ShroomShroom — Terms of Service
ShroomShroom Terms of Service Effective: 04.09.2026 · Version 1.1
1. Who we are
ShroomShroom is operated by ARC Baltic OÜ, registry code 10741973, Tammeallika, Rätsepa küla, 86816 Tori vald, Pärnu maakond, Estonia ("ShroomShroom", "we"). Contact: shroom@shroomshroom.app. These Terms are a contract between you and us. The Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data; it is part of your relationship with us but consent to data processing is collected separately where the law requires it, not through these Terms.
2. The service
ShroomShroom is a nature-photography collection game: you photograph fungi, our service identifies the likely species using automated image recognition, and your finds become cards, hunts and leaderboards you can share with family and friends. The service today is a web application; the same account and these same Terms will apply to our mobile applications when they launch. Some features may be paid in the future; any paid feature will show its price and terms before you buy.
3. Your account
You must be at least 13 to create an account. If you are 13–17 you may use ShroomShroom only with the consent of a parent or guardian, who links their account to yours and can review your uploads. You are responsible for keeping your login secure and for what happens under your account. One account per person; no impersonation.
4. Your content and the licence you give us
4.1 Ownership. Photographs and text you upload ("Content") remain yours. We claim no ownership.
4.2 Licence to run the service. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, reproduce, adapt (e.g. crop, resize, render into cards and share images), and display your Content to you and to the people you share it with, and to sub-license it to our hosting and processing providers for those purposes.
4.3 Public by default. ShroomShroom is an open, social game: unless you choose otherwise, your profile, cards, hunts (including their maps and find locations) and scores are public — visible to other players and to visitors of public pages — and the licence in 4.2 extends to displaying that Content publicly in the app and in ShroomShroom marketing that shows the product as it looks in use, with your username. You can switch your profile, an individual hunt or an individual card to private at any time in Settings or on the item itself; from that point it is hidden from others, with future effect. Content already shared or reposted by others outside the app cannot be recalled by us.
4.4 Improving identification (training). You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, perpetual licence to use your mushroom photographs and the associated observation record (species suggestion, your confirmations and corrections, coarse location, date, habitat notes) to develop, train, test and improve species-identification and related nature-recognition models, and to include them in research or training datasets that we may license to third parties. Before any third-party dataset release, records are pseudonymised: your name, handle, contact details and precise coordinates are removed, and locations are truncated to 3 km resolution (protected-area records to the protected-area name only). This licence survives account deletion for material already incorporated into datasets or trained models, but we stop including your Content in new dataset releases after you delete it or your account. Both uses are on by default and each has its own switch in Settings → Privacy: "Model improvement" (our own training) and "Research datasets" (inclusion in datasets licensed to third parties). Turning either off stops future use; it does not untrain existing models or recall released datasets.
4.5 Future features. The licence in 4.4 covers using your observation records to build and improve recommendation and forecasting features (for example flush forecasts, species suggestions, habitat recommendations) inside ShroomShroom and successor features of the service. Materially new categories of use — anything a reasonable player would not expect from a mushroom app — require an update to these Terms under section 15, not silent expansion.
4.6 Your promises about Content. Upload only what you took yourself or have rights to. Do not upload images with identifiable people in them; if a person appears incidentally, we may blur or reject the image, and such images are excluded from 4.4 datasets. Do not upload Content that is unlawful, deceptive (e.g. staged or downloaded finds presented as your own), or that reveals someone else's private land or protected-species location.
4.7 Coordinates. Precise find coordinates are part of your public Content by default: they are shown on hunt maps that other players can see, until you make the profile, hunt or card private (4.3). They are never included in licensed datasets — dataset releases are pseudonymised and truncated to 3 km (4.4). We do not sell your identity.
5. Identification is a suggestion — never eat based on the app
Species identification is produced by automated image recognition and is probabilistic. It is wrong sometimes, including with high displayed confidence. Edibility information in the app is general to a species, never a statement about your find. Never eat, taste or feed to anyone any mushroom based on this app. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones everywhere fungi grow. If you choose to forage for the table, use qualified human expertise; the app is not it. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for illness, injury or death resulting from consuming anything, or from reliance on identification or edibility information (see section 13).
6. Nature and safety rules
Points are awarded for photographs, never for picking. You are responsible for complying with the law of the place you are in: protected-species rules, protected-area rules (everyman's right does not cover everything, and some areas restrict foraging), private land access, and any local restrictions. The app may show protected-area boundaries as a courtesy; absence of a warning is not permission. Be careful in the forest; you use the outdoors at your own risk.
7. Age and identity verification (VerifEye)
Where a feature requires proof of age or identity, verification is performed by VerifEye (Realeyes OÜ) as our verification provider, under its own terms and privacy notice shown to you at the moment of verification.
