Terms of service

Bivaq describes shelters, water sources, trails and bivouac rules from open data and community reports. That data can be inaccurate, incomplete or outdated. Concretely:

• A shelter may be gone, locked, full, occupied, damaged or unsafe when you arrive. A “last confirmed” report describes the past, not tonight.
• Water potability is not guaranteed. Where potability is unknown, we say so — treat water before drinking.
• Elevations are largely derived from satellite terrain data and are display-grade, not survey-grade.
• Bivouac and camping rules change and vary locally. What we show is not legal advice — verify on the ground.
• Coordinates come mostly from OpenStreetMap and community input and may be imprecise.

You are responsible for your own safety: your route, your equipment, your weather window, and your decisions. Bivaq is a planning aid. It is not a substitute for your own judgement, official information, maps, or rescue services. Carry what you need to spend a night out safely even if a shelter fails you.

Bivaq is provided by the operator identified in the imprint. For anything about these terms, contact info@bivaq.sk.

Bivaq is a map and directory of mountain shelters and related information. Every feature is free to everyone — browsing, searching, filtering, the trip planner, water and legality information, and contributing. There is no paid tier, no subscription and no checkout. Nothing is sold and nothing is charged.

We work to keep Bivaq available and correct, but we don't promise uninterrupted service, and we may change or discontinue features.

Bivaq costs money to run — hosting, the database, map imagery. If you want to help cover that, you can, and some people do. What is true of it:

• It is voluntary and it buys nothing. Every feature is free to everyone, whether they support Bivaq or not. Supporting unlocks no content, no data and no function.
• It is not a subscription. There is nothing to cancel and nothing that renews.
• It is not a purchase of goods or services, and Bivaq is not a registered charity — so nothing here is a receipt or a claim about tax treatment.
• Supporters may get a badge on their profile. The badge is public: anyone looking at that profile can see it. It is optional and can be removed at any time by writing to info@bivaq.sk.

If you have supported Bivaq and want to raise something about it — including asking for it back — write to the same address. We will deal with it individually, in good faith.

You don't need an account to browse. You need one to contribute, save places, or log nights. Bivaq is not directed at anyone under 16 — the same line our privacy policy draws. Keep your login to yourself; what happens under your account is your responsibility until you tell us it was compromised.

Contributions are shelters you add, status and water reports, reviews, and photos. The rules:

• You keep ownership. Your photos and words remain yours.
• You licence them to us. By contributing, you grant Bivaq a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, display, adapt (for example: resize, re-encode, crop to a thumbnail) and distribute your contribution within the service, for as long as it stays on the map.
• You confirm you have the right to post it.A photo must be yours or one you hold the rights to. Don't upload other people's work.
• Deleting your account doesn't unpublish the map. When you delete your account, your personal data is deleted, but your contributions stay — anonymised, shown as “Bivaq user” — because a shelter someone verified keeps its value to the next person. This is described in the privacy policy and happens exactly that way.

Don't:

• post false or misleading information — a wrong “water here” or an invented shelter can put someone in danger;
• upload photos or content you don't have rights to;
• post other people's personal data, or use Bivaq to track or expose anyone;
• scrape or bulk-extract the service, or probe or overload it (open data is available at its sources — see sources);
• use the service to break any applicable law.

Contributions can be reviewed, edited for accuracy, held back from publication, or removed. Signed-in users can report any shelter, report or photo with the “report” control next to it; reports go to the operator for review. We may remove content that breaks these terms and may close accounts that repeatedly do. Where a contribution came from an open data source, corrections are best made at the source — links are on each shelter page.

Anyone — with or without an account — can report content they believe is illegal or infringes their copyright. Email info@bivaq.sk with: a link to the content, what is wrong with it, and — for copyright — proof you hold the rights and your contact details. Reports are reviewed; content found to be illegal or infringing is removed. For photos that originate from Wikimedia Commons, the takedown also belongs at Commons — removing a file there removes it here.

The data-quality facts above are the heart of it: we provide Bivaq with care, but we can't and don't guarantee that any piece of data is correct, and you use it at your own judgement. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law — including EU consumer protections and liability for intent or gross negligence.

You can delete your account yourself, any time, from your profile — the effects are described above and in the privacy policy. We may suspend or close accounts that seriously or repeatedly violate these terms.

These terms are governed by the law of the Slovak Republic. Mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in remain unaffected.

If these terms change, we'll update this page and the “last updated” date above. For significant changes affecting account holders, we'll make the change visible in the product.