Terms of use

VillageWatch, the service at villagewatch.app, is operated for your village by [Parish Council name]. By creating an account you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. If you do not agree with them, do not use the service.

• It is not an emergency service. Nothing you post here reaches the police, the fire service or an ambulance.
• It is not monitored continuously. Your coordinator is a volunteer neighbour. A report may sit unreviewed overnight, over a weekend, or while they are away.
• It is not a crime record. Reports are what residents believe they saw. They are not verified, not investigated, and carry no official status.
• It is not a substitute for reporting to the police. If something is a crime, report it to the police as well. There is a field on the report form for the reference they give you.

• You must be at least 16 years old and live in, or have a genuine connection to, the village you join.
• Give your real name. Coordinators verify residents so that a village map reflects its actual neighbours, and an account under a false name will be removed. You can still file individual reports anonymously — that hides your name from other residents, not from your coordinator.
• One account per person. Do not share your password or let anyone else file under your name.
• Tell your coordinator promptly if you think someone else has got into your account.

You must not post, upload or share any of the following.

Anything that identifies a private individual

This is the rule the whole service is built around. Do not include:

• Names, nicknames, or “the family at number 14”.
• Vehicle registration plates, or a vehicle described distinctively enough to be one particular car.
• Home addresses, workplaces, or schools.
• Phone numbers, email addresses, or social media accounts.
• Photographs or video in which a person is recognisable, including by build, clothing or context rather than face.
• Descriptions of ethnicity, religion, disability, sexuality or health unless they are genuinely necessary to the report — and they rarely are.

The AI pass removes most of this automatically and a coordinator checks the rest, but you should not rely on either. Write the report as though neither existed.

Anything defamatory or accusatory

• Do not accuse anyone of a crime. “A shed was broken into” is a report. “The lad from the caravans broke into my shed” is an allegation, and publishing an untrue allegation that damages someone's reputation is defamation — for which you are liable, not the council and not VillageWatch.
• Do not post about a suspect, a court case or an investigation in a way that could prejudice it.
• Do not use reports to pursue a dispute with a neighbour, a landlord, a business or the council.

Anything else on this list

• Reports you know to be false, exaggerated, or filed to cause alarm.
• Abuse, harassment, threats, or content that is hateful towards any group.
• Indecent, obscene or gratuitously distressing images.
• Advertising, campaigning, canvassing, fundraising or anything commercial.
• Content that infringes someone else's copyright, or footage from a camera you had no right to use.
• Anything that would break a court order, a reporting restriction or the law.
• Automated filing, scraping the map, or attempting to get at reports from another village.

These carry over from the village group chat this replaces. They are not legal obligations so much as what makes the difference between a watch scheme people trust and one they mute.

Report what you saw, not who you think did it

A description of a vehicle circling twice at midnight is useful. A name is not — it is an accusation, and it is the fastest way to make a village turn on someone who turns out to have been visiting their mother.

999 first, then here

Never let filing a report delay a call to the emergency services. The map can wait ten minutes. It always can.

No vigilante action, ever

Do not confront, follow, detain or organise a group to deal with anyone. Do not post about doing so. Watch schemes exist to observe and report — the moment they do more than that, someone gets hurt and the scheme is finished.

One incident, one report

If four people saw the same van, four reports make it look like four vans. Check the map first; add what you saw as a confirmation instead.

Keep it proportionate

An unfamiliar car parked on a lane is not a crime. A delivery driver with a clipboard is not a scout. Ask yourself whether you would want the report filed if you were the one being described.

Nothing you would not say to their face

Everything published is read by a few hundred neighbours, and there is a good chance the person in the report is one of them.

It is not a noticeboard

Lost cats and blocked drains, yes — that is what the categories are for. Parish politics, sale items, and opinions about the council belong somewhere else.

Respect the coordinators

They are volunteers reading every report before anyone else sees it. Disagree with a decision by all means; take it up with them privately.

You remain legally responsible for the content of every report you submit, including after it has been anonymised, rewritten and published. Neither VillageWatch nor [Parish Council name]accepts responsibility for a report's accuracy.

In particular, the anonymisation pass and the coordinator's review reduce the risk of publishing something identifying or defamatory — they do not transfer that risk away from you. If a report you filed defames someone, the claim is against you.

You confirm that anything you upload is yours to upload, and that any photograph or video was taken lawfully.

• By default, every report is reviewed by a coordinator before publication, and nothing you file is visible to other residents until it has been. Your village's coordinators can turn that review off, in which case reports are published the moment they are filed — the screen tells you which applies before you press publish.
• Coordinators may edit, reject, resolve or archive any report in their village, at their discretion, with or without giving a reason.
• We may remove any content at any time, particularly where it breaches section 4, and we do not have to warn you first.
• You can edit or withdraw your own report yourself while it is still awaiting review. Once published it becomes part of the village record, and removing it is a coordinator's decision — though your right to erasure under data protection law is unaffected, and section 8 of the privacy policy explains how to use it.
• Published reports are archived after 12 months and attached photos are deleted after 6.
• Every moderation decision is logged. So is every read of a report's original wording.

VillageWatch uses AI to rewrite reports with identifying details removed, to suggest categories and severities, to flag patterns across nearby reports, and to write the weekly summary coordinators receive.

• These outputs are provided without warranty. They can be wrong, incomplete, or miss something identifying that a person would have caught. Do not treat them as verified.
• You see the rewrite before it is published and can edit or reject it. Publishing it is your decision and it stays your report.
• A pattern note is an observation, not a finding. “Fourth report of vehicle crime within 200 metres this month” describes what has been filed. It does not establish that the incidents are related, and it never identifies anyone.
• To the extent the law allows, neither VillageWatch nor [Parish Council name] is liable for any loss arising from reliance on an AI-generated summary, category, severity or pattern note.

Section 5 of the privacy policy explains what is sent to the AI provider and what happens to it.

What you file stays yours. By submitting it you give [Parish Council name] a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, anonymise it, redact it, publish it to your village and include it in aggregated safety statistics, for as long as these terms apply and for the retention periods in the privacy policy.

That licence exists so the service can function. It does not let anyone sell your content, use it for marketing, or pass it to a third party beyond the processors listed in the privacy policy.

• The service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors, and we may change or withdraw features.
• Push notifications depend on your device, your browser and third-party networks. Alerts may be delayed or not arrive at all. Do not rely on receiving one.
• Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
• Subject to that, neither VillageWatch nor [Parish Council name] is liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of property, or loss arising from a report that was inaccurate, delayed, unreviewed or never filed.
• You agree to indemnify [Parish Council name] against claims brought by a third party arising from content you filed in breach of section 4.

We may suspend or remove your account if you breach these terms, if you repeatedly file reports that have to be rejected, or if you no longer live in the village. Serious breaches — harassment, deliberately false reports, publishing someone's details — mean immediate removal, and may be reported to the police.

You can close your account at any time by asking your coordinator or the council. Reports already published stay on the village map, detached from your name.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of the page changes when we do, and material changes will be flagged in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use VillageWatch after that means you accept them.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If any part of them is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

Questions about these terms, or about a moderation decision, go to [Parish Council name] at [clerk@parish-council.example.uk].