Terms of use my photos & windfarms

TurbinePreview — Terms of Use. Version 1, 2026-07-25

1. Who we are, and your agreement

TurbinePreview (turbine-preview.au) is operated by Hereabouts Pty Ltd, ABN 83 700 672 813 ("we", "us"). By creating an account you agree to these terms. You can read public content at the service without an account; these terms govern what you do with an account.

2. The service

TurbinePreview lets you photograph a landscape, estimate how proposed wind turbines would appear in it, and optionally share the results. The service is currently provided free of charge to individuals; wind-farm proponents require a site licence (§4). We may add, change or withdraw features; where a change removes something you have stored, we will make reasonable efforts to give notice first.

3. Your account

• Provide accurate registration details and keep your credentials secure; you are responsible for activity under your account.
• Role claims must be honest. The service asks whether you are a neighbour, turbine host, wind-farm representative, or other. Sharing visibility and what you may do with the capture tools (§4) both depend on these roles, so a false claim misleads other users about who can see their photos and may give you access these terms do not. We may verify claims and may correct or suspend accounts with false ones.
• You must be at least 17 years old.

4. Who may use the capture tools, and where

The public homepage and this site's read-only pages are open to everyone, with or without an account. The capture and alignment tools are scoped by role:

• Neighbours and others may capture and align photos anywhere around up to 2 wind farms per account, with additional wind farms by arrangement.
• Turbine hosts may capture photos only within 5 km of the boundary of land they own or occupy (with additional range by arrangement). Captures beyond that distance are outside a host account's licence to use the service.
• Wind-farm personnel. If you are an employee or contractor of a wind-farm proponent or operator, or of their consultants or agents, you may not register for or use the service beyond the public homepage — including in your personal capacity — unless the proponent holds a current site licence with us covering the relevant wind farm. Site licences are commercial agreements made separately with us; where one is in place, its terms govern what licensed personnel (including the "wind-farm representative" role) may do.

We may rely on your role claim (§3) in applying these limits, and may suspend accounts that evade them (for example, industry personnel registering under another role).

5. Your content

• You keep ownership of the photos, audio comments, text and ratings you upload.
• You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, process (including computing overlays and composites) and display your content to the audience your sharing setting names (see §7), for as long as it remains on the service. This licence ends when you delete the content, except for copies already made by people you shared it with, and short-lived backups.
• You also grant us a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to aggregate, analyse and publish de-identified information derived from your contributions, as described in the Privacy Policy's §3 (no names, no photographs or audio, no positions from which a viewpoint can be identified). This licence survives deletion of the content, because nothing that identifies you or your viewpoint is retained in the published material.
• Only upload what you have the right to upload. Do not upload content that is unlawful, that infringes someone else's rights, or that discloses another person's private information (including identifiable people photographed on private property) without their consent.
• Do not upload information you are bound to keep confidential — for example under a hosting, option or lease agreement with a wind-farm proponent, or an employment or consultancy agreement. What you have agreed to keep confidential is between you and the other party: you, not we, are responsible for your obligations under any such agreement, and we may remove content when put on notice that it discloses confidential information (§15).

6. Location privacy — read this one

Photographs in TurbinePreview carry the position they were taken from; that position is what makes the visualization possible, and it travels with the photo when you share it. If you photograph from your home and make the photo public, you are publishing where you live. Think about the sharing setting before you choose it. (Camera-file metadata is stripped from every copy others can see; the capture position is governed only by your sharing setting.)

7. Sharing and visibility

• Content is private by default: visible to you and to service administrators (who need access to operate, moderate and support the service, and are bound by these terms and our privacy practices).
• You may share content with role groups (neighbours, hosts, the wind farm, others) or make it public. You can change or revoke the setting at any time; revocation stops future access but cannot recall copies or exports already made.
• Deleting a server copy does not affect copies on your own device or exports you or others have already saved.

We do not warrant that everyone is in the correct role. For example a neighbour may claim to be a host or vice versa. Bear this in mind when sharing content with a role group.

8. Visualizations: accuracy and honest use

• Everything in the public Disclaimer applies and forms part of these terms: visualizations are estimates, not survey-grade, and depict a named layout version.
• Where a proponent has not yet published a proposed turbine layout, we may generate and present a hypothetical layout. If we do, the layout and every visualization made from it will be clearly marked as hypothetical. A hypothetical layout is our indicative construction, not a proponent's proposal — do not present it, or visualizations of it, as depicting anyone's actual plans.
• Exported images carry a caption strip stating their provenance (windfarm, layout date/version), location and the base-imagery attribution. Do not remove or crop the caption or attribution, and do not present a TurbinePreview image as an unmodified photograph or as depicting existing structures. Present it as what it is: an estimate of a proposal.

9. Acceptable use

Do not: use the service unlawfully or to harass; misrepresent your identity or role; use the capture tools outside your role's scope (§4); probe, overload or interfere with the service; scrape other users' content; attempt to access content or functionality your role does not entitle you to; or resell the service. The software is proprietary to us; these terms give you no rights in it beyond use of the service.

10. Third-party data

Base imagery and elevation data are licensed from third parties (see the disclaimer's third-party data section). Where you export material containing that data, the relevant licence obligations (notably attribution, which the caption strip carries) pass to you.

11. Privacy

We collect and hold: your registration details (via our identity provider), your claimed role, your content and its metadata (including capture positions, alignment data, impact ratings and comments), and technical logs needed to run the service. We use them only to provide the service as described here, and we do not sell them. See our Privacy Policy.

12. Availability and your own copies

We aim to keep the service available and backed up but promise neither. Your device keeps the original of every capture; the server is not your only copy, and you should not treat it as an archive.

13. Suspension and ending your account

We may suspend or close accounts that breach these terms, with or without notice. You may stop using the service at any time and may delete your content and account; we will then delete your stored content within a reasonable period, subject to backup cycles and any legal retention duties.

14. Liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, right or remedy that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified, including under the Australian Consumer Law.

Subject to those rights, and to the maximum extent permitted by law:

(a) the service and its visualisations are provided for general information and illustrative purposes only. Visualisations are estimates generated from available data, assumptions and device measurements and may differ from actual conditions;

(b) the visualisations are not surveying, engineering, planning, environmental, valuation or legal advice and should not be relied upon as the sole basis for any property, financial, legal, planning or other significant decision. You should independently verify relevant information and obtain appropriate professional advice;

(c) we do not promise that the service will always be available, uninterrupted, error-free or suitable for any purpose that we have not expressly agreed to;

(d) we do not endorse or guarantee the accuracy, completeness or reliability of content submitted by other users;

(e) we are not liable for loss to the extent that it was caused or contributed to by your misuse of the service, failure to follow a warning or instruction, unreasonable reliance on an indicative visualisation, or failure to take reasonable steps to avoid or reduce the loss; and

(f) neither party is liable for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable at the time these terms were accepted.

15. Your responsibility to others

You are responsible for the content you upload and share. If a third party brings a claim against us because your content infringed their rights or your use broke these terms, you agree to reimburse our reasonable resulting costs, except to the extent we caused the loss.

Complaints about content. If you believe content on the service infringes your rights or discloses information confidential to you, email privacy@turbine-preview.au identifying the content and the basis of your complaint. We will review it promptly and remove or restrict content that breaches these terms. We are not the arbiter of disputes between users and third parties, and removal is not an admission that a complaint was justified.

16. General

These terms are governed by the law of New South Wales, Australia, and courts with jurisdiction there. We may update these terms; material changes will be announced on the service and take effect on notice; continued use is acceptance. If part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stands.