The rules.

SidewalkSnitch is a tool for filing 311 / NYC agency complaints about potential city-code violations. It is operated by the SidewalkSnitch team. By using the service you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the service.

You must be at least 13 years old. To file a complaint you must verify a mobile phone number and provide a real name and contact address — city agencies require a contactable submitter. By verifying your phone number on SidewalkSnitch, you affirm you are at least 13 years old.

Use SidewalkSnitch to file complaints about violations you have personally observed in New York City. Examples: a car blocking a fire hydrant, trash put out before the legal set-out time, an unlicensed sidewalk café.

• File complaints about events you did not personally witness. The app enforces a 200 ft / 24 h geofence on photos; circumventing it is grounds for account termination.
• Use the app to harass, stalk, or retaliate against any individual. Repeated complaints against the same vehicle, business, or person from the same submitter will trigger manual review and may be suspended.
• Submit false or fabricated content. The complaint text you confirm is treated as your sworn statement to the city.
• Bulk-scrape or automate use of the service, including the AI analysis endpoint and any NYC Open Data passthrough we proxy.
• Use the plate-lookup feature for any purpose other than filing a single complaint about the specific vehicle in your photo. The data we surface from NYC's open dataset is shown to support that single filing.
• Submit photos containing material that violates someone else's rights — for example, images you don't have the right to upload, or images intended primarily to identify or shame a bystander.

Our AI drafts complaint text from your photo. The draft is editable. Before you submit, you must read the text, edit anything inaccurate, and explicitly attest that what it describes is what you personally observed. The submitted text is your statement, not ours. You are responsible for its accuracy.

When you photograph a parked vehicle, our AI may extract the visible license plate. We then query NYC's public Open Parking and Camera Violations dataset and display the vehicle's prior-violation summary to help you confirm you have the right vehicle. The history is not stored on your complaint and is not shown to any other user. The plate itself is stored on your complaint because the eventual 311 filing requires it.

We keep an audit log of plate lookups for our own compliance under federal law. See the Privacy Policy for details on retention.

You keep ownership of the photos and text you submit. By submitting, you grant SidewalkSnitch a limited license to store the content on our infrastructure, transmit it to the city agency you select, and display it to you in your own account. We will not display your name, phone, email, or address to other users. Your screenname is the only identifier shown publicly.

The service is provided “as is.” The AI's analysis is a drafting aid, not a legal determination. The AI sometimes misreads photos. You are responsible for confirming the accuracy of your complaint before submitting. SidewalkSnitch is not a law firm and provides no legal advice.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, SidewalkSnitch is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service. Our aggregate liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you have paid us in the past 12 months (which is, for most users, zero).

You can stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your account for any of the “What you can't do” behaviors above, or for any other material violation of these terms. We will preserve your data per our retention schedule (see the Privacy Policy) and respect any deletion requests you make.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute must be brought in a state or federal court located in New York County, New York.

We may update these terms. If we make a material change we'll notify account holders by email or in-app banner before the change takes effect.

jeffry.white@gmail.com