7.1 How it works. The camera captures a live image; the verification system returns a pass/fail (or age-band) result to us. We receive the result and a reference code — not the image.
7.2 Deletion by default. Verification images — successful or failed — are processed to produce the result and then deleted. We mirror VerifEye's published approach: analyze on the spot, return a result, discard the input. We do not retain verification images, and failed attempts are not kept for model training.
7.3 Fraud prevention. Where fraud is suspected (for example repeated spoofing attempts), verification metadata and, where strictly necessary and lawful, the image of the attempt may be retained for up to 30 days solely to investigate and prevent fraud, on the legal basis described in the Privacy Policy, after which it is deleted.
7.4 Optional research programme (separate in-app permission). These Terms grant no rights over verification images. If and when we want to use them for model improvement, the app will ask you separately, in context, with an explicit, specific, freely given consent, to contribute verification images (including unsuccessful attempts on their own account) to model-improvement research by us and/or VerifEye. This is never a condition of using ShroomShroom, is off by default, excludes minors, and can be withdrawn at any time with deletion of contributed images going forward.
8. Personal data
The Privacy Policy explains what personal data we process (account details, photo EXIF including location and time, device and usage data), why, on what legal basis, how long we keep it, and your rights under the GDPR, including access, deletion, portability and objection. Location from your photos is used to place your finds; other players see area names only. We do not sell personal data or use it for third-party advertising.
9. Leagues, leaderboards and other players
Leagues and friend connections show your username, scores, cards and hunt maps, including find locations, to their members and — because ShroomShroom is public by default (4.3) — to other players, until you make the profile, hunt or card private. Share images you generate may be reposted by recipients outside the app; share them at your own discretion. Junior accounts appear with their guardian's oversight (section 3).
10. Acceptable use
Do not: cheat (fabricated finds, others' photos, manipulated EXIF); harass others; scrape or bulk-export the service or its species data beyond your own records; probe or disrupt the service; reverse engineer except where the law permits; or use the service to locate and harvest protected species. We may remove Content and suspend or terminate accounts for breach, with notice and an explanation except where the law allows immediate action.
11. Our stuff
The ShroomShroom name, logo, wordmark, card designs, iconography, visual identity, text, software and databases are ours or our licensors', are protected by copyright, trade mark and database law, and may not be copied, imitated or used to identify another product or service without our written permission. © ARC Baltic OÜ. All rights reserved. We grant you a personal, non-transferable licence to use the app for its intended purpose. Species reference information is compiled from sources including GBIF and eElurikkus/PlutoF; base maps © Maa- ja Ruumiamet (CC BY 4.0). Attribution notices in the app must not be removed.
12. Third-party services
Identification runs on Kindwise mushroom.id; verification on VerifEye; hosting and authentication on our infrastructure providers. They process data as our processors or, where their own terms apply, as independently disclosed at the point of use. We are not responsible for third-party services we do not control (e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook, where you share images).
13. Disclaimers and liability
The service is provided "as is" and "as available"; we do not warrant uninterrupted service or accurate identification. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law (including our intentional acts or gross negligence, or your statutory consumer rights in your country of residence). Otherwise, our total liability for any claims in a year is limited to the greater of €10 and the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, and we are not liable for indirect losses. Section 5 (never eat based on the app) applies above everything.
14. Ending things, and how long we keep your collection
Your collection is built over many seasons, so we keep your account and Content until you delete them, even through long gaps — a returning player finds their cards where they left them. If your account is inactive for a long period we remind you it exists (email, roughly yearly after 2 years of inactivity) and delete it after 10 years without any interaction, with a final notice first. Shorter clocks apply to specific data (verification, logs, payments) as set out in the Privacy Policy's retention schedule.
You can stop using ShroomShroom and delete your account at any time in Settings; deletion removes your account and Content from the live service within 30 days, with backups purged on their cycle, and with the survival rule of 4.4 for already-released datasets and trained models. We may terminate under section 10 or by discontinuing the service with 60 days' notice, in which case we provide an export of your records and photos.
15. Changes
We may update these Terms. For material changes we give at least 30 days' notice in the app and by email, and material expansions of the data licence in 4.4/4.5 or of section 7 take effect only for Content uploaded, or verifications performed, after you accept the change. If you do not accept, you may delete your account; continued use after the notice period is acceptance.
16. Law and disputes
Estonian law governs, without depriving you of mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence. Disputes go to Estonian courts, or to your local courts where consumer law so provides. EU consumers may also use the Consumer Disputes Committee (Tarbijavaidluste komisjon) or the EU ODR platform. If a clause is held invalid, the rest stands.
17. Contact
ARC Baltic OÜ · Tammeallika, Rätsepa küla, 86816 Tori vald, Pärnu maakond, Estonia · shroom@shroomshroom.app · registry code 10741973. Data protection contact: shroom@shroomshroom.app.