Hugs Map — Terms of Service and Community Rules

Last updated: 13 September 2026

These Terms are the agreement between you and Hugs Map. They are written to match how the app is actually built. Where a rule you would expect from a large social network does not apply here — advertising, data sales, training AI on your pictures — this document says so rather than leaving you to wonder.

Each section opens with a short plain-language summary. The summary is there to help you; if it ever conflicts with the full text below it, the full text applies.

1. Introduction and agreement to these Terms

1.1 Who we are. Hugs Map is made and operated by an independent developer in the Sultanate of Oman ("Hugs Map", "we", "us"). Contact: support@hugs-map.com.

1.2 What these Terms cover. These Terms govern the Hugs Map app, its website, and every feature reached through them: saving memories ("hugs"), the map, sharing with people you add, conversations, the public map, and the one-time unlock purchase. Together with the Privacy Policy, which is part of this agreement, they are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.

1.3 How you agree. You accept these Terms by creating an account, by tapping "Agree" where the app asks, or by using the Service. If you do not agree, do not use Hugs Map. Deleting your account (You → Account → Delete account) ends the agreement, subject to Section 8.

1.4 Age. You must be at least 13 years old to use Hugs Map. If the law where you live sets a higher age for consenting to an online service without a parent (for example 16 in some countries of the European Economic Area), that higher age applies to you. If you are under 18, you confirm that a parent or legal guardian has read these Terms and agreed to them on your behalf. We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to hold an account; if we learn that one does, we delete it and its data. Parents who believe a child under 13 has an account can write to the address above.

1.5 Changes to these Terms. We may change these Terms as the app changes. For changes that affect your rights or obligations in a meaningful way, we will notify you in the app at least 14 days before they take effect, and you may delete your account before then if you do not accept them. Continuing to use Hugs Map after the effective date means you accept the new Terms. Small changes — wording, typos, a new feature described in the same spirit — take effect when posted, with the date at the top updated.

1.6 Language. These Terms are offered in English, Arabic and Spanish. If the translations ever differ, the English text governs.

2. Your account and identity

2.1 Creating an account. Hugs Map works fully on your own phone without any account. To share with other people you sign in with a Google account or a phone number. You agree to give accurate information, to keep it current, and to hold only one account for yourself. Accounts are personal and may not be sold, rented, or handed to someone else.

2.2 Your name and username. You choose a display name and a username. A username may be changed once every 49 hours, so that the people who know you by it are not confused. Usernames are first come, first served, and may not impersonate a person, brand or organisation, contain slurs, or be chosen to mislead.

2.3 Security is shared. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your Google or phone sign-in secure, use the app lock and biometric gate the app offers if your phone is shared, and tell us at once at the address above if you believe your account has been used without your permission. We are not responsible for loss caused by someone using your account because your sign-in was not kept safe.

2.4 Impersonation. You may not present yourself as another person, a public figure, a business, or a Hugs Map employee, or claim a connection you do not have. A parody or fan account is allowed only if the name and profile make the parody obvious to a first-time viewer.

2.5 Ending your account. You may delete your account at any time from You → Account. Deletion removes your profile, your shared memories and their photos, your conversations on the server, your reports, and retires your username; memories kept only on your phone go with the app when you uninstall it. We may suspend or close an account under Section 7. If we close it for a serious breach, you may not open another.

2.6 Inactive accounts. We may close an account that has not signed in for 24 months, after warning the email or number on file 30 days beforehand.

3. Acceptable use and content rules

3.1 What you may share

You may share memories, pictures, words, feelings, places and conversations that are yours to share. A "public" hug is visible to anyone on Hugs Map from the map, with your name and picture on it. A hug shared with chosen people is visible to them and to nobody else. A hug kept "just me" never leaves your phone. Choose the audience with the same care you would choose it in person.

3.2 Prohibited content

We remove the following and act against the accounts that post it. These apply to memories, photos, stickers, captions, notes, usernames, profile cards, status lines, comments and conversations alike.

