic. Reviews, ratings, or photos generated by an automated system or by a third-party AI service and presented as your own first-hand experience are prohibited. When the public review feed launches in a future release, you must clearly disclose any AI assistance.

3. Prohibited conduct

You also agree not to do any of the following with the Service itself:

1. Scrape or extract. Automated harvesting of restaurant data, user content, or any other content from the Service — including using scripts, headless browsers, or third-party services to make repeated requests on your behalf.
2. Exceed rate limits or quotas. Diner Decider publishes per-user quotas (see Settings and the rate-limit error pages). Attempting to bypass them — by rotating IPs, using multiple accounts, or otherwise — is a violation.
3. Reverse-engineer or compete. Decompile or reverse-engineer the Service except as permitted by applicable law, or use the Service to design or build a competing product.
4. Share accounts or use multiple accounts to manipulate aggregates. One account per person. When household / group features ship, sharing is allowed within the feature's intended scope. Otherwise you may not let someone else use your account, share credentials, or create multiple accounts to inflate or attack ratings.
5. Submit fake reviews. When the public review feed ships in a future release: no reviews of restaurants you have not visited, no reviews from inauthentic accounts, no paid reviews that hide the commercial relationship, no retaliatory negative reviews unrelated to the dining experience.
6. Circumvent security or moderation. Attempting to bypass authentication, access another user's account or content, evade a moderation action (ban evasion via new accounts), or interfere with the Service's normal operation.

4. Third-party provider pass-throughs

Some of our integrations have their own acceptable-use policies that we are required to pass through to you:

• Google Maps Platform — restaurant data is provided by Google. You may not cache, mirror, redistribute, or republish that data outside of your personal use of the Service, and you may not build a competing mapping product on top of it. See the Google Maps Platform Acceptable Use Policy for the canonical list.

• Anthropic / OpenAI (when AI features ship in a future release) — the "Garçon" recommendation features will be powered by a third-party AI model (currently planned to be a model from Anthropic or, if later added, OpenAI). When AI features are live, you also agree not to use those features for any purpose prohibited by the underlying provider's acceptable use policy, including:

  • generating child sexual abuse material or sexual content involving minors;
  • designing weapons (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield conventional);
  • autonomously controlling critical infrastructure;
  • generating disinformation, fraud, or large-scale spam;
  • producing malware or other code that disrupts systems you do not own.

  See Anthropic's Usage Policies and, if applicable, OpenAI's Usage Policies for the current canonical lists.

5. Reporting violations

If you see something on Diner Decider that violates this AUP — your own content, someone else's, or behavior that affects you — please report it.

• In-app: when the "Report" button ships on user content (planned for a future release), use it. The reported content + your reason go to our moderation queue.
• By email: (monitored Monday–Friday during business hours; for urgent issues involving threats of imminent harm, contact local law enforcement first)

Tell us what you saw, where you saw it (a meal ID, a restaurant page, a user handle), and why it violates this AUP. We do not require you to identify yourself when you report — anonymous reports are accepted, but we may not be able to update you on the outcome.

6. Our enforcement process

When we find or are told about a violation of this AUP, we take action in proportion to the severity:

• First violation, low severity (a one-off off-topic post, a single review that violates the misinformation rule, etc.): we remove the content and send you a warning email explaining what we removed and why.
• Repeat or moderate violations (multiple flagged posts, a pattern of harassment, evading a prior moderation action): we may suspend your account for a defined period (typically 14–30 days). You retain access to delete your data and to file an appeal during the suspension.
• Severe violations (CSAM, threats of imminent violence, large-scale scraping, fraud): we ban the account immediately, preserve evidence as required by law, and report to the appropriate authorities (e.g. NCMEC for CSAM, local law enforcement for credible threats).

We may also remove content without account action when the content itself is the only problem, or take action on an account without removing specific content when the conduct (e.g. scraping) doesn't have a single piece of content attached.

We do not publish individual moderation decisions. We may publish aggregate moderation statistics in the future.

7. Repeat-infringer policy

Section 512 of the US Copyright Act requires us to terminate accounts of repeat infringers under "appropriate circumstances." We use the following baseline: an account that receives two valid DMCA take-downs within twelve months may be suspended, and an account that receives three valid DMCA take-downs within twelve months will be terminated. "Valid" means a take-down that was not successfully countered or withdrawn. The DMCA Notice describes the take-down and counter-notice procedure.

8. Appeals

If we take action on your account or your content and you disagree, you may appeal. Email with the subject line "Appeal" and include:

• The action you are appealing (content removal, suspension, ban);
• The date of the action;
• Why you believe the action was incorrect.

We will respond within days of receiving a complete appeal. If we agree the action was incorrect, we will reverse it and restore your content and account. If we disagree, we will explain why and the action will stand.

Repeat-infringer terminations under Section 7 are subject to the DMCA counter-notice procedure in the DMCA Notice rather than this appeals process.

9. Future surfaces

When the public review feed and other community surfaces ship in a future release, every prohibition above continues to apply, plus the additional rules called out in Sections 2.9 (AI-generated content disclosure), 3.4 (multiple accounts to manipulate aggregates), and 3.5 (fake reviews). We may publish surface-specific guidelines that supplement this AUP at the time those surfaces launch.

10. Updates

We may update this AUP from time to time. Material changes will be announced via an in-app banner at least 14 days before they take effect, and the "Effective date" at the top of this document will be updated. We will keep the previous version available for at least one year so you can compare.

11. Contact

To report a violation:

For legal notices about this AUP:

For copyright take-downs specifically: see the DMCA Notice.

Not legal advice. This document is a structured first draft. Have a licensed attorney in our operating jurisdiction(s) review and approve before treating any provision as enforceable.