App terms

These terms cover the Adrift app for iPhone. They are an agreement between you and the person named below, and by using the app you accept them. The tryadrift.com website has its own terms, and the shop has Spreadshirt's. Neither is this page. What the app does with your data is the app privacy policy.

Who you are agreeing with

Simon Berriman
sole trader (freelance)
Karl-Rothe-Str. 4
04105 Leipzig
Germany
hello@tryadrift.com

Written as "we" below, which is one person. Full provider details are on the Impressum.

What Adrift is

You stand beside open water, write something, seal it, and let it go. You cannot choose where it goes and you cannot follow it. Nobody is sent it: somebody else has to be standing beside water somewhere in the world and find it. They may keep it, or add something of their own and put it back.

Adrift is free. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase, no advertising and no way to pay for anything inside it. Nothing you buy anywhere gives you an advantage in it — no extra bottles, no faster drift, no better chance of being found.

The drift is a simulation. Bottles move across a modelled field of ocean movement at plausible speeds. It is not a live forecast, it is not a real current dataset, and where a bottle goes is not a prediction of where a real object would go. Nothing in Adrift should be relied on for navigation, for safety, or for anything at sea.

Your account

You need an email address and a code sent to it. There is no password and no profile. You must be old enough to agree to these terms where you live, and at least 13 in any case. Keep access to your mailbox: it is the only way back to your collection.

One person, one account. Do not create accounts to get round a removal or a ban.

Being safe at the water

Adrift only works within about 120 metres of open sea, and finding a bottle means walking towards it. That is the product, and it puts you outdoors near water, sometimes in the dark and sometimes in weather.

Use your own judgement, and put it above the app. Do not climb anything, go anywhere you should not be, enter the water, ignore a tide, a warning sign or a cliff edge, or walk into traffic looking at your phone, because a screen said something was 40 metres away. Adrift never asks you to go anywhere in particular and there is nothing in it worth being hurt for. A distance shown in the app is an estimate from a phone's position sensor, which is at its least reliable exactly where you will be using it.

Anyone under 18 should have the agreement of a parent or guardian before going to the water to use Adrift.

What you may put in a bottle

Whatever you write can be read by a stranger anywhere in the world, and there is no way to take it back. Write accordingly.

We have no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive behaviour. You must not put any of the following in a bottle, in writing or in a photograph:

• sexual content, nudity, or anything sexualising a child in any way whatsoever
• harassment, bullying, or abuse directed at anybody
• hatred or degradation of people for their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any comparable characteristic
• threats, incitement to violence, or the glorification of violence or terrorism
• content encouraging suicide, self-harm, or an eating disorder
• somebody else's personal information — a name, an address, a phone number, a workplace — including your own if you would not want a stranger to have it
• anything unlawful, and anything depicting or promoting the sale of drugs, weapons or people
• spam, advertising, scams, chain messages, links soliciting anything, or bulk identical text
• work that is not yours to give away, and photographs of identifiable people who have not agreed to be in one
• attempts to obtain contact details from whoever finds your bottle, or to arrange to meet them

Do not use Adrift to reach a specific person, or to send anything to somebody who has asked you to leave them alone. The app is built so that you cannot choose who finds a bottle, and working around that is a breach of these terms.

Reporting something, and what we do

Every bottle has a Report control, on the bottle itself. It takes one tap and reaches us with the bottle attached. You do not need a reason beyond the one you pick from the list.

We review reported content within 24 hours. Anything breaking the rules above is hidden from every reader, and the account behind it is removed if it is deliberate or repeated. We may remove content or an account without a report if we come across something ourselves. Content that is hidden is retained rather than destroyed, so that a decision can be explained and so that a report about somebody's safety is not answered with an empty record.

If somebody may be in danger, contact your local emergency services. Adrift cannot: a bottle carries no way of identifying or locating the person who wrote it, and by the time you read one they may have written it a long way away and a long time ago. Report it to us as well, and we will do what can be done from our side.

You can write to hello@tryadrift.com about anything a report form does not cover, including a rights-holder complaint, and we will answer.

Never seeing somebody again

Under every piece of writing in a bottle there is Never show me this writer again. Tap it and nothing else by that person will ever reach you: their bottles stop appearing in the water around you, and anything of theirs in a bottle you are already holding is withheld.

