The terms a tour is bought under

A tour is licensed, not sold. What you buy is a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to play one tour for your own enjoyment, for twenty-eight days from the purchase. The licence is not a sale of the recordings, the photographs, the narration or the software, and it does not pass to anybody else.

The tour is copied to your phone before you walk, because the places these tours are made for have no mobile signal. When the twenty-eight days end, the tour is deleted from your phone. Finishing a walk removes it early — the closing screen gives the space back by itself, and there is a row on that screen for keeping it instead until the window runs out.

Restoring a purchase asks the store you bought it from. A purchase made on the App Store and a purchase made on Google Play are separate; neither store will restore the other's.

Payment is taken by Apple’s App Store or Google Play, never by us — no payment method of yours reaches hindsite or the venue. The price and the currency are whatever the store shows you at the moment you confirm, and the store adds any tax it is required to.

A refund is the store’s to give, and asking them is the route that works: Apple through Report a Problem, Google through your Play order history. If a tour did not work, write to [email protected] as well and a person answers — we would rather fix it, and we will say so to the store if you ask us to. A refund ends the licence, and the entitlement that goes with it is revoked.

Within the twenty-eight days you may play the tour as often as you like, on the phones signed in to the store account that bought it.

You may not copy, extract, publish, broadcast, resell, rent or lend the tour or anything in it, use it commercially or as part of a guided service you charge for, or work around the protection on the files.

What the protection actually is

The files are encrypted and the key is issued when you buy. We will not claim more for that than it does: anybody determined enough, with a camera pointed at a screen, can record what plays. What the protection buys is cost — a copy stops being one anonymous download and starts needing a modified phone and the knowledge to use it.

A per-purchase mark is rendered over playback, so a recording can be traced back to the purchase that made it. It is there for the same reason: to make a copy attributable rather than to pretend none can be made.

Tours are made from archive material, published sources and contributions from the people who look after a place, and everything is reviewed before it reaches a visitor. Images and video that show a place as it once looked are generated reconstructions, and they are labelled as such wherever they appear.

History is argued over. A tour is an interpretation — careful, sourced, and still an interpretation — and it is not a substitute for a venue’s own guiding, its signage or its records.

These tours are walked outdoors, on ground that belongs to somebody else. The safety rules of the site you are visiting apply and they come first: follow the venue’s instructions and signage, keep to the paths they mark, and stay out of any building they have closed.

hindsite is not a safety, navigation or emergency system. It does not know where the ground is unsound, when a wall is unsafe, or where you are allowed to be. Look where you are going rather than at the phone; the walk is built so a tour speaks up on its own and the phone can stay in a pocket. In an emergency use the venue’s own arrangements.

The app itself is free, and you can look through the tours without an account — there are no visitor accounts at all. Once a tour is on your phone it plays with the network off, which is the point of the whole product.

We do not promise that the service is uninterrupted, that a particular tour stays on sale, or that a tour is available in every language. A tour withdrawn from sale does not end a licence somebody already bought.

hindsite is not directed at children, and it collects nothing that would identify one. What the app does with data is set out in the privacy policy, which is written from the code.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud — and nothing in them takes away rights you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 or any other law that applies to you.

Subject to that, our liability arising out of a tour is limited to what you paid for it, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss.

These terms may change. The version that governs a purchase is the one on this page at the moment the purchase was made, so a change never reaches back into a tour somebody has already bought.

hindsite is operated by Vitruvian AI. These terms are governed by the law of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction over any dispute about them. Questions, complaints and anything else go to [email protected], where a person answers.