Terms and Conditions

1. Who this agreement is between

These terms govern your use of arana.cc and everything on it. They form an agreement between you and Jakob Walter, Quitzowstraße 123, 10559 Berlin, Germany — the person identified in the imprint. “Arana”, “we” and “us” below mean that person; “you” means whoever is using the site.

They apply whether or not you have an account. Planning a route as a visitor is covered by everything here except the sections about accounts; creating an account adds those.

How your personal data is handled is not repeated here. It is set out in the privacy notice, which is part of this agreement.

2. Who can use Arana

You need to be at least 16. If you are under 18, you may use Arana only with the agreement of a parent or guardian, who is then agreeing to these terms with you.

An account is for one person. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us at help@arana.cc if you think someone else has got into your account. Signing in through OpenStreetMap instead means your OpenStreetMap credentials do that job, and they never reach us.

3. What Arana is

As things stand, Arana lets you:

• plan a cycling route by placing waypoints on a map, under a routing style you pick;
• generate round tours from a starting point;
• save routes to your account, and download any of them as a GPX file;
• upload a recorded ride and see it matched onto the road network;
• look at the OpenStreetMap data behind a routing decision — the tags on a way, and what the router made of them;
• report a road you would rather not be sent down;
• correct the surface, smoothness or tracktype of a way in OpenStreetMap, if you have connected an OpenStreetMap account.

Arana is pre-launch software built by one person. Features described here can change, be rebuilt or disappear, and that is expected rather than exceptional.

4. What Arana is not

It is not a navigation system and not a safety system. It does not know about traffic, weather, ice, roadworks, closures, private land, or whether cycling is permitted where you are. It will not warn you about any of them.

Routes are computed from OpenStreetMap data, which is contributed by volunteers and is incomplete, uneven and sometimes wrong. Surface, gradient and how rideable a road is are estimates — partly from that data, partly from a model of it. A road Arana calls good may be gravel, flooded, fenced off or gone.

So the decision to ride a road is yours, made when you get there and can see it. Arana is a planning aid, and a route it produces is a suggestion, not advice that a road is safe or legal for you to ride.

5. It is free

Everything described here costs nothing, and there is no advertising and nothing is sold. If part of Arana ever costs money, you will be told plainly, in advance, and nothing you already use will start charging without you agreeing to it first.

Because it is free, the statutory relief the law gives a provider who charges nothing applies, to the extent § 11 below and the law allow.

6. How you may use it

Use Arana to plan your own riding. That includes riding for work — what it does not include is building something else on top of it.

Specifically, please do not:

• call the routing, map or elevation endpoints from your own software, scrape the site, or bulk-download tiles or routes. The routing engine and the map tiles are one small server and one metered account, and this is the thing that takes Arana down for everyone;
• use automated means to create accounts, or hold more than one account yourself;
• work around a rate limit, an access rule or an authentication step, or probe the service for weaknesses without asking us first — a report sent to help@arana.cc is welcome;
• upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the rights to;
• do anything that puts the OpenStreetMap data or the OpenStreetMap community at risk (see § 8).

If something you want to do sits near one of these lines, ask. The answer to a reasonable request is usually yes.

7. What you put into Arana

Your routes, the rides you upload, the names and descriptions you write, the routing styles you build and the roads you report stay yours. None of it is published: the privacy notice describes who can see what, and the answer is you.

To be able to hold and show it back to you, we need your permission to store, copy, display and process it. You grant that permission — free of charge, non-exclusive, for as long as the content is in your account, and only for the purpose of running Arana for you. It ends when you delete the content or the account.

One narrow use goes beyond your own account. When you report a road, and where a ride you uploaded is what showed us a road, we use what that tells us about the road to tune how routes are chosen for everybody. What we take from it describes the road, not you: the resulting ratings carry no link to the person who prompted them.

By uploading something you confirm it is yours to upload — that you recorded the ride, or are otherwise entitled to put the file here. If a third party raises a claim against us because that was not true, you will cover the reasonable costs of defending it, unless you were not at fault.