1. Sexual content involving minors. Zero tolerance. Any sexual or sexualised depiction of a person under 18, real or generated, and any attempt to solicit it, results in immediate permanent removal and a report to the relevant authorities and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children or its local counterpart.
2. Non-consensual intimate imagery. Intimate or sexual images or video of any person shared without that person's explicit consent, threats to share them, and "deepfake" sexual imagery. The app tells the owner of a memory shared with chosen people when someone in that audience takes a screenshot; taking one and passing it on without consent is a breach of these rules whatever the audience.
3. Hate speech. Attacks on people for their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, serious illness, or immigration status — including slurs, dehumanising comparisons, calls for exclusion, and symbols used to intimidate. Discussing or condemning hatred is fine; spreading it is not.
4. Harassment and bullying. Targeting a person with insults, threats, unwanted sexual attention, doxxing (publishing a home address, phone number, workplace, or private images), or repeated contact after being blocked. Because Hugs Map places memories on a map, publishing where a specific person lives, works, or regularly goes, without their consent, is treated as doxxing.
5. Violence and dangerous people. Threats of violence, glorification of violent acts, and any presence of terrorist or violent extremist organisations or their supporters. Content that encourages self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders. If you are struggling, the app's Quiet Room is a private place for hard days; if you are in danger, contact local emergency services.
6. Illegal goods and acts. Selling or arranging the sale of drugs, weapons, or stolen goods; human trafficking; sexual services; fraud; and content that describes how to commit a serious crime in order to help someone do it.
7. Harmful falsehoods. Deliberately false claims that are likely to cause real harm — about elections and how to vote, about medical treatments and public health, about emergencies and disasters, or that impersonate an official source. Honest mistakes and matters of opinion are not covered; deliberate deception that endangers people is.
8. Adult sexual content. Hugs Map is not a platform for pornography. Sexual activity and sexually explicit nudity are not allowed in public hugs, comments, or anywhere a stranger may see them. Non-sexual nudity in a memory shared only with chosen adults who agreed to see it is your own affair, within the law.
9. Other people's privacy. Photos of identifiable people who have not agreed to appear in a public hug, recordings of private conversations, and personal data of others (documents, medical or financial information).
10. Anything unlawful where you are, where the person you share it with is, or in Oman.

3.3 Platform integrity

You may not:

• run automated accounts ("bots"), buy or sell accounts, or coordinate groups of accounts to manipulate the map's warmth, likes, or who appears in "People on Hugs Map";
• send spam, unsolicited commercial messages, chain messages, or bulk friend requests;
• scrape, crawl, or harvest content or personal data from the Service, or use the public map to track any person's movements;
• probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, bypass App Check or other integrity measures, tamper with the app, or use a modified client;
• reverse-engineer the app except where the law expressly allows it;
• use the Service to build a competing dataset or product, or to train any machine learning model;
• interfere with another person's use of the Service.

Security researchers who find a vulnerability are asked to report it privately to the address above; we will not pursue good-faith research that respects other users' data.

3.4 Your responsibility for what you share

You are responsible for the content you post and for making sure you have the right to post it, including the consent of the people in it. Hugs Map does not review content before it is posted.

4. Intellectual property and ownership of content

4.1 You own your content. Everything you create in Hugs Map — pictures, words, notes, stickers placed, conversations — remains yours. We claim no ownership of it.

4.2 The licence you give us. So that the app can work, you grant Hugs Map a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, back up, transmit, resize, encrypt, display and distribute your content solely to operate the Service and only to the audience you chose: your own devices, the people you shared a memory with, the members of a conversation, and — for a public hug — anyone viewing the public map. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except that copies already delivered to the people you shared with may remain with them, and copies in our routine backups are removed within 30 days.

We do not use this licence to advertise, to sell your content, to license it to others, or to train AI. See Section 5.

4.3 Other people's content. Content another person shares with you is theirs. You may view it in the app; you may not copy, republish, or redistribute it without their consent. The screenshot notice described in 3.2(2) exists for this reason.

4.4 Our content. The Hugs Map app, its design, names, logos, companion characters, sounds, and code are ours or our licensors'. You receive a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app as intended. You may not copy, modify, or distribute it.

4.5 Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything, and you keep no rights in how we implement them.

4.6 Copyright and IP complaints. We respond to notices under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent laws elsewhere. If you believe content on Hugs Map infringes your copyright or trademark, send a notice to support@hugs-map.com containing:

1. the work you say is infringed;
2. where the infringing content is (the username, memory, or conversation);
3. your name, address, and email;
4. a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law;
5. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them;
6. your physical or electronic signature.

