Divemap — Terms of Use
Effective date: 28 Sept 2026 Contact: [email protected]
Divemap is a free, hobbyist dive-mapping and navigation tool operated by an individual as part of the Tern Diving project. These terms explain what you can expect from it, what it expects from you, and — importantly — what it does not promise.
Please read Section 4 even if you skip everything else.
1. What Divemap is, and why it exists
Divemap collects, stores, and displays dive-related geographic information: wreck and obstruction reports, landmarks, lines, waypoints, dive tracks, and sensor data uploaded from dive computers or navigation devices such as DPV-Nav. It combines contributions from multiple divers into maps and derived data products to improve navigation for everybody.
Divemap is a sharing platform, and sharing is the entire point. A track that nobody else can use is just a file on your computer. A newly found wreck that nobody else knows about helps no one. A report that a line is intact — or gone — is worth something only if the next diver can read it before they get in the water. The map gets better strictly in proportion to what people are willing to put into it.
So Divemap is built to publish, not to hoard. Use it expecting that what you contribute will be shared with other divers. Where you need an exception, Section 8 and the Privacy Policy explain how to take one.
It is a hobby project. It is maintained on a best-effort basis by one person, in their spare time, at their own expense.
2. Eligibility
You must be at least 13 years old to create an account (16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom). If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may only use Divemap with a parent’s or guardian’s permission.
3. Accounts and usernames
Your username is public and is permanently attached to everything you contribute. Choose it accordingly. If you would prefer not to be identifiable, pick a username that does not contain your real name.
You are responsible for keeping your login credentials and any device upload tokens secure, and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.
4. Safety — read this one
Divemap is not a navigation system, not a nautical chart, and not a life-support tool. Do not rely on it to keep you alive.
Specifically:
- Positions, depths, headings, bearings, distances, and landmark locations shown in Divemap may be wrong. They may be wrong by a little or wrong by a lot. They may have been wrong from the moment they were entered, or they may have become wrong since.
- Much of the data is contributed by other divers using consumer-grade or homemade equipment, under conditions where accuracy is difficult to achieve and impossible to verify. Dead-reckoning error, magnetic interference, uncalibrated sensors, current, transcription mistakes, and simple optimism all end up in the dataset.
- Aggregated or derived layers — heat maps, route corridors, smoothed tracks, interpolated bathymetry — are statistical products. They describe where data happens to exist, not where it is safe or possible to go. A well-travelled corridor on the map is not a cleared route.
- Underwater obstructions, entanglement hazards, lines, nets, silt-out conditions, and overhead environments may be present and unmarked. Absence of a hazard on the map does not mean the absence of a real world hazard.
Lines and other things that go away
A line that was good last weekend may not be good this weekend. Lines part, chafe, get dragged by boat traffic or current, get cut, get fouled, or get buried in silt. A line reported as running from A to B may now run from A to somewhere else, may be there but slack and unfindable, or may never have been quite where the reporting diver believed it was. The same is true of temporary buoys, shot lines, mooring lines, jump lines, strobes, markers, and every other piece of navigation aid anyone has ever reported on this site.
Do not plan a dive around the existence of a line you have not personally verified on this dive. Carry your own reel and your own navigation. Treat everything on the map as a hypothesis you are going to test, not a fact you are going to rely on. The question: “What if we don’t find the line” remains valid, even with a map that allows people to more easily report the existence and state of lines.
Wrecks shift, collapse, and get salvaged. Bottom features silt over. Visibility and current vary hour to hour. Any report on this map is a snapshot of one moment, from one diver’s perspective, and the map has no way to tell you whether it is still true.
Where this data actually comes from
Every entry on this map was put there by another diver — someone like you, diving recreationally or technically, with whatever equipment they had, doing their best. This is not a survey. It is not survey-grade, it was not collected to a standard, nothing was ground-truthed, and there is no quality authority behind it. Positions come from dead reckoning, surface marks, GPS fixes taken from a bobbing SMB, or estimates based on memories of distance and direction.
Contributions are made in good faith and stored in good faith. That is all anyone can honestly promise. There is no mechanism by which Divemap can validate before your dive that a report was accurate when it was written, or that it is still accurate now. Good faith is not accuracy, and a sincere report can be badly wrong.
Extend the same good faith when you contribute: report what you actually observed, say how you measured it, and say how confident you are. Other divers will be reading it the same way you’re reading theirs.
Diving — particularly deep, cold, low-visibility, or overhead-environment diving — is inherently dangerous and can kill you. You alone are responsible for your dive planning, your gas planning, your navigation, your equipment, your training, and your decision to get in the water. Use appropriate training, appropriate redundancy, and primary navigation methods you can trust independently of this site.
If Divemap and your own instruments disagree, believe your instruments.
5. No warranty
Divemap and all data in it are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. We specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, title, and non-infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law.
We do not vouch for the data. We do not verify contributions. We do not represent that the map corresponds to physical reality. (Ok, that’s a little extreme: In reality, if somebody reports a wreck, somebody else is going to go look at it. If somebody runs a line, somebody else is going to go run it after and report whether or not they could find it. But none of that is guaranteed.)
6. No guarantee of availability or durability
There is no service-level commitment of any kind. Without prior notice, Divemap may:
- be slow, broken, or unreachable;
- lose, corrupt, or fail to restore your data;
- change or remove features;
- reset, migrate, or discard the database;
- be discontinued entirely.
Keep your own copies of anything you care about. Export functionality is provided as a convenience where available; it is not a backup service, and its continued existence is not guaranteed either.
7. Your contributions and the license you grant
You keep ownership of what you contribute. You are also giving it to the community, and that needs to be unambiguous.
By contributing content to Divemap — reports, logs, tracks, waypoints, notes, sensor data, photographs, or anything else — you grant the operator of Divemap a worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, sublicensable, and transferable license to store, reproduce, adapt, aggregate, analyze, publish, display, and distribute that content and to