8. Map corrections and OpenStreetMap

If you connect an OpenStreetMap account, Arana can submit a correction to the surface, smoothness or tracktype of a way. Four things follow, and they matter more than the rest of this page:

• The edit is yours. It is uploaded under your OpenStreetMap account, not ours. It is your contribution, subject to the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s terms, its contributor terms and the ODbL, which you accept directly with them.
• It is permanent and public. It joins the map history under your name, immediately, and we cannot take it back for you.
• It must be something you saw. Arana tags every changeset it sends source=survey, which tells the community you were there. Only submit what you observed yourself. Never copy from Google Maps, another commercial map, an aerial image you have no licence for, or any other source whose data is not compatible with OpenStreetMap — that is the one mistake that does lasting damage to the map.
• Accuracy is on you. Arana narrows what you can say to three tags and a fixed list of values, which keeps an edit well-formed. It cannot tell whether it is true.

If edits sent through Arana damage the map, we may withdraw your access to the edit feature, with or without ending the rest of your account. Arana is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

9. Availability and changes to the service

There is no promised uptime. Arana runs on one server looked after by one person, and it will be down sometimes — for maintenance, for a fault, or because something upstream of us failed.

Features may be added, changed or removed. If a change would take away something substantial you rely on, we will tell you by email where we have your address, far enough ahead that you can download your routes as GPX first.

Keep your own copy of anything you would mind losing. The download button is there for exactly that, and a full export of your data is yours to ask for at any time under Art. 20 GDPR.

10. Ending it

You can delete your account at any moment from your settings, without giving a reason. The account and everything saved with it go at once; map corrections you already published to OpenStreetMap stay there, because they are no longer ours to remove.

We may close your account with 30 days’ notice by email, and we may close it immediately for good cause within the meaning of § 314 BGB — for instance a serious or repeated breach of § 6 or § 8, or use that threatens the service or other people. Where it is immediate and the reason allows, you will be told what it was.

If Arana shuts down altogether, we will give at least 30 days’ notice on the site and by email where we have your address, so that you can take your data with you.

11. Liability

We are liable without limitation:

• for intent and gross negligence;
• for injury to life, body or health caused by a negligent breach of duty by us or an intentional or negligent breach by our representatives or agents;
• under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz);
• to the extent we have given a guarantee, and for fraudulently concealed defects.

For simple negligence, we are liable only where we breach a duty whose fulfilment makes performing this agreement possible at all and on which you may routinely rely. That liability is limited to the foreseeable damage typical for an agreement of this kind. Any further liability for simple negligence is excluded. Because Arana is provided free of charge, the reduced standard of care the law applies to gratuitous services applies on top of this, in your favour where it goes further.

Within those limits, in particular:

• we do not warrant that OpenStreetMap data, or a route, surface estimate, elevation figure or rideability score built on it, is accurate, complete or current;
• we are not responsible for what the external map, terrain and geocoding providers listed in the privacy notice deliver, nor for content on sites we link to;
• we are not liable for loss of data you could have prevented by keeping your own copy, as § 9 asks you to.

These limits apply to the operator personally as well as to anyone acting for him.

12. Changes to these terms

These terms will change as Arana does. We will tell you what changed and when it takes effect — by email where we hold your address, otherwise here — at least 30 days beforehand, and we will say what the change is rather than leave you to compare two versions of this page.

If you do not want the new version, delete your account before it takes effect. Continuing to use Arana after that date means the new version applies to you. Where a change would materially alter the balance of this agreement, we will ask you to agree to it instead of relying on that.

13. Applicable law and the rest

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer resident in another EU member state, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of that state.

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

If a provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, the rest stays in force and the statutory rules take the place of the invalid provision, as § 306 BGB provides.

These terms are written in English, which is the language Arana is offered in and the language this agreement is concluded in. If a German version is published later, it will say which one governs.

14. Contact

Email help@arana.cc. It is the only channel, it is read by one person, and a reply can take a few days. Who operates this site is set out in the imprint.