Terms of Use

1. Accepting these terms

By using this website or submitting anything to it, you agree to these Terms of Use. If you don't agree, please don't use the site or submit content. These terms are between you and VG Cruising Ducks, a community hobby project based in Osceola County, Florida, USA.

2. Who can take part

Anyone is welcome to browse. If you are under the age of legal majority where you live, please take part with a parent or guardian involved, and have them make submissions on your behalf. Children should never submit sensitive personal information — a first name or nickname is plenty. Don't submit anything on behalf of someone else without their permission.

3. What this project is

VG Cruising Ducks is a free, for-fun community duck hide-and-seek and journey-tracking project. People hide small rubber ducks, other people find them, and everyone can log those moments so a duck's journey can be followed over time. Taking part is entirely voluntary.

4. No affiliation

We are an independent fan community. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any cruise line, ship, port, travel company, Google, Supabase, or any other third-party brand unless we specifically state otherwise. Cruise line and ship names are used only to describe where a duck turned up, and all trademarks belong to their owners. Always follow the rules of the ship, venue, or country you are in — some places do not allow items to be left behind.

5. Accuracy of what you submit

You are responsible for the accuracy of the duck codes, dates, places, cruise line and ship details, and everything else you submit. Content on this site comes from community members and may be incomplete, mistaken, or out of date.

6. Acceptable use and photo submissions

Please don't:

• submit false, fraudulent, or deliberately misleading entries;
• use bots, scripts, scraping, or bulk/spam submissions, or otherwise flood the site;
• upload malware, attack or overload the service, probe or bypass security, or try to reach administrator areas or other people's data without authorization;
• post illegal, threatening, harassing, hateful, abusive, obscene, defamatory, infringing, or privacy-violating content, or other people's private information;
• use the site for advertising or commercial solicitation.

Photo submissions may be up to 25 MB before processing and may be submitted as JPEG, PNG, or WEBP. Uploaded photos may be automatically resized, compressed, re-encoded, or otherwise optimized for display and performance. Files that exceed permitted limits, are in unsupported formats, appear corrupted, or cannot be processed may be rejected. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to submit any photo and that it complies with these Terms.

7. Your content stays yours

You keep ownership of the photos, stories, and other content you submit. We don't claim ownership of your original content.

By submitting content, you grant VG Cruising Ducks a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, resize, crop, compress, re-encode, convert formats, remove embedded metadata, generate optimized or derivative versions, display, distribute, and promote that content as reasonably necessary to operate, moderate, secure, improve delivery of, and promote VG Cruising Ducks, its duck journey pages, and its related social-media presence. These technical processing rights are limited to what is reasonably necessary to operate and display the submitted content through the service.

This license lasts as long as the content remains part of the project and any copies that have already been distributed remain in circulation. For more information about how submitted information and photos are handled, please see our Privacy Policy.

8. Rights and permissions you confirm

By submitting content you confirm that you have the rights and permissions needed to submit it and to grant the license above. If identifiable people appear in a photo or story, you are responsible for having their permission to share it. If anyone identifiable is a minor, you should have appropriate permission from their parent or guardian.

9. Moderation, removal, and takedown requests

Every find and hide submission is reviewed before it appears publicly. We may approve, decline, edit for formatting, safety, accuracy, privacy, or moderation purposes, hide, unapprove, unpublish, or delete any submission at our discretion. We can't guarantee that a submission will be approved, featured, or stay online forever.

Photos associated with pending submissions are kept in private pending storage and are not intentionally displayed publicly before approval. After approval, the associated photo may become publicly accessible as part of the duck's journey page. Authorized administrators may edit submission information or replace an associated photo when reasonably necessary for formatting, accuracy, safety, privacy, moderation, or operation of the service.

