Terms of use

Who we are and how to contact us

BarkUp is a UK community service that helps dog owners find walking company nearby, arrange community walks and keep each other informed about hazards on local routes. These terms cover the BarkUp website at barkup.co, the waitlist, and the BarkUp app and its supporting services. We call all of that "BarkUp" or "the service".

• Service: BarkUp (barkup.co), operated by Arnold Kocsis, a sole trader established in the United Kingdom and trading as BarkUp
• Email: info@barkup.co

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean Arnold Kocsis trading as BarkUp. "You" and "your" mean the person using the service. Email is the fastest way to reach us and is the address to use for account requests, complaints, safety concerns and data-protection requests.

BarkUp is a free consumer service. It is not a business-to-business product, and you must not use it for commercial purposes without our written agreement.

These terms, and your agreement to them

By joining the waitlist, creating an account, or otherwise using BarkUp, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, please do not use the service.

Our privacy policy explains what we do with personal information, and our cookie notice explains the technologies the website uses. Both form part of your agreement with us.

We may change these terms as the service changes or the law requires. When a change is significant we will update the date at the top of this page and take reasonable steps to tell registered users before it takes effect, for example by email or a notice in the app. If you do not accept a change, you can stop using BarkUp and ask us to close your account. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

Who can use BarkUp

BarkUp is for adults. You may use it only if you are 18 or over and legally able to enter into a contract. We are a service for people who arrange to meet strangers in person, so this is a firm rule rather than a formality.

• You must confirm that you are 18 or over when you create an account. We record that confirmation, together with the wording you agreed to and the time you agreed to it.
• You must give accurate account information and keep it up to date.
• You must not create an account for anyone else, share your account, or let anyone else use it.
• You must not create a new account to get around a suspension or a block.
• BarkUp is designed for use in the United Kingdom. We do not offer it elsewhere and it may not be lawful or workable outside the UK.

If we have reasonable grounds to believe an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete the associated content. If you believe a child is using BarkUp, tell us at info@barkup.co and we will act on it as a priority.

We may introduce stronger age checks, and we may require you to complete one before you can keep using features that lead to meeting people in person.

The waitlist

Before the app is generally available you can ask us to keep you informed by joining the waitlist. We ask for your email address, and optionally the outward part of your postcode, such as OX16, so we know which areas people are waiting in.

You must use an email address you control. We send a confirmation link and only add you to the list once you use it, so nobody can sign someone else up. Every waitlist email contains a link that removes you from the list, and you can also ask us to remove you by email.

Joining the waitlist does not create an account, does not guarantee that you will be offered access, and is not a promise that BarkUp will launch by a particular date or in a particular area.

Your account and keeping it secure

You can sign in with an email address and password, or with a Google account. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in details secure and for what happens under your account.

Tell us promptly at info@barkup.co if you think someone else has access to your account. We will never ask you for your password.

You must verify your email address before you can use the app. Some features stay unavailable until you have added a dog, because a walking community only works if the people in it are actually walking a dog.

Dogs, profiles and the content you add

On BarkUp your dog is the visible identity and you stay in the background. Other members see your dog and, once you have connected, your first name. They do not see your surname, your email address, your address or your precise location.

You are responsible for what you publish. When you add a dog, a walk, a photo or a hazard, you confirm that it is honest and that you have the right to publish it.

• Describe your dog accurately, including size, temperament and any reactivity. Other owners rely on this to decide whether a walk is a good idea, and a misleading profile can get a dog or a person hurt.
• Only upload photos you took or are allowed to use. Photos are for dogs and walks.
• Do not upload photos of other people without their permission, and never upload photos of children.
• Do not put contact details, addresses, surnames or anything you would not want a stranger to have into a dog name, a walk description or any other free-text field.
• Do not use BarkUp to sell, breed, rehome or advertise dogs, or to advertise a business, unless we have agreed it in writing.

The permission you give us

You keep ownership of everything you add. You give us permission to host, store, re-encode, display and share that content with other members as the service requires, and to keep copies where we need to for safety, moderation, legal or backup reasons. That permission is limited to running and protecting BarkUp; we do not sell your content, license it to advertisers or use it in marketing without asking you first.

We may remove or hide anything that breaks these terms, and we may keep a copy of removed content where we need it as evidence for a report, a complaint or a legal obligation.

Acceptable use

BarkUp exists so that strangers can meet safely. Behaviour that undermines that is the thing we act on fastest. You must not use BarkUp to:

• break the law, or encourage or help anyone else to;
• harass, stalk, bully, threaten, intimidate or abuse anyone, or track or monitor a person against their wishes;
• post or send anything hateful, discriminatory, defamatory, obscene or sexual;
• harm an animal, or arrange, promote or glorify cruelty, neglect, fighting or unlawful breeding;
• impersonate another person, misrepresent who you are, or pretend a dog is yours when it is not;
• defraud anyone, ask other members for money, or promote schemes, products or services;
• reveal another member's identity, home, workplace or location, or share private information or messages about them;
• report a person, a home or a vehicle as a "hazard", or use hazard reports to point at anyone;
• scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-collect data from BarkUp, whether by hand or with automated tools;
• use bots or scripts against the service, get around rate limits, capacity limits or blocks, or automate account creation;
• probe, scan or test the security of the service, or try to access data, accounts or areas you are not entitled to; or
• copy, modify, decompile or reverse engineer the service, except to the extent the law says you may.