We will remove or disable the content, notify the person who posted it, and provide them your notice. That person may send a counter-notice with the same details, a statement under penalty of perjury that the content was removed by mistake, and their consent to the jurisdiction described in Section 8. Unless you tell us within 10 business days that you have filed a court action, we may restore the content. Accounts that infringe repeatedly are closed.

5. Privacy, your data, and AI

5.1 The Privacy Policy governs. How we collect, use, store and delete your data is set out in the Privacy Policy, which you should read. The points below are commitments repeated here so they carry the weight of a contract.

5.2 What we promise.

• No advertising. Hugs Map shows no ads and never will. There is nothing to target, so nothing is profiled.
• No data sales or sharing for others' purposes. We do not sell, rent, or share your data with data brokers, advertisers, or analytics companies.
• Location is read once, at the moment you save a memory, and never in the background. Lowering a memory's precision destroys the original coordinates. The map's "where I am" dot is a single read when you ask for it and is never stored.
• Private stays private. A memory kept "just me" never leaves your phone.
• Encrypted at rest and in transit. On your phone the database and photos are encrypted with keys held in the phone's secure hardware; on the way they are encrypted with TLS; on the server they are encrypted at rest.
• Not end-to-end. Shared memories and conversations are readable by the service itself, which is what lets abuse reports be reviewed and lets you get your chats back on a new phone. If you need end-to-end encryption, do not use Hugs Map for that conversation.
• You can leave with everything. Export is free, plain, and always available.

5.3 Artificial intelligence. We do not use your content — pictures, words, places, conversations, feelings — to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any generative or machine-learning model, ours or anyone else's, and we do not permit third parties to. The app contains no generative AI features today. If we ever add one, the following will apply and cannot be changed without a new agreement from you:

1. any AI feature will be off by default and enabled only by your explicit opt-in;
2. your content will not be used to train models unless you separately and explicitly opt in to that, with a plain explanation of what is used and why;
3. you will be able to withdraw that opt-in at any time, and we will stop using your content going forward;
4. content shared with you by others will never be used for training on the strength of your consent alone.

The only automated processing of your content today is on-device (photo grading, the companion's mood, location labelling) or for safety (Section 7.3).

5.4 Data you give us about others. When you add someone by username, QR code, or from "People on Hugs Map", or share a memory with them, you confirm you have the right to share that person's involvement with us.

6. Recommendations, ranking, and money

6.1 How things are ordered. Hugs Map has no engagement-ranked feed. Your story is in chronological order. The map's warmth layer shows only how many memories were saved near a place recently, as colour, and never who or exactly where. "People on Hugs Map" lists people by proximity of place and recency, with no paid placement. Public hugs on the map are shown by location. Nothing you see is ranked for advertising, and we do not use inferred interests, demographics, or behaviour to choose what you see.

6.2 Personalisation you control. The only personalisation is what you set: location precision, who you have added, who you have blocked, which notification categories are on, and whether the warmth layer is shown.

6.3 Price. Hugs Map is free to install and fully functional for your first 25 memories. Keeping more requires a single one-time purchase (US $4.99 or the local equivalent) through Google Play, per Google account. There are no subscriptions, no recurring charges, no in-app currency, and no paid features beyond that unlock. Purchases are handled by Google Play under its terms; refunds follow Google Play's refund policy and the law where you live. Because the unlock is a non-consumable product, it is restored to the same Google account on a new phone at no cost.

6.4 Sponsored and affiliate content. Hugs Map does not sell sponsored placements. If you personally use the Service to promote a product, service, or brand in exchange for payment, free goods, or any other benefit, you must disclose that relationship clearly and conspicuously in the content itself (for example "#ad", "Sponsored", or "I was paid to post this"), as required by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides and equivalent consumer-protection rules elsewhere. Undisclosed paid promotion, affiliate links dressed up as personal recommendations, and mass promotional posting are treated as spam under 3.3.

7. Enforcement, moderation, and appeals

7.1 Reporting and blocking. Anyone can be blocked from You → People; a blocked person is never told and cannot see your memories, message you, or find you. A person, a memory, a comment, or a message can be reported from where it appears. Reports are confidential.

7.2 How decisions are made. Reports are reviewed by the developer. Because Hugs Map is small, the person reviewing is also the person answerable for the decision. Reviewers see the reported content and the context needed to judge it, not your whole account. Reports of the most serious categories (3.2(1), (2), (5)) are handled first.

