SidewalkSnitch community guidelines

Comments are public and attached to civic reports about real places. Do not post: personal phone numbers, home addresses, license plates, or other private identifying information about individuals; threats or harassment; accusations you cannot support from what you personally observed; or spam/links. Say what you saw, not what you conclude — “I watched this happen” is different from “this business always does this,” and only the first is something you can be confident is true.

Do not post license plates, and do not post anything that identifies a specific person. The app blurs faces and plates in photos before they are published. Typing a plate, a name, an apartment number or a description of what someone looks like into a comment defeats that, and it is the fastest way to have a comment removed and an account suspended.

We use automated screening and community flags to catch content that violates these rules before or after it's posted. Comments that violate these rules may be held or removed. Repeated abuse may result in loss of commenting privileges.

This is not a forum for reviews of businesses — it's for factual discussion of the reported civic issue. You are personally responsible for what you post. SidewalkSnitch's moderation does not mean we agree with or vouch for any comment, and does not make us legally responsible for it — the commenter is.

What happens when a comment is flagged. A flagged comment is held and reviewed. If it breaks these Guidelines we remove it. If it does not, it goes back up. We do not tell the person who flagged it what we decided about another user's account, and we do not tell the author who flagged them. Repeatedly flagging comments that do not break the Guidelines is itself a misuse of the flag.

Reporting copyright. If you own the copyright in a photo posted here and it went up without your permission, email hello@sidewalksnitch.com with a link to the post. The notice has to contain six specific things and there is a counter-notice path if we get it wrong — both are set out under “Copyright and takedown” in the Terms of Use. Accounts that accumulate three takedowns are terminated.

How fast we act. A post that names a specific business is reviewed and acted on within 24 hours. Every other takedown, suppression and deletion request has a published deadline too — see the takedown policy.

If a comment is about you or your business and you believe it's false: email hello@sidewalksnitch.com with a link to the comment. We will review promptly; this is separate from and faster than the in-app flag.

If you delete your account, comments of yours that were published stay up with your screenname replaced by “[deleted]”, and your votes, flags and contributed photos are deleted. This is so a conversation other people took part in does not collapse when one person leaves. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.