The prohibition on scraping and automated data collection is an express reservation of rights, including for the purposes of any text and data mining exception. If you want to do research with BarkUp data, ask us first.

Messages

Messaging on BarkUp is deliberately narrow. You can only message someone you have connected with, or someone approved for the same walk as you, and blocking ends that immediately in both directions. There is no messaging between strangers and no way to turn it on.

Messages are currently sent from a fixed list of phrases for arranging a walk, such as "Up for a walk?", "Yes, that works for me." or "Running a few minutes late." Your device sends the choice you tapped, not text you typed, and the message is written by our system. It means nobody can be sent an abusive, sexual or scam message through BarkUp, and it means the content of your conversations is not something we hold as free text. Messages carry no attachments, photos, voice notes or links.

If we open free-text messaging later, we will say so clearly in the app and update these terms first.

Ordinary messages are deleted automatically 90 days after they are sent. Messages that have been reported are kept for as long as we need them to deal with the report, and stay available to us even if the sender deletes them or leaves.

Community walks and meeting in person

Anyone with a dog can organise a walk. Other members ask to join and the organiser decides. Asking is not the same as being approved, and until you are approved you cannot see the exact meeting point or message the organiser.

If you organise a walk, you are responsible for the information you publish about it, for approving people sensibly, and for telling participants promptly if it changes or is cancelled. If you join a walk, turn up or cancel in good time, and follow the organiser's reasonable instructions on the day.

The exact meeting point, and the organiser's first name, are shown only to the organiser and to approved participants. Once you have that information you must keep it to that walk: do not publish it, pass it on, or use it to find someone later.

BarkUp does not organise, supervise, insure or attend walks. Walks are arranged between members, and the arrangement is between you.

Location, and what we deliberately do not do with it

BarkUp never stores a precise home location. Your walking area is a rough grid cell of roughly a kilometre across, worked out on your own device, and other members only ever see a distance band such as "within 2 km" rather than a distance, a direction or a point on a map. Our privacy policy explains the model in full.

Live location during a walk is separate and always opt-in. You have to press "Share my live location" and allow your browser to share it. It shows only to people on that walk, it is a single current point rather than a trail, it disappears about two minutes after your last update, and the session ends automatically after eight hours at the latest. You can stop at any time, and blocking someone hides you from them immediately.

Hazard reports are the one location on BarkUp that is precise, because a hazard is only useful where it is. Report the hazard, not the person: hazard points must never be used to mark out an individual, a home or a vehicle. Hazards expire on their own, and other members are not shown who reported them.

You must not use anything you learn on BarkUp - an area, a walk, a live location or a meeting point - to follow, find, monitor or turn up on anyone.

Your safety when you meet someone

BarkUp reduces risk by design, but meeting a stranger carries risk that no product can remove. We do not vet, interview, background-check or screen members, and we cannot confirm that anyone is who they say they are.

Some members complete an optional identity check through Stripe. A verified badge means that check completed. It is not a background check, a criminal-records check, a proof of age, a safety endorsement or a recommendation from us, and you should not treat it as one.

We suggest you meet for the first time in a public place in daylight, tell someone you trust where you are going and when you expect to be back, take a charged phone, bring someone with you if you would rather, and leave whenever you want to and without explaining yourself. Trust your instincts over politeness.

BarkUp is not an emergency service, a vet, a dog trainer or a behaviourist, and nothing in it is professional advice. If someone is in danger, or an animal is being harmed, contact the emergency services on 999 rather than us. Please also report it to us afterwards so we can act on the account.

Your dog, and the law

You are responsible for your dog at all times, including on a walk you found through BarkUp, and for any injury or damage your dog causes. Other members are responsible for theirs.

• Keep your dog under proper control in public, and follow local rules on leads, exclusion areas and access to land.
• Meet the legal basics: microchipping and up-to-date contact details, a collar and tag in public, and current vaccinations and worming.
• Do not bring a dog to a walk if it is unwell, in season without telling the organiser, or has bitten or shown aggression that other people should know about.
• Do not bring a dog that is banned, or that is subject to a court order or exemption scheme requirement, to any BarkUp walk.
• Clean up after your dog.

We recommend you hold third-party liability insurance, for example through pet insurance or a household policy. BarkUp does not insure you, your dog or any walk.

