Terms of Service
Wezwot is an App designed to enable people to connect with each other, build communities, and grow businesses. These Terms govern your use of Wezwot and the other products, features, apps, services, technologies, and software we offer, except where we expressly state that separate terms (and not these) apply.
We don’t charge you to download and view the Wezwot App with basic functionality. An Annual (for Wezzers) / Monthly (For Wotters) subscription is however payable to utilise the App in full. Businesses and organizations, and other persons pay us to show ads for their products and services. By using our Products, you agree that we can show you ads that we think may be relevant to you and your interests. We use your personal data to help determine which personalized ads to show you.
We will not and don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you give us specific permission and/or request us to do so. Instead, advertisers can tell us things like the kind of audience they want to see their ads, and we show those ads to people who may be interested. We provide advertisers with reports about the performance of their ads that help them understand how people are interacting with their content. See Section 2 below to learn more about how personalized advertising under these terms works.
Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect and use your personal data to determine some of the ads you see and provide all of the other services described below. You can also go to your settings pages of the relevant Meta Product at any time to review the privacy choices you have about how we use your data.
POPI ACT Clause
In terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (Act 4 of 2013), also called the POPI Act or POPIA, which came into effect on 1 July 2021, Wezwot (Pty) Ltd needs its client’s consent to store and process their personal information. As a company processing information, we must be legally compliant. We would like to assure you that Wezwot (Pty) Ltd treats your personal information with the utmost privacy. We shall not share any of our client’s personal information with anyone other than in cases of legally proven requirements. For us to responsibly service our clients and to be able to communicate, we need to store and process client’s personal information, this may include the following: Company name/Initials, Surname, Address, Phone Numbers, Email Address, and ID/Registration nr.
Should you have any objection to us storing your personal information, please inform us via email, we will then be compelled to remove your information from our database.
1. The services we provide
Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. To help advance this mission, we provide the Products and services described below to you:
Provide a personalized experience for you:
Your Wezzer experience on Wezwot is unlike anyone else’s: from the posts, specials, events, ads, and other content you may see from the Wotters you follow and search. For example, we use data about the connections you make, the choices and settings you select, and what you share and do – to personalize your experience.
Connect you with people and organizations you care about:
We help you find and connect with people, businesses, organizations, and others that matter to you. We use data to make suggestions for you and others – for example, events to attend, Wotters to follow, or send a message to recommend activities you may be interested in.
Help you discover content, products, and services that may interest you:
We show you personalized ads, offers, and other sponsored or commercial content to help you discover content, products, and services that are offered by the many businesses and organizations that use Wezwot. Section 2 below explains this in more detail.
Promote the safety, security, and integrity of our services, combat harmful conduct and keep our community of users safe:
People will only build community on Wezwot if they feel safe and secure. We work hard to maintain the security (including the availability, authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality) of our Products and services. We employ dedicated teams around the world, work with external service providers, partners and other relevant entities and develop advanced technical systems to detect potential misuse of our Products, harmful conduct towards others, and situations where we may be able to help support or protect our community, including to respond to user reports of potentially violating content. If we learn of content or conduct like this, we may take appropriate action based on our assessment that may include – notifying you, offering help, removing content, removing or restricting access to certain features, disabling an account, or contacting law enforcement.
In some cases, the Oversight Board may review our decisions, subject to its terms and bylaws. Learn more here.
Use and develop advanced technologies to provide safe and functional services for everyone:
We use and develop advanced technologies – such as artificial intelligence and machine learning systems – so that people can use our Products safely regardless of physical ability or geographic location. And we develop automated systems to improve our ability to detect and remove abusive and dangerous activity that may harm our community and the integrity of our Products.
Research ways to make our services better:
We engage in research to develop, test, and improve our Products. This includes analyzing data we have about our users and understanding how people use our Products, for example by conducting surveys and testing and troubleshooting new features. Our Privacy Policy explains how we use data to support this research for the purposes of developing and improving our services.
