Terms of Service

1. Eligibility

The Service is not directed to children under 16, and you must be at least 16 years old to use it. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. By using the Service you represent that you meet these requirements.

2. Your account

• You are responsible for the information you provide and for keeping it accurate.
• You are responsible for safeguarding your login credentials and for all activity under your account. Notify us promptly at support@plateranks.com if you believe your account has been compromised.
• You may register with an email and password, or by signing in with Google or Apple where we offer it. You may not share your account or let others use it, and you may not create an account for anyone else without permission.

3. Your content and the license you grant us

• You own what you create. You keep ownership of the reviews, ratings, written text, photos, posts, comments, profile picture, menu photos, and other content you submit, and any rights you have in menu details you add (together, “Your Content”).
• License to operate the Service. You grant PlateRanks a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for formatting and display), publish, and distribute Your Content within and for the purpose of operating and promoting the Service. This includes: showing your reviews, ratings, and review photos on public PlateRanks pages, where anyone can see them, including people who are not signed in and search engines; showing your content with your username and profile picture; sharing your reviews, with your name, with the restaurant you reviewed; showing your posts, comments, and profile to other PlateRanks users; using your ratings in community and aggregate scores, rankings, and recommendations; quoting short parts of your reviews in summaries of what diners say; using one of your photos as a dish’s main picture; and displaying content on shareable dashboards you generate. We may use service providers, including AI services, to process Your Content for these purposes (see Section 6).
• Your representations. You represent that you own or have the necessary rights to Your Content, that it does not infringe anyone’s rights, and that your reviews reflect your genuine, first-hand experience.
• Aggregated and anonymized data. As described in the Privacy Policy, anonymized and aggregated information derived from use of the Service is not tied to you as an individual and may be retained and used without the limits that apply to personal information.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Post content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, obscene, or that infringes others’ intellectual property or privacy rights.
• Submit fake, paid, incentivized, or deceptive reviews, or manipulate ratings, rankings, or community scores.
• Add false or misleading plates, menu details, or photos to a restaurant’s page.
• Review a restaurant you own, manage, or work for, or review a competitor to hurt it.
• Impersonate any person or misrepresent your affiliation with a restaurant or business.
• Access the Service through automated means (scraping, bots) except as expressly permitted, or collect other users’ data without consent.
• Interfere with, disrupt, probe, or attempt to circumvent the security or rate limits of the Service, or reverse engineer it except to the extent that restriction is prohibited by law.
• Use the Service to violate any applicable law or the rights of others.

We may remove content, and suspend or terminate accounts, that we reasonably believe violate these Terms or harm the Service or other users.

5. Reviews, ratings, and community content

Reviews and ratings you submit contribute to community scores and dish and restaurant insights shown to other users. We decide how ratings are combined into scores, and some ratings may count more or less than others. You can edit or delete a review for 30 days after you post it. Deleting your account removes all of your reviews. A review you edit shows the date you last edited it. You can’t edit or delete a review we took down. Deleting your account still removes it. After that, a review stays up until you delete your account or we remove it. You can also share posts and photos, comment, and follow other diners. We may apply reasonable moderation, including editing for formatting, removing content that violates these Terms, or limiting content that appears fraudulent, but we are not obligated to monitor content and are not responsible for content submitted by users.

We do not tolerate objectionable content or abusive users. We automatically block some offensive words in usernames, posts, comments, and messages. You can report a review, post, or comment that you think breaks these Terms. When several people report the same item, we may hide it while we look at it. We keep a copy of what was reported, as it read then, so editing or deleting it later doesn’t change what we look at. In the PlateRanks apps, you can also block another diner.

You may earn badges and titles and appear on leaderboards based on your activity. They are for fun, have no cash value, and cannot be sold or transferred. We may change how they are earned or shown, and we may remove ones earned in ways that break these Terms.