Reporting, moderation and enforcement

Every place another member appears - a dog profile, a photo, a walk, a message, a hazard or an account - carries a way to report it and a way to block. Blocking takes effect immediately, is mutual, removes any connection between you, and does not wait for us to review anything. You do not have to interact with the person you are reporting, and we do not tell them who reported them.

Reports go to a private queue that only we can read. We look at what was reported and the account behind it, and we can take graduated action: removing a photo, hiding a dog, hiding a whole household from the community, hiding a walk, or suspending or removing an account. We record what we decided and why.

We do not promise to review everything, or to reach the outcome you want. We do prioritise anything involving a threat to a person or an animal, and anything suggesting a child is using the service.

If you think we got a decision about you wrong, email info@barkup.co with the details and we will look at it again.

Reported content, including messages, is kept as a record of the report even after the person who wrote it deletes it or leaves. We may share it with the police or another authority where the law allows or requires it.

Donations

You can support BarkUp with a voluntary donation, handled by Stripe. We never see or hold your card details.

A donation is a gift, not a purchase. It buys no membership, feature, priority, discount or other benefit, and it does not change how your reports or your account are handled.

Because a donation is not a purchase of goods or services, it is not refundable as of right. If you donated by mistake, donated an amount you did not intend, or believe a payment was not authorised by you, email us within a reasonable time and we will look into it and refund it where that is fair. This does not affect your rights against your bank or card provider.

Availability and changes to the service

BarkUp is provided free and without a guaranteed level of service. We may change, add, limit, suspend or withdraw features, and we may take the service down for maintenance, security or legal reasons.

Discovery deliberately shows nothing at all until enough households are active in an area, because a result in an empty area identifies the people in it. An empty screen in a quiet area is the service working correctly.

Some features are described as planned or coming soon. Those are intentions, not commitments, and we may change or drop them.

If we withdraw the service entirely, we will give registered users reasonable notice by email where we can, so you can save anything you want to keep.

Our intellectual property

The BarkUp name, logo, brand, site and app design, software, text, illustrations and other material we produce belong to us or our licensors, and are protected by intellectual property law. Using BarkUp does not transfer any of it to you.

You may view and print pages for your own personal use. You may not copy, republish, adapt, sell or commercially exploit our material without our written permission, and you may not use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you.

If you send us feedback, suggestions or ideas about BarkUp, we may use them freely and without owing you anything. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential.

Our responsibility to you

We provide BarkUp with reasonable care and skill. We do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure against every attack, that information other members publish is accurate, or that anyone you meet will be who or what they claim.

We never exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not allow us to exclude or limit. Your statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected.

Otherwise, we are responsible only for loss that is a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, and because BarkUp is a consumer service we are not responsible for business losses such as lost profits, lost business or lost opportunity.

BarkUp is a place where people arrange to meet. Except where we are at fault, we are not responsible for what members do - before, during or after a walk, on BarkUp or elsewhere - for what their dogs do, for what they publish about themselves, or for anything that happens at a meeting we did not organise and did not attend.

We are not responsible for third-party websites, apps, maps or services that BarkUp links to or relies on, or for anything that happens because your device, network or browser fails.

If you break these terms and that causes us loss - for example a claim from someone else because of what you published or did - we may ask you to cover it, to the extent it is fair to do so and reflects your responsibility for what happened.

Ending your use of BarkUp

You can stop using BarkUp at any time. To have your account closed and your personal information deleted, email info@barkup.co from the address on the account and we will handle it as described in our privacy policy. Some records, such as reports and evidence, are kept afterwards where we have a legal reason to keep them.

We may suspend or end your access, with notice where it is reasonable to give it and immediately where it is not, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if we reasonably believe you are putting a person or an animal at risk, if we reasonably believe you are under 18, or if the law requires it.

If your access ends, you must stop using the service, and any content that was visible to other members is removed or hidden. The sections on content permissions, acceptable use, our intellectual property, our responsibility to you, complaints and the general terms below survive.

Complaints, disputes and governing law

If something has gone wrong, email info@barkup.co with what happened and what you would like us to do. We aim to acknowledge complaints within 5 working days and to resolve them within 30 days, and we will tell you if something will take longer.

These terms, and any dispute arising from them or from your use of BarkUp, are governed by the law of England and Wales. Court proceedings can be brought in the courts of England and Wales; if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts.

Complaints about how we handle personal information can also be taken to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, though we would like the chance to put it right first.

General terms

These terms, together with our privacy policy and cookie notice, are the whole agreement between us about BarkUp, and replace anything said or written before.

If a court decides part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce something straight away, that does not mean we have given up the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to another organisation, for example if BarkUp is taken over, and we will tell you if that happens; your rights under these terms will not be reduced by it.

Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

Neither of us is responsible for a failure or delay caused by something genuinely beyond our reasonable control, such as a network, hosting or power failure, extreme weather, or an act of a public authority.