When the site deletes a find or hide submission, its associated stored photo is also scheduled for deletion through the site's storage cleanup process. When a photo is successfully replaced, the previously stored photo is also removed through that process. We do not promise instantaneous deletion from every CDN cache, backup, log, or third-party infrastructure layer; temporary cached or backup copies may persist for limited periods as part of normal infrastructure operation. We are not obligated to permanently store, archive, back up, or return user-submitted content, so please retain your own copies of anything you wish to keep.

To request removal or correction of something you submitted, email legal@vgcruisingducks.com with the duck code and roughly when you submitted it. Please note that content already shared externally — on social media, in someone's screenshot, or in search-engine caches — may not be fully retractable from those third-party systems.

10. Copyright and intellectual property

We respect intellectual property rights. If you believe content on this site infringes your copyright or other rights, please follow the DMCA notice process below.

DMCA / Copyright Infringement Notices

VG Cruising Ducks has registered a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive notifications of claimed copyright infringement. If you are a copyright owner or an authorized agent and believe that content on VG Cruising Ducks infringes your copyright, you may send a DMCA notice to our designated agent.

Designated Agent: Vital Aguiar
Organization: VG Cruising Ducks
Email: legal@vgcruisingducks.com
DMCA Registration Number: DMCA-1077874

Your DMCA notice should include the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), including:

• A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner;
• Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or a representative list if multiple works are involved;
• Identification of the allegedly infringing material and its location on the site, with enough detail for us to locate it;
• Your contact information, including address, telephone number, and email address;
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
• A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

If you believe your content was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notification consistent with 17 U.S.C. § 512(g). Your counter-notification should include your contact information, identification of the removed content and its location, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe the removal was a mistake or misidentification, and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court in the district where you are located (or, if outside the U.S., to the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal district in which VG Cruising Ducks is located).

VG Cruising Ducks may remove or disable access to allegedly infringing material upon receipt of a valid DMCA notice and may take appropriate action regarding repeat infringers when appropriate.

11. Third-party services and links

The site uses and links to third-party services to operate, host, and provide features. These include Supabase (backend database, storage, and administrator authentication), Lovable (website and application hosting and supporting infrastructure), Google (maps, place and geocoding services, and Google Fonts where applicable), and Instagram (external social and contact links). Your use of those services is subject to their own terms and privacy policies — for example, Google Maps terms may apply when you use map features. We aren't responsible for third-party sites or content.

12. Ducks wander — and maps are approximate

A hidden duck may be picked up, moved, kept, damaged, discarded, or cleaned up by staff at any moment, and may never be found or logged again. We make no promise of recovery, continued tracking, or accuracy. Journey and map locations are approximate and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only.

13. Provided “as is”

To the fullest extent permitted by law, this website and its content are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, or uninterrupted availability. You use the site at your own discretion and risk.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, VG Cruising Ducks and the people who run it will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising from your use of the site or participation in the project. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, our total liability for any claim relating to the site or these terms is limited to one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100), reflecting that this is a free community hobby site. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Indemnification

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless VG Cruising Ducks and the people who run it from claims, damages, and reasonable costs arising out of content you submit, your infringement of someone else's rights, your unlawful conduct, or your violation of these terms.

16. Suspension and changes to the service

We may block or suspend users or submissions that appear abusive or harmful, and we may modify, pause, or discontinue any part of the site at any time.

17. Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in or serving Osceola County, Florida, and you consent to their jurisdiction, subject to any applicable law that gives you the right to proceed elsewhere.

18. General

Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.

No waiver. If we don't enforce a part of these terms right away, we haven't given up the right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours in connection with a transfer of the project.

Entire agreement. These terms, together with our privacy policy, are the whole agreement between you and VG Cruising Ducks about the site.

19. Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the project grows. When they do, we'll update the revision date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the site after an update means you accept the revised terms.

20. Contact

VG Cruising Ducks, Osceola County, Florida, USA — legal@vgcruisingducks.com. For everyday questions, say hello on Instagram at @vgcruisingducks or use our contact page.