Trail Buddy — Terms of Service & Privacy Policy (Draft)

Terms of Service

1. What Trail Buddy is

Trail Buddy lets you record trip details (destination, expected return time, and emergency contact information) before you lose cell reception, so that if you don't check in by your expected return time, our team can notify the emergency contact you've provided.

Trail Buddy is not an emergency service, a search and rescue provider, or a substitute for one. We do not monitor trips in real time on a guaranteed schedule, we do not dispatch search and rescue, and we do not guarantee that your emergency contact will be reached or will act within any particular timeframe.

2. How the check-in process actually works

• You create a trip and set an expected return time.
• If you check in (“I'm back”) before that time, nothing further happens.
• If you do not check in, your trip is flagged as overdue for review by our team.
• Our team may then send an email to the emergency contact you provided, containing the trip details you entered.
• It is your emergency contact's responsibility, not Trail Buddy's, to decide whether and when to contact search and rescue or other emergency services.
• There is no guaranteed response time for any of the above. Do not rely on Trail Buddy as your sole safety measure for any trip where a delayed response could be life-threatening.

3. Your responsibilities

By creating a trip, you confirm that:

• All information you enter is accurate and truthful to the best of your knowledge.
• You have obtained your emergency contact's agreement to be contacted by Trail Buddy on your behalf, and to have their name, email, and phone number stored for that purpose.
• You understand that entering false, fabricated, or intentionally misleading trip information may delay or prevent any response, and that knowingly submitting fabricated trip information may result in suspension of your account and, where applicable, legal consequences (for example, if false information leads to a wasted search and rescue response).
• You will not use Trail Buddy as your only safety measure on any trip. Always carry appropriate navigation, communication, and survival equipment for your route, and follow local trail/backcountry regulations.

4. No warranty

Trail Buddy is provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that alerts will be successfully delivered. Email and SMS delivery can fail for reasons outside our control (spam filtering, incorrect contact details, network issues, and so on).

5. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Trail Buddy and its operators are not liable for any injury, death, loss, or damage arising from your use of the service, including but not limited to failure of an alert to be delivered, delay in an alert being sent, or reliance on the service in place of other safety precautions.

[This section in particular needs real legal drafting for your jurisdiction — liability waivers for safety-adjacent services are heavily regulated and vary by province/state.]

6. Account and data

You may delete your account and associated data at any time by [contacting us at EMAIL / using the account deletion option in your profile]. See the Privacy Policy below for what we collect and why.

7. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Continued use of Trail Buddy after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

8. Contact

Questions about these terms: fishboneox@gmail.com