Terms of Use

Last updated 25 September 2026 · Version 1.1

1. The agreement

By using the app you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the app. The Privacy Policy forms part of this agreement and explains what we do with information about you.

Whimzi is one product of Whimzi Group. Whimzi Connect is a separate app with its own terms; nothing here applies to it.

2. Who may use the app

You must be at least 13.

If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian's permission, and by using the app you are telling us you have it. They are agreeing to these terms with you. South African law requires their consent before we may process a person under 18's information at all — see the Privacy Policy, which is also where the two things worth a parent reading are set out.

You may not use the app if we have previously removed your account, or if the law where you are does not allow it.

Browsing needs no account. You only need to sign in to film something.

3. Your account

• You sign in with Apple or Google. We never see your password and there is no password for us to lose.
• Keep your phone and your Apple or Google account secure. Anything posted from your account is treated as posted by you.
• One account per person. Do not create accounts to evade a removal.
• You can delete your account in the app at any time — You → the menu → Delete account. It is immediate and it cannot be undone. What happens is set out in the Privacy Policy.

4. How posting works

You should know these before you press the button, because they are unusual:

• Clips are filmed in the app. Always. There is no way to post from your camera roll, and there never will be. The clip uploads while it records, so the time our server receives it is the time it was filmed. That is the entire basis on which anybody trusts what they are looking at.
• Stopping is publishing. Tap to start, tap to stop, and it is live. There is no review step, nothing to confirm, and no way to watch it back first. Do not start filming anything you are not prepared to have published.
• Up to 30 seconds. The camera stops itself there.
• You can delete your own clip at any time by holding it. That deletes the video from storage, not just from the screen.
• Everything expires. After about a day the video file is deleted automatically. We do not keep a copy.

5. What you may film

These are the standards this app is moderated against. They are short on purpose, so that nobody can claim not to have understood them.

1. Film the place, not the person. The point is what a place is like right now — the crowd, the queue, the band, the traffic, the view. People will be in shot and that is fine. A person as the subject is not.
2. Film what is in front of you, now. Not a screen, not a photo, not a video of a video, not something you are re-enacting.
3. Film in public, or where you are welcome. A street, a park, a bar you are in. Not through a window, not into a home, not over a wall, and not anywhere you have been asked to stop filming.
4. Stop if somebody asks. Even where the law permits filming, being asked is an answer.
5. Never film children you do not know as the subject of a clip.
6. Never film anywhere a person is entitled to privacy — a bathroom, a changing room, a medical setting, a hotel room.

6. What is not allowed

Do not post, and do not use the app for:

• Sexual content, nudity, or anything sexualising a person; anything at all involving a child in that context.
• Violence, injury, death, a body, or the aftermath of an accident or a crime where a person is identifiable.
• Harassment. Following somebody, filming a specific person repeatedly, filming somebody's home or workplace, or filming to intimidate.
• Hate speech or content attacking people for who they are — including anything that is hate speech under section 10 of South Africa's Equality Act.
• Illegal activity, or content promoting it.
• Other people's footage, or anything you do not have the right to post. The app's design already makes this difficult; doing it anyway is a breach of these terms.
• Misrepresenting where or when you are. Spoofing your location, tampering with timestamps, or modifying the app to post something it did not record.
• Advertising that is not a venue posting about itself under section 13, spam, or repeatedly posting the same thing.
• Attacking the service — scraping, automating, probing it for holes, bypassing rate limits, or reverse-engineering the app to post without recording.
• Abusing the report button to take down clips you simply do not like. Every report records who made it.

If you find something that should not be there, report it. It comes down immediately — you do not have to wait for us.

7. Your clip stays yours

You own what you film. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of anything to us, and nothing here gives us a right that outlives the clip.

8. What you let us do with it

So that we can actually show your clip to the people near you, you give us permission to store it, process it, and show it in the app and on our website. That permission is:

• Non-exclusive. You can do whatever else you want with your own footage.
• Royalty-free and worldwide, because somebody in another country may open the app and see your city.
• Limited to running the app. Not for advertising, not for promotion, not for training a model, and not to licence on to anybody else. If we ever want to use a clip in a screenshot or a promotion, we will ask you first and you can say no.
• It ends when the clip does. When your clip expires or you delete it, the file is deleted and the permission is spent. There is no archive.