7.3 Automated systems. Automated checks are used narrowly: to detect known child sexual abuse material by hash-matching against industry databases, to enforce rate limits and reject tampered clients, and to flag likely spam patterns. Automated detection of CSAM results in immediate removal and reporting as the law requires. Every other automated flag is reviewed by a person before any action is taken against an account. No account is suspended by an automated system alone.

7.4 The enforcement ladder. Depending on severity, history, and intent:

Anyone may be moved straight to a permanent ban for the categories listed in that row. Trying to evade enforcement with a new account extends the ban to the new account.

7.5 What you are told. When we act against your content or account, we tell you in the app (You → Notices) or by the email or number on file: what was actioned, which rule applies, the reference, and how to appeal. The exception is where telling you would put a person at risk or is prohibited by law.

7.6 Appeals. You may appeal any decision within 30 days from the notice in the app (You → Notices → Appeal) or by writing to support@hugs-map.com with the reference in the notice and anything you want considered. Content removed under 7.4 is held, not destroyed, for those 30 days, so that a successful appeal can put it back exactly as it was; it is deleted for good when the window closes. An appeal is reviewed afresh, with your explanation, by the developer as a reviewer who did not make the original decision, or — for the developer's own decisions — after at least 48 hours and a written re-examination against the rule cited. We answer appeals within 14 days. If your appeal succeeds, the content or account is restored and the record of the action is removed. People who reported content are not told who appealed.

7.7 Reports made in bad faith. Filing reports you know to be false, or in large numbers to overwhelm a person, is itself a breach of 3.3.

7.8 Content that reaches others. When we remove your content, we also remove it from the devices of the people you shared it with at the next sync. We cannot recall copies they have already exported or screenshotted.

8. Disclaimers, liability, and disputes

8.1 The Service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, Hugs Map is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, non-infringement, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot bear to lose: Export exists for exactly that.

8.2 Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, Hugs Map and its developer are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for loss of data, profits, goodwill, or opportunity, arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability to you for all claims together is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim and US $50. Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law.

8.3 Consumer rights. If you live in a place whose consumer law gives you rights that these Terms cannot take away — including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and others — you keep those rights, and this Section applies only as far as that law allows.

8.4 Indemnity. If you are not a consumer, you agree to defend and hold harmless Hugs Map and its developer from claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from your content, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of another person's rights.

8.5 Talk first. Before starting any formal proceeding, write to support@hugs-map.com with a description of the dispute and what you want. We will do the same. Both of us agree to try in good faith to resolve it within 60 days.

8.6 Arbitration. If we cannot resolve it, any dispute arising from these Terms or the Service will be finally settled by binding arbitration seated in Muscat, Oman, under the rules of the Oman Commercial Arbitration Centre, by one arbitrator, in English, with hearings held remotely unless the arbitrator decides otherwise. The arbitrator may award the same relief a court could. Either party may instead bring an individual claim in a small-claims court that has jurisdiction. Either party may seek an injunction in any competent court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised use of the Service.

8.7 Opt-out of arbitration. You may reject this arbitration clause by emailing the address above within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, stating your username and that you opt out. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms. If you opt out, or if arbitration is unenforceable where you live, disputes go to the courts of Muscat, Oman, except that consumers in the EU, UK, and other places whose law gives them their home courts may sue there.

8.8 No class actions. To the extent the law allows, you and we agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or member of any class, collective, or representative proceeding. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court, not arbitration.

8.9 Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the Sultanate of Oman, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, except where the mandatory law of your country of residence applies to you as a consumer.

8.10 Time limit. Any claim must be brought within one year of the events giving rise to it, unless the law where you live requires a longer period.

8.11 General. If part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest stands. Our not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this agreement; we may assign it to a successor who takes on the same obligations, and will tell you if we do. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the Service. Sections 4, 5.3, 7 and 8 survive the end of the agreement.

8.12 Export and sanctions. You may not use Hugs Map if you are on a sanctions list or in a place where the Service is prohibited by law.

Contact

Questions, notices, appeals, and copyright complaints: support@hugs-map.com.

This document describes the Service as it is built. If something here stops being true, it is a bug, and we would like to hear about it.