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Contribution terms

These cover what you can add to playdar: what equipment is at a playground, a photo of one, and — if you have an account — a review. They are short on purpose, and they are written to be read rather than to be survived.

The short version

• You keep ownership of your photo and your review. You give us permission to show them in playdar, nothing more.
• Only photograph the place. Not people, and above all not children.
• Write about the place, not about anyone by name.
• Anyone can have a photo taken down, including you, at any time, without giving a reason. You can edit or delete your own review the same way, at any time.
• We can refuse or remove anything, and we do not have to explain why.

What you are confirming when you send something

By adding equipment information or a photo, you are telling us that:

• It is yours to give. You took the photo, or you otherwise hold the rights to it. Please do not send a photo you found online, or one someone else took.
• There are no identifiable people in it. In particular no children, whether or not they are yours. This is the one rule we will not bend — a photo containing a child is removed regardless of who took it, who is in it, and who consented.
• It is a fair description of the place. Not a joke, not an advert, not a picture of somewhere else.
• You are old enough to agree to this. If you are under 18, please ask a parent or guardian first.

What rights you give us

You keep the copyright in your photo. You are not selling it to us or signing it away.

What you grant is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, resize, compress, and display that photo within playdar — on the page for the playground it shows, and in playdar’s own listings and previews of that page. “Non-exclusive” means you may still use, publish, license or sell the same photo anywhere else, without asking us. “Royalty-free” means we do not pay you, and you are not charged either.

The licence covers what is needed to run playdar and nothing beyond it. Concretely, we will not:

• sell, license or syndicate your photo to anyone else
• use it in advertising, whether ours or anyone’s
• use it to train a machine-learning model, or supply it to anyone who does
• attach your name to it, because we never asked for your name

The licence lasts while the photo is published in playdar. It ends when the photo is removed — see below. The same applies to equipment information you add, which is published only as counts and never as an individual report.

How long we keep things

• A photo we reject is deleted from storage, not archived. What remains is a record that a photo was submitted and refused, with no image.
• A photo we publish is kept while it is on the site.
• A photo you have taken down stops being visible immediately and is deleted from storage when we process the report.
• A photo that never passes the check on your phone is not kept at all, because it is never sent. It is discarded in your browser.
• Equipment information is kept indefinitely as part of the record for that playground, as counts.
• A review is kept while your account exists, or until you delete it yourself. See “Reviews” and “Accounts” below for what happens to it if you delete your account instead.

Reviews

Writing a review needs an account — an email address and, if you like, a display name — because a review is a claim about a specific place from a specific person, and “one review per account per playground” only means something if an account is a real, durable thing. Nothing else on playdar needs an account. See Privacy for what an account involves.

By posting a review, you are telling us that it is your own honest experience of the place, written by you, and that it does not name or identify anyone else. A review is about a playground, not about a person — not a parent, not a staff member, not another visitor. We can remove one that crosses that line regardless of whether it is otherwise accurate.

Ownership and licence. Same principle as a photo: you keep it, and you grant playdar a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display it on the page for that playground, for as long as it stays approved. We will not sell it, use it in advertising, or feed it to a model. Your display name shows on it instead of your email — we never publish your email address.

Editing. You can edit your review at any time, from your account. An edit takes it off the page immediately and puts it back through the same check a new review gets, because an edit is new, unreviewed content — it is not shown again until it is looked at, the same as when you first posted it.

Moderation, not a public report button. Every review is checked before it is shown, the same as a photo. What is different is the takedown route: photos have a one-tap, no-questions-asked Report this photo control anyone can use, because the harm a wrongly-published photo can do is severe and immediate. A review does not carry that same risk, and a public, anonymous button to hide someone’s written review is also a button to silence a fair but unflattering one — “the water fountain has been broken for months” is exactly the kind of review that should survive a determined complaint. So there is no self-serve hide button for reviews. There is still a fast route: write to us using Report a problem on the playground’s page, tell us which review, and we will look at it and remove it if it should not be up — we do not require proof before acting.

Accounts

An account is an email address, an optional display name, and whatever you have saved or reviewed. You can edit your display name or delete your account at any time from the account page.

Deleting your account removes it and everything you have saved. Reviews you wrote stay up — the rating and what you wrote are useful to the next parent even after you are gone — but we take your name off them. There is nothing left connecting a review to a deleted account, on the page or in what we keep privately.

Taking a photo down

There are two routes and both work. (For a review, see “Reviews” above — the routes are similar but not identical.)

The button. Every published photo has Report this photo underneath it. It needs no account and no reason. The photo is hidden the moment you press it — before anyone reviews it — and a person looks at it afterwards. If you sent the photo yourself and want it gone, this is the fastest way, and you do not need to explain that it was yours.

Writing to us. Use the Report a problem link on any playground page. Tell us which photo and we will remove it. You do not have to say why, and we will not ask you to prove anything before taking it down — we take it down first.

We would rather remove a hundred photos of slides by mistake than leave one photo of a child up while we work out who is right.

What we can do

We can decline, remove, or stop showing any contribution, at any time, for any reason or none, without telling you first. Nothing here obliges us to publish anything. We can also block a device that repeatedly sends things that break these rules.

We are one small project, not a platform with an appeals department. If we get something wrong, the Report a problem link reaches a person.

No warranty

playdar is provided as it is. The information in it comes from City of New York data and from contributors, and neither is guaranteed to be current or correct. Nothing here is a substitute for calling ahead about something that matters — NYC Parks Accessibility is on 212-360-2715.

Changes

If these terms change in a way that affects what you have already contributed, we will say so here and update the date below. A change never applies retroactively to give us rights over a photo you sent under the old terms.

Last updated 7 August 2026 · Privacy · Back to playdar