6. Restaurant, menu, and third-party information

Restaurant, location, and menu information comes in part from third-party sources (including Google Places and Geoapify), from restaurant websites, from restaurants that manage their pages, and from user submissions, and may be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate. We use AI to help with some information. For example, AI reads menus from photos, PDFs, and restaurant websites, turns review text into short tags about a dish, and helps pick a dish’s main photo from diners’ photos. When turned on, AI may also read reviews of a claimed restaurant to tell the restaurant what diners say needs work, including possible health or safety problems. AI can make mistakes. All such information is provided for convenience and on an “as is” basis; you should verify details (such as hours, location, allergens, and pricing) directly with the restaurant. PlateRanks is not responsible for third-party content or for the acts or omissions of any restaurant.

Restaurants on PlateRanks. A restaurant can claim its PlateRanks page once it shows us that it runs the restaurant. A claimed restaurant can manage its menu and photos, post updates, and post one public reply to each review. It can see the reviews written about it along with the reviewer’s name, which is your full name if you added one. If you have reviewed it, it may also see how often and how recently you have visited, based on the days you reviewed it, and your name when you use one of its offer codes. It may get your reviews and your name in emails from us and in reports it downloads. A restaurant cannot edit or remove your review. It can ask us to look at a review, and we decide what happens to it.

Unless you turn them off, a restaurant may contact you through PlateRanks in two ways: one private message about a recent low rating you gave it, to try to make things right, and offers or invitations from a restaurant you have visited recently or often, based on the days you reviewed it. A restaurant may not use these messages to ask you to change or remove a review, and we limit how often they can be sent. You can reply to, decline, or report a private message. Offers come from the restaurant, which sets their terms and is responsible for honoring them. These messages appear in your PlateRanks notifications and, when push notifications are turned on, may also appear on your phone if you allow it. You can turn off restaurant messages and offers separately, at any time, in your settings.

If you use PlateRanks to manage a restaurant, our Merchant Terms also apply to that use.

7. Intellectual property

The Service itself, including its software, design, trademarks, logos, and the aggregated ratings, rankings, and insights we generate, is owned by PlateRanks or its licensors and is protected by intellectual-property laws. Except for Your Content and the rights expressly granted here, these Terms do not transfer any rights to you.

8. Privacy

Your use of the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy, which explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices and consents available to you (including what restaurants can see and the opt-in consent for anonymized, aggregate insights shared with restaurants). Please read it.

9. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that any restaurant or menu information is accurate.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, PlateRanks will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, or goodwill, arising out of or related to your use of (or inability to use) the Service. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service will not exceed one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100). Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you.

11. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold PlateRanks harmless from claims, damages, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of Your Content, your use of the Service, or your violation of these Terms or of any law or third-party right.

12. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. You can delete your account yourself in your account settings in the app or on the website, or by emailing support@plateranks.com. Deleting your account is permanent. It removes your profile, your reviews and ratings, your posts and comments, and the photos you added to them. Some things stay, such as plates you added to a restaurant’s menu, anonymous totals, and copies in our encrypted backups and in our private test copy of the database, until those copies are replaced. We cannot delete copies a restaurant already has, such as reviews it got by email or in a report it downloaded. Our account deletion page (plateranks.com/delete-account) lists exactly what we delete and what we keep. We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms or to protect the Service or its users. When Your Content is deleted, the license you gave us in Section 3 ends, except for content that stays as described above. Disclaimers, limitations of liability, indemnification, and other provisions that by their nature should survive termination will survive.

13. Changes to the Service and these Terms

We may modify or discontinue features of the Service, and we may update these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the version identifier and effective date above. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

14. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If you have a concern about the Service, please contact us first at support@plateranks.com so we can try to resolve it informally. If we cannot resolve it within 30 days, either of us may take it further. You and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be decided only by the state or federal courts located in Florida, and you and we consent to the jurisdiction of those courts. Either of us may instead bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies. Nothing in this section limits any rights you have under laws that cannot be waived by contract.

15. Contact us

Questions about these Terms can go to:

PlateRanks LLC
16350 Bruce B Downs Blvd, PO Box 46694
Tampa, FL 33646
support@plateranks.com

Notices. Send legal notices to us by email to support@plateranks.com and by mail to the address above. We may send notices to you at the email address on your account or show them in the Service.