Terms of Use

Last updated: 8 August 2026

1. Provider and scope

These terms of use apply to the use of the “SafeZone” app, offered by ESBM-Solutions UG (haftungsbeschränkt) i. Gr., Ditfurthstraße 48, 33611 Bielefeld, Germany (“we”). By using the app you agree to these terms.

2. What SafeZone is — and what it is not

SafeZone shows on a map where users have reported incidents or unsafe situations, lets you add your own reports and confirmations, warns you on request when you approach a reported area, and shows emergency numbers and help nearby.

SafeZone is not an emergency service, not a security service and no substitute for the police, fire brigade or ambulance. In case of acute danger call 110 or 112 (in Germany). Reports come from other users; they are not verified by any authority and may be wrong, outdated, incomplete or malicious. An area without reports does not mean nothing has happened there. Do not base your decisions on the map alone.

The help locations shown (police stations, hospitals, shelters, emergency numbers) are guidance drawn from public data sources. Opening hours, phone numbers and responsibilities can change; we accept no liability for their accuracy or currency.

3. No user account

Use requires no registration. Your reports are linked to a random device identifier that the app creates on first use. That identifier is not transferable; you may not extract, manipulate, duplicate or pass it on to third parties in order to circumvent limits.

4. Minimum age

Use of SafeZone is permitted from the age of 16. If you are younger, please do not use the app, or only with the consent of your legal guardian where the law of your country of residence permits this.

5. Rules for reports

The map is only as good as the reports in it. Therefore: only report situations you have witnessed yourself, truthfully, promptly and at the place where they actually occurred. Only confirm someone else’s report if you witnessed the situation too.

The following are prohibited in particular:

• False and joke reports, as well as reporting invented incidents or incidents you only heard about from others.
• Reports directed at specific individuals — SafeZone is not a tool for tagging, following, observing or pillorying individual people.
• Discriminatory use, in particular reporting people or groups solely because of their origin, skin colour, language, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, homelessness or social status. What is reported is behaviour in a situation, not membership of a group.
• Systematically running down places, for instance to economically harm a neighbourhood, a shop, an institution or a person.
• Automated or bulk reporting, circumventing the reporting and confirmation limits (up to 3 reports and 10 confirmations per 24 hours), faking location data, and any access to our API outside the app.

6. Checks, moderation and removal

Reports expire automatically after a category-dependent period and are deleted after 90 days at the latest. In addition we check plausibility automatically (the reported location must be close to the device), limit the number of reports per device, and weight reports using an internal trust score derived from how often a device’s reports were confirmed or expired unconfirmed.

We reserve the right to remove individual reports and to suspend or permanently block device identifiers if these terms are breached or there is reasonable suspicion of a breach. If you notice an obviously false or abusive report, write to support@esbm-solutions.com with the category, the location and roughly the time. We will review it and remove the report if it violates these terms.

7. Rights in your reports

Your reports consist solely of predefined categories, attributes, location and time — there is no free text and there are no photos. You grant us the non-exclusive, royalty-free right, unlimited in territory and time, to display this information in the app, to use it to compute the map, and to continue using it after deletion in anonymised statistical form (category, month, coarse map cell).

8. Warnings and availability

The warning feature is optional and technically limited: it depends on location permissions, your device’s battery-saving settings, the number of zones that can be monitored at once and an existing internet connection. A warning may arrive late, incompletely or not at all; do not rely on it. We do not owe uninterrupted availability of the app or our API and may carry out maintenance and develop, change or discontinue features.

9. Free use, advertising and subscriptions

All safety features can be used free of charge. Without a subscription the app is financed by an ad banner that appears exclusively on the map screen.

Two subscriptions are offered:

Subscriptions renew automatically for the respective term unless cancelled in good time before it ends. Purchase, renewal, cancellation and refunds are handled exclusively through your app store account (Apple App Store or Google Play); your contractual partner for the purchase is Apple or Google and their terms apply. Cancelling through us is technically not possible. Price changes are announced according to the rules of the respective store.

There is no virtual currency, no in-app credit and no redeemable points. For digital content supplied immediately, the statutory right of withdrawal expires once you have expressly agreed to the immediate start of performance.

10. Licence to use the app

We grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the app for your own private purposes on your devices. Reverse engineering, circumventing security mechanisms and the commercial exploitation of the map data are prohibited.

11. Liability

We accept no liability for the accuracy, completeness or currency of user-reported content or of the help locations shown. Otherwise we are liable only under the statutory provisions, in particular for intent and gross negligence as well as for injury to life, body or health; liability for slight negligence is limited to the breach of essential contractual obligations and to foreseeable damage typical for this type of contract.

If you culpably breach the rules in section 5 and this causes damage to us or to third parties, you shall indemnify us against justified third-party claims.

12. Changes to these terms

We may adjust these terms where objectively justified — for example for new features or a changed legal situation. We will inform you of material changes in an appropriate way, for instance inside the app.

13. Applicable law and dispute resolution

The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods; mandatory consumer protection provisions of your country of residence remain unaffected. The EU online dispute resolution platform is available at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are neither obliged nor willing to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

Note: This text is a carefully prepared draft and does not constitute legal advice. We recommend having it reviewed by a lawyer before the official app launch.