Terms of Service and Privacy/Refund Policies

Last updated: August 19, 2025

Welcome to Pika's Path! These terms are here to explain the rules for using this website and its services – and by creating an account or using our site, you agree to these terms. Pika's Path is operated from California, which means that these terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the United States, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. You and I are agreeing, right now, that California law will be used to settle any disputes about these terms, and we won't waste time arguing about whether some other state's or country's laws should apply instead. I can't imagine what a Dutch lawyer costs.

Terms of Service

1. Your Account and Content Responsibilities

You are responsible for keeping your account password safe and for all activities that occur under your account. You are also solely responsible for the content you post, including your location points, comments, and images, which we'll refer to as "User Content".

You agree not to post User Content that:

• Is illegal, hateful, threatening, defamatory, or pornographic;
• Incites violence or promotes discrimination based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or nationality – or any funky fluidity within those categories;
• Infringes on any third party's intellectual property rights, such as copyright or trademark;
• Violates the privacy of any third party (e.g. featuring someone in your post who has not consented to their inclusion).

This site is a tool for sharing personal journeys. While this may include mature or explicit content, you agree not to use the service to share such content with unwilling recipients. You are responsible for using the available privacy tools (such as password-protection) where appropriate, and for ensuring you have consent from everyone with whom you share a link to your path. Violations of this principle are super-duper-grounds for account termination.

This means you can use the site to share pictures of your butt in different world capitals, but only with people who have agreed to see your butt, and only if your butt is not shown committing a crime.

Friendly reminder: Please also think about what you're uploading to protect yourself, too. Some of the most joyous things in life are criminalized in some places, and using a service which documents the time, place, and circumstances could put you at risk even if said things are totally cool and super-fun under California law.

2. Our Service

Pika's Path is provided "as is." This means that while I do my best to make sure everything works perfectly, I can't guarantee it will be available 100% of the time. I may need to perform maintenance or fix things, which could result in downtime. A data center could get flooded at the same time a bus hits me while I bike home from my actual job. As such, I am not responsible for any loss of data, though I will continue to take all reasonable precautions to prevent it.

3. Paid Subscriptions

Pika's Path offers paid "Pika Pioneer" subscriptions, which give you access to extra features. These subscriptions are billed annually through the site's payment partner, Paddle. Your subscription will automatically renew each year unless you cancel it.

4. Age Requirement

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account and use Pika's Path. This service is not directed at those under 18 years of age. (my prototypical user is a boring millennial, like meeee!)

5. Rights to User-Provided Content

You own all of the content, data, and images you upload to Pika's Path. I claim no ownership over your path data or uploaded images. However, by using the service, you grant Pika's Path a license to display, modify, and distribute your content for the sole purpose of providing the service. For example, I need your permission to show your photos on your public map and to resize them for display on different devices. They remain yours.

6. Termination

You can delete your account at any time from your Preferences page, which also deletes all your data. I reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account if you violate these terms, or if I am required to by law enforced by government stormtroopers.

7. Changes to These Terms

This is a small and growing project, which means that things may change over time. As such, I reserve the right to modify these terms at any time. If I make a significant change, I will notify you, either by posting a notice on this page or by sending an email to the address associated with your account. Your continued use of the site after such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new terms. With that said, on principle I stand behind the above and (barring major head injury?) will never seek to alter any terms which support your privacy, your rights to your content, or your ability to delete everything you've ever uploaded and run off to the hills.

Privacy Policy

My goal is to collect only the data I need to provide the site's service. I don't want any of your information outside of that. Like my sick, sick cat, having any of your information at all is a liability that is unfortunately necessary.

What Pika's Path Collects

• Account Information: Your username, email address, and a securely hashed version of your password, as well as "meta-info" like your display name, selected path color, and path names (for paid users with multiple paths)
• Path Data: The coordinates, comments, images, place names, and timestamps you upload to create your map.
• Path-Derived Data: Region data derived from your path data used to power the achievements and Passport features.
• Example of the former: if you record a path point with coordinates in San Francisco, I might in theory have a line in the PHP script which updates your location which would see "San Francisco" and record in the "user achievements" database table that you got the "Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair" achievement. Which is not (yet) a real achievement, but... that kind of thing.
• Example of the latter: if you record a path point with coordinates in Wyoming, I save that in a "location log" database table and also associate "US-WY" with your user ID in a "visited regions" database table, then use that to shade in the state of Wyoming on your Passport map.
• Payment Information: Pika's Path does not handle or store your credit card information directly. All payments are processed securely by our payment partner, Paddle. They communicate the information needed to change your user status back to Pika's Path through webhooks, but none of your financial information. I would literally die of anxiety if I had to handle payment processing.
• Reverse Geolocation: The location name for your coordinate points is provided by Nominatim, an open-source (reverse-)geocoding service. Pika's Path provides Nominatim *only* the latitude and longitude you have entered – no account info. 
  • If you are curious, the exact call looks like this: "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=jsonv2&lat={$latitude}&lon={$longitude}&accept-language=en&zoom=12&email=will@pikaspath.com". The lat/lon are what you provide, the zoom determines the verbosity of what comes back, and my email is so they know who to yell at if I send way too much stuff their way.

How Pika's Path Uses Your Information

• To provide, maintain, and improve the site's services.
• "Improve" means that I may make changes in response to a need expressed through aggregate data. For example, if image-posting proves unexpectedly popular, I may decide to increase file size limits, add new features for image uploading, etc.
• To display your public map (behind a password, if you've set one).
• To communicate with you about your account if needed.

I will not sell your account information, path data, and/or uploaded images to third-party marketers. When posting things publicly on the internet you are potentially making them available to such entities, but I will never intend to facilitate the misuse of your data.

On principle, all revenue comes from paid subscriptions. The site will never show ads for external services, or be supported in any way that is not "I make the site I am excited to use, you can use it, and you can also pay me some money to use some other features of that site which happen to use more computing resources". I will attempt to make callouts to Pioneer subscriptions classy of tone and minimal of file size.

On that note, Pioneer is and will remain the only subscription, tier, or paid service associated with this website. There's the free version, which is good, and the paid version, which adds some other good stuff. The price may increase over time if the US Dollar tanks, but that's it.

Refund Policy

Hopefully the value proposition of a Pioneer subscription is clear, and the features are well-tested. A 1-day trial period is included through Paddle for all subscriptions, so that you can investigate fully and draw your own conclusions. After that period, you can request a full refund and removal of paid features within 7 days of your initial purchase. Please contact me to request a refund.

Contact Me

If you have any questions about these terms, please feel free to reach out to me.