We may make technical copies — re-encoding, caching at the edge, joining the pieces when you turn the camera around mid-recording — purely to deliver the clip.

9. Reporting and takedown

Every clip has a report control on it. A report is decided by a person at Whimzi: if it is upheld, the clip stops being served and the video file is deleted from storage. Reports from somebody who says they are in the clip are seen first. A clip that several different people report is hidden from everybody while it waits for a decision.

A single report does not take a clip down on its own. If it did, any stranger could delete anybody's moment with one tap, and a mistaken report is more common than a real one.

You can report a given clip once. If we find you reporting clips you simply dislike, we will remove your account — see section 11.

If you do not have the app, write to the address in section 20. You do not need an account to ask for something to be taken down.

10. Blocking

From any clip you can choose Don't show me moments from this person. After that, nothing they film appears anywhere in your app, and you are never notified about it.

You are never told who they are, and they are never told you blocked them. There are no profiles in this product, so a block works on the clip in front of you rather than on a name you would have to look up. You can clear your blocks in Settings.

11. Suspension and removal

We may remove a clip, suspend an account, or remove an account if:

• it breaches these terms;
• it is reported;
• we are legally required to;
• somebody is trying to break or abuse the service.

A single serious breach — anything involving a child, sexual content, filming to harass — means immediate and permanent removal.

If your account is removed and you think we are wrong, write to us and say so. We will look at it properly and reply. We will not always agree.

You can stop using the app at any time, and delete your account from inside it.

12. Take me there, and going somewhere

Take me there opens your phone's maps app with a destination in it. That is all it does.

Please read the rest of this section. It is the part that matters.

• A clip is not a recommendation and we are not vouching for anywhere. We have not been to these places. Nobody at Whimzi has checked them. A clip only ever shows that somebody stood somewhere and pressed record.
• We are not telling you anywhere is safe. The app shows you how recently people filmed at a place and whether a sunlit clip is being looked at after dark. That is context, not a safety rating, and we will never publish a safety rating of an area — it would be wrong often enough to be dangerous, and in South Africa it would encode exactly the prejudices this product has no business encoding.
• Use your own judgement, the same as anywhere else. Consider the time, the route, how you are travelling and who you are with. If you would not go there on somebody's word, do not go there on a clip's.
• Things change fast. A clip is up to a day old. What it showed may have ended hours ago.
• Nothing is verified. We check that a clip was filmed in the app, at the time it says, at the coordinates your phone reported. We do not check what is in it.

To the extent the law allows, we are not responsible for what happens to you at a place you went to after seeing it in the app. Going is your decision.

13. Venues and businesses

A venue may post about itself, and its clips are labelled as coming from the place rather than from a person.

Position cannot be bought. Clips are ordered by how recently they were filmed and by nothing else, for everybody. There is no paid placement, no promoted post and no boost, and there will not be one. A venue's clip obeys every rule in sections 5 and 6, expires like everybody else's, and can be reported like everybody else's.

Claiming to be a venue you are not, or posting on a venue's behalf without its permission, means removal.

14. What we do not promise

The app is provided as it is. We do not promise that it will always be available, that it will be free of faults, that there will be anything to watch near you, or that anything you see in it is accurate, current or safe.

In particular we do not promise that a place is open, that an event is happening, that a clip represents a place fairly, or that a place name is right — names come from open map data and open map data is sometimes wrong.

Nothing here takes away rights you have under consumer law that cannot be taken away. In South Africa, that includes your rights under the Consumer Protection Act.

15. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, or lost data.
• We are not liable for what somebody else films, or for what happens when you go somewhere.
• Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you have paid us in the previous twelve months — which, for a free app, is nothing.

We do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

16. Indemnity

If somebody brings a claim against us because of something you filmed or did in the app, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it — unless the claim is about something we did wrong.

17. Our rights, and other people's data

The app, the name, the design and the software are ours. These terms give you permission to use the app, and nothing else.

Place names and geography come from open data: OpenStreetMap, whose data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence, and the Overture Maps Foundation. Their licences apply to their data, not to this app, and we credit them wherever their names are shown.

18. Changes and ending this

We may change these terms. The date at the top changes with them, and if a change matters we will tell you in the app before it takes effect rather than quietly editing this page. Continuing to use the app after that means you accept the change; if you do not, delete your account.

Sections 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 19 survive the end of this agreement.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

19. Which law applies

20. Contact

We will reply. If we have got something wrong, say so.