Terms

Terms of Service

Last updated 28 September 2026. Applies to Spotto for Android (nz.co.spottoapp).

1. Agreeing to these terms

By installing or using Spotto you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the app. If you make an account, you also agree to the Privacy Policy.

2. Who may use Spotto

Anyone may install and use Spotto on their own device. To create an account you must be at least 13, and if you are under 16 you should have a parent's or guardian's agreement. One person, one account.

3. Your account

You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your sign-in secure. Choose a handle that is not offensive and does not impersonate someone else. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates a real person, a business or a marque.

4. Safety comes before spotting

Do not use Spotto while driving. Log the car afterwards. Do not trespass, do not enter private property, and do not follow, obstruct or confront anybody to get a photograph. Nothing in this app is worth a crash, a fine or a confrontation.

5. What you may not post

Spotto has a feed, comments, direct messages and profiles, so what you post can reach other people — and a spot shared with everyone reaches every Spotto account. The same rules apply whoever you share with. You must not post:

• Anything that turns a car into a person. Number plates appear in photographs and that is fine — see below. What is not fine is posting a plate together with a name, an address, a workplace, a claim about who owns the car, or where it is usually parked.
• Recognisable photographs of people, or anyone's home, driveway or address.
• Anything that follows a particular car or person. Spotto is for spotting, not for tracking. Do not use it to build a record of one vehicle's movements or to keep tabs on somebody.
• Anything harassing, threatening, abusive, hateful, or targeting a person or group.
• Sexual content, or any content involving a minor in a sexual way.
• Content that is unlawful in New Zealand, encourages a crime, or encourages dangerous or illegal driving.
• Spam, advertising, scams, or links you would not want a stranger to click.
• Someone else's photographs or writing presented as your own.
• Anything designed to make the leaderboard say something untrue.

Zero tolerance for abusive content and for people who behave abusively. Accounts that post it are removed.

About number plates

A photograph of a car has a number plate in it. That is unavoidable in an app for photographing cars, and you do not need to blur or crop anything. Plates are visible to anyone standing on the street, Spotto never records one as data, and a plate on its own tells a stranger very little.

What makes it safe is that Spotto does not publish where or when. A shared spot carries a region and a calendar date — never coordinates, never a place name, never a time of day. Keeping the location coarse is the reason we can be relaxed about the plate, so the two rules above exist to stop anyone putting the pieces back together by hand.

If someone asks for a photograph of their vehicle to be taken down, we take it down. No account needed, no reason required.

6. Reporting, blocking and moderation

Every spot, comment, message and profile can be reported from inside the app, and you can block any account. Reports reach a human by email. We aim to act within 24 hours and may remove content or accounts without warning where the content is serious.

We may suspend an account instead of removing it. A suspended account can read but cannot post, like, comment or message, and its posts and comments are hidden from other people while the suspension stands. New accounts can share with friends straight away and with everyone after three days, and sharing with everyone is rate-limited; both are spam measures, not judgements.

Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 we pass a complaint to the author within 48 hours and, if there is no response, remove the content within a further 48 hours.

Content that draws reports from several different people is hidden automatically while it is reviewed. That is a safety measure, not a finding against you, and it is reversed if the content is fine.

If you think we got a decision wrong, whether something was hidden or removed or your account was suspended, you can ask a person to look at it again: see spotto.kiwi/review.

7. Your content stays yours

You keep ownership of your notes, photographs and comments. By publishing something, you give us permission to store it and to show it to the people you published it to — your friends, or every Spotto account if you chose to share with everyone — nothing more. That permission ends when you delete the content, subject to the limits in section 7 of the Privacy Policy. We will never use your photographs to promote the app without asking you first.

8. Rarity figures are estimates, not valuations

Rarity grades, registered counts and regional figures are calculated from the New Zealand Motor Vehicle Register, which is public data published by Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (CC BY 4.0). Spotto is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Waka Kotahi, any vehicle manufacturer, or any marque named in the catalogue. Manufacturer names and logos are trademarks of their owners and appear in the app only to identify each make.

The register is a snapshot and it contains errors and inconsistencies, some of which we correct and some of which we cannot. Counts change every month. Breakdowns by generation and trim rely on published year ranges and on how the register spells a model, and both are imperfect.

None of it is a valuation and none of it is advice. Do not buy, sell or price a vehicle on the strength of a number in this app.

8a. Scraping and bulk extraction

The Spotto catalogue is our own work. That covers the vehicle entries, how register records are matched to makes, models, generations and trims, the corrections, the rarity grades, and the way all of it is arranged. You are welcome to use it the way the app is meant to be used: look vehicles up, log what you see, and share your own spots and screenshots.

Unless we have agreed to it in writing, you must not:

• Scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-download the catalogue, rarity grades, counts, or other people's posts and profiles, whether through the app, our servers, or any automated means.
• Send requests to Spotto's servers from anything other than the Spotto app, or in a volume no person using the app would.
• Copy the catalogue data out of the app in order to reproduce it somewhere else.
• Use the catalogue or rarity grades to build, train or feed another product, database, dataset, AI model or service, commercial or not.
• Get around a rate limit, access control or other measure that protects them.

If you do, we may block your access or remove your account, and we may take other steps open to us under New Zealand law.

What this does not restrict. The Motor Vehicle Register is open data published by Waka Kotahi, and nothing in these terms limits what you may do with the register you obtain from Waka Kotahi under its own licence. Nor does it limit anything the law allows you to do regardless of these terms. You may always export and keep your own collection, quote a few figures with credit to Spotto, and write about or review the app. If you want to use the data at scale for journalism, research or business, ask us at the address in section 14.

9. Availability

Spotto is offered as it is. The app works offline and your collection lives on your phone, so it keeps working if our servers do not; the feed, messages and leaderboard need a connection and can be unavailable. We may change or withdraw the online features. If we ever shut the service down we will give notice in the app and leave you a way to export your collection.

10. Ending your use of Spotto

You can delete your account at any time from the Account screen, or simply uninstall the app. We may suspend or remove an account that breaks these terms, that is used to harass someone, or that is used to falsify the leaderboard. If we do, we will tell you why unless telling you would put someone at risk.

11. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits your rights under the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986 where those Acts apply to you as a consumer, and we do not attempt to contract out of them.

Subject to that, Spotto is provided without warranties, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of data you did not back up, or for anything arising from your use of the app in a vehicle or on the road.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page always shows when it last changed.

13. Law

These terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction.

14. Contact

privacy@spotto.kiwi