It works differently from blocking somewhere with profiles, because Adrift has none. You are not told who you blocked — there is no name to tell you — and they are not told it happened, because there is nothing they could do about it and no way for them to reach you in the first place. Settings shows how many writers you have blocked and lets you undo all of them at once, which is the only form undoing can take when nobody can be named.

Blocking is yours alone and is not a report. If something broke the rules above, report it as well: blocking hides it from you, and reporting is what gets it taken down for everybody.

What Adrift refuses to carry

Some things are refused as you write them rather than after somebody complains. A bottle cannot contain an email address, a phone number, a link or a username — Adrift has no way for a stranger to reach you and that is deliberate, so a bottle must not become one — and a short list of terms tied to the most serious categories above will be refused outright.

It is a filter rather than a judge, and it is not what keeps Adrift usable. A person reading a report is. If something you wrote in good faith is refused, rephrase it, or write to us and say so.

What you write stays yours

You keep the copyright in what you write and in any photograph you add. You give us permission to store it, to move it around the world inside a bottle, and to show it to the people who find that bottle — a licence that is free, worldwide and lasts as long as the bottle does, and that exists solely to run the app.

We do not sell it, we do not use it in advertising, and we do not publish it anywhere outside the app without asking you first. You confirm that what you put in a bottle is yours to give away on those terms.

Letting go is final. Once a bottle is in the water you cannot recall it, edit it or delete it, and neither can we without taking it out of somebody else's collection. Deleting your account detaches you from the bottles you released; it does not empty them. If you have a serious reason to want something removed after the fact, write to us and we will weigh it against the people holding it.

Adrift itself — its name, its design, its code and its writing — belongs to us, and using the app gives you no rights over any of it.

Using the app fairly

Do not falsify your position or attempt to make the app accept a position you are not at. Do not automate the app, script it, or use anything other than the official iPhone app to reach our servers. Do not attempt to identify the person who wrote a bottle, to find where it was released, or to work around the limits that keep both of those private. Do not probe or interfere with the service, and do not try to read data that is not yours.

Ending it

You can leave at any time: Settings → Delete account, and the privacy policy says exactly what that removes.

We can suspend or remove an account that breaks these terms. Where it is proportionate to do so we will say what happened and you can reply to hello@tryadrift.com; where somebody has posted something seriously harmful we will act first.

Availability and liability

Adrift is offered as it is. It is a free product built by one person, it will have periods where it is unavailable or wrong, and there is no promise that a bottle you release will ever be found — that is the nature of the thing rather than a defect.

Where the law allows it, we are not liable for loss arising from using Adrift, from being unable to use it, from anything somebody else wrote in a bottle, or from a bottle never being found. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for intent or gross negligence, or for anything else that cannot be limited under German law. If you are a consumer, the mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in apply to you whatever this page says.

Changes

The date at the top says when this version was written. If we change something material we will change that date and say so in the app. Continuing to use Adrift after that is how you accept the change; if you would rather not, delete your account.

Law and language

German law applies, without displacing the mandatory law of the country you live in if you are a consumer there. These terms are written in English, and the English text is the one that counts.

The European Commission runs an online dispute resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

Terms Apple requires us to include

Adrift is distributed through the App Store, and these terms are the licence agreement for it. Apple requires the following, and it is all true:

• This agreement is with us, not Apple. Apple is not a party to it, and we alone are responsible for the app and its contents.
• What the licence covers. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to use Adrift on any Apple-branded product you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the App Store Terms of Service.
• Support. Maintenance and support are ours to provide, at hello@tryadrift.com. Apple has no obligation to provide either.
• Warranty. Any warranty is ours. If Adrift fails to conform to a warranty, you may tell Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price, which for Adrift is nothing. Beyond that, Apple has no warranty obligation, and any other claim, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense attributable to a failure to conform is ours.
• Claims. We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim about Adrift — including product liability, a failure to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, consumer protection and privacy claims, and any claim that Adrift infringes somebody else's intellectual property.
• Where you are. You confirm that you are not in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as supporting terrorism, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Third-party terms. You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using Adrift.
• Apple may enforce this. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and have the right to enforce them against you.

Contact

hello@tryadrift.com, for anything on this page.

Written by the person who built Adrift, describing how it actually works. It is not a lawyer's work and has not been reviewed by one.