Provide consistent and seamless experiences across the Wezwot Products:
Our Products help you find and connect with people, businesses, organizations, and others that are important to you. We design our systems so that your experience is consistent and seamless across the App.
2. How our services are funded
Wezwot is free to download to all users.
Wotters will pay a monthly subscription fee to advertise their daily/weekly/monthly specials, events, activities etc.
Wezzers will be required to pay an annual subscription fee to enjoy the full capabilities for the App. We use your personal data, such as information about your activity and interests, to show you ads that are more relevant to you.
Protecting people’s privacy is central to how we’ve designed our ad system. This means that we can show you relevant and useful ads without telling advertisers who you are. We don’t sell your personal data. We allow advertisers to tell us things like their business goal, and the kind of audience they want to see their ads (for example, people between the age of 18-35 who like cycling). We then show their ad to people who might be interested.
We also provide advertisers with reports about the performance of their ads to help them understand how people are interacting with their content. For example, we provide general demographic and interest information to advertisers (for example, that an ad was seen by a woman between the ages of 25 and 34 who lives in Cape Town and likes Whale watching to help them better understand their audience. We don’t share information that directly identifies you (information such as your name or email address that by itself can be used to contact you or identifies who you are) unless you give us specific permission.
We collect and use your personal data in order to provide the services described above to you. You have control over the types of ads and advertisers you see, and the types of information we use to determine which ads we show you.
3. Your commitments to Wezwot and our community
We provide these services to you and others to help advance our mission. In exchange, we need you to make the following commitments:
- Who can use Wezwot
When people stand behind their opinions and actions, our community is safer and more accountable. For this reason, you must:
- Provide for your account the same name that you use in everyday life.
- Provide accurate information about yourself.
- Wezzers to create only one account (your own) and use it for personal purposes.
- Wotters to create only one account (your own business/event) and use it for promotional purposes.
- Not share your password, give access to your Wezwot account to others, or transfer your account to anyone else (without our permission).
We try to make Wezwot broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Wezwot if:
- You are under 16 years old.
- You are a convicted sex offender.
- We’ve previously disabled your account for violations of our Terms or the Community Standards, or other terms and policies that apply to your use of Wezwot. If we disable your account for a violation of our Terms, the Community Standards, or other terms and policies, you agree not to create another account without our permission. Receiving permission to create a new account is provided at our sole discretion, and does not mean or imply that the disciplinary action was wrong or without cause.
- You are prohibited from receiving our products, services, or software under applicable laws.
- What you can share and do on Wezwot
We want people to use Wezwot to explore and support events and businesses throughout the country. You therefore agree not to engage in the conduct described below (or to facilitate or support others in doing so):
- You may not use our Products to do or share anything:
- That violates these Terms, the Community Standards, or other terms and policies that apply to your use of our Products.
- That is unlawful, misleading, discriminatory or fraudulent (or assists someone else in using our Products in such a way).
- That you do not own or have the necessary rights to share.
- That infringes or violates someone else’s rights, including their intellectual property rights (such as by infringing another’s copyright or trademark, or distributing or selling counterfeit or pirated goods), unless an exception or limitation applies under applicable law.
- You may not upload viruses or malicious code, use the services to send spam, or do anything else that could disable, overburden, interfere with, or impair the proper working, integrity, operation, or appearance of our services, systems, or Products.
- You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data you do not have permission to access.
- You may not proxy, request, or collect Product usernames or passwords, or misappropriate access tokens.
- You may not sell, license, or purchase any data obtained from us or our services.
- You may not misuse any reporting, flagging, dispute, or appeals channel, such as by making fraudulent, duplicative, or groundless reports or appeals.
We can remove or restrict access to content that is in violation of these provisions. We can also suspend or disable your account for conduct that violates these provisions, as provided in Section 4.B.
If we remove content that you have shared in violation of the Community Standards, we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request another review, unless you seriously or repeatedly violate these Terms or if doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons. For information on account suspension or termination, see Section 4.B below.
To help support our community, we encourage you to report content or conduct that you believe violates your rights (including intellectual property rights) or our terms and policies, if this feature exists in your jurisdiction.
We also can remove or restrict access to content features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Wezwot.
- The permissions you give us
We need certain permissions from you to provide our services:
- Permission to use content you create and share: Some content that you share or upload, such as photos or videos, may be protected by intellectual property laws.
You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Wezwot. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want.
However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a “licence”) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.
Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Wezwot, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Wezwot’s service providers that support those products and services. This licence will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
You can delete individual content you share, post, and upload at any time. In addition, all content posted to your personal account will be deleted if you delete your account.
It may take up to 90 days to delete content after we begin the account deletion process or receive a content deletion request. If you send content to trash, the deletion process will automatically begin in 30 days unless you chose to delete the content sooner. While the deletion process for such content is being undertaken, the content is no longer visible to other users. After the content is deleted, it may take us up to another 90 days to remove it from backups and disaster recovery systems.
Content will not be deleted within 90 days of the account deletion or content deletion process beginning in the following situations:- where your content has been used by others in accordance with this licence and they have not deleted it (in which case this licence will continue to apply until that content is deleted);
- where deletion within 90 days is not possible due to technical limitations of our systems, in which case, we will complete the deletion as soon as technically feasible; or
- where immediate deletion would restrict our ability to:
- investigate or identify illegal activity or violations of our terms and policies (for example, to identify or investigate misuse of our Products or systems);
- protect the safety, integrity, and security of our Products, systems, services, our employees, and users, and to defend ourselves;
- comply with legal obligations for the preservation of evidence, including data providing financial products and services to comply with any record keeping obligations required by law; or
- comply with a request of a judicial or administrative authority, law enforcement or a government agency;
- in which case, the content will be retained for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it has been retained (the exact duration will vary on a case-by-case basis).
In each of the above cases, this licence will continue until the content has been fully deleted. Permission to use your name, profile picture, and information about your actions with ads and sponsored or commercial content: You give us permission to use your name and profile picture and information about actions you have taken on Wezwot next to or in connection with ads, offers, and other sponsored or commercial content that we display across our Products, without any compensation to you. For example, we may show your friends that you are interested in an advertised event or have liked a Wotter Page created by a brand that has paid us to display its ads on Wezwot. Ads and content like this can be seen only by people who have your permission to see the actions you’ve taken on Wezwot. - Permission to update software you use or download: If you download or use our software, you give us permission to download and install updates to the software where available.
- Limits on using our intellectual property
If you use content covered by intellectual property rights that we have and make available in our Products (for example, images, designs, videos, or sounds we provide that you add to content you create or share on Wezwot), we retain all rights to that content (but not yours). You can only use our copyrights or trademarks (or any similar marks) as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines or with our prior written permission. You must obtain our written permission (or permission under an open source licence) to modify, translate, create derivative works of, decompile, or reverse engineer our products or their components, or otherwise attempt to extract source code from us, unless an exception or limitation applies under applicable law.
4. Additional provisions
- Updating our Terms
We work constantly to improve our services and develop new features to make our Products better for you and our community. As a result, we may need to update these Terms from time to time to accurately reflect our services and practices, to promote a safe and secure experience on our Products and services, and/or to comply with applicable law. We will only make any changes if the provisions are no longer appropriate or if they are incomplete, and only if the changes are reasonable and take due account of your interests or if the changes are required for safety and security purposes or to comply with applicable law.
We will notify you (for example, by email or through our Products) at least 30 days before we make changes to these Terms and give you an opportunity to review them before they go into effect, unless changes are required by law. Once any updated Terms are in effect, you will be bound by them if you continue to use our Products.
We hope that you will continue using our Products, but if you do not agree to our updated Terms and no longer want to be a part of the Wezwot community, you can delete your account at any time.
- Account suspension or termination
We want Wezwot to be a place where people feel welcome and safe to express themselves and share their thoughts and ideas.
If we determine, in our discretion, that you have clearly, seriously or repeatedly breached our Terms or Policies, including in particular the Community Standards, we may suspend or permanently disable your access to Wezwot Products, and we may permanently disable or delete your account. We may also disable or delete your account if you repeatedly infringe other people’s intellectual property rights or where we are required to do so for legal reasons.
We may disable or delete your account if after registration your account is not confirmed, your account is unused and remains inactive for an extended period of time, or if we detect someone may have used it without your permission and we are unable to confirm your ownership of the account.
Where we take such action we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request a review, unless doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons.
You can learn contact us if you think we have disabled your account by mistake.
If you delete or we disable or delete your account, these Terms shall terminate as an agreement between you and us, but the following provisions will remain in place: 3, 4.2-4.5.
- Limits on liability
We work hard to provide the best Products we can and to specify clear guidelines for everyone who uses them. Our Products, however, are provided “as is,” and to the extent permissible by law, we make no guarantees that they always will be safe, secure, or error-free, or that they will function without disruptions, delays, or imperfections. To the extent permitted by law, we also DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not control or direct what people and others do or say, and we are not responsible for their actions or conduct (whether online or offline) or any content they share (including offensive, inappropriate, obscene, unlawful, and other objectionable content).
We cannot predict when issues might arise with our Products. Accordingly, our liability shall be limited to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law under no circumstance will we be liable to you for any lost profits, revenues, information, or data, or consequential, special, indirect, exemplary, punitive, or incidental damages arising out of or related to these Terms or the Wezwot Products (however caused and on any theory of liability, including negligence), even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.
- Disputes
We try to provide clear rules so that we can limit or hopefully avoid disputes between you and us. If a dispute does arise, however, it’s useful to know up front where it can be resolved and what laws will apply.
If you are a consumer, the laws of the country in which you reside will apply to any claim, cause of action, or dispute you have against us that arises out of or relates to these Terms or the Wezwot Products, and you may resolve your claim in any competent court in that country that has jurisdiction over the claim. In all other cases, and for any claim, cause of action, or dispute that Wezwot files against you, you and Wezwot agree that any such claim, cause of action or dispute must be resolved exclusively in the High Court in Johannesburg. You also agree that you submit to the personal jurisdiction of either of these courts for the purpose of litigating any such claim, and that the laws of South Africa will govern these Terms and any claim, cause of action, or dispute without regard to conflict of law provisions. Without prejudice to the foregoing, you agree that, in its sole discretion, Wezwot may bring any claim, cause of action, or dispute we have against you in any competent court in the country in which you reside that has jurisdiction over the claim.
- Other
- These Terms make up the entire agreement between you and Wezwot (Pty) Ltd. regarding your use of our Products. They supersede any prior agreements.
- Some of the Products we offer are also governed by supplemental terms. If you use any of those Products, supplemental terms will be made available and will become part of our agreement with you. For instance, if you access or use our Products for commercial or business purposes, such as buying ads, selling products, developing apps, managing a group or Page for your business, or using our measurement services, you must agree to our Commercial Terms. To the extent any supplemental terms conflict with these Terms, the supplemental terms shall govern to the extent of the conflict.
- If any portion of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the unenforceable portion will be deemed amended to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, and if it can’t be made enforceable, then it will be severed and the remaining portion will remain in full force and effect. If we fail to enforce any of these Terms, it will not be considered a waiver. Any amendment to or waiver of these Terms must be made in writing and signed by us.
- You will not transfer any of your rights or obligations under these Terms to anyone else without our consent.
- These Terms do not confer any third-party beneficiary rights. All of our rights and obligations under these Terms are freely assignable by us in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, or by operation of law or otherwise.
- We may change the username for your account in certain circumstances (for example, if someone else claims the username and it appears unrelated to the name you use in everyday life).
- We always appreciate your feedback and other suggestions about our products and services. But we may use feedback and other suggestions without any restriction or obligation to compensate you, and we are under no obligation to keep them confidential.
- We reserve all rights not expressly granted to you.
Date of Last Revision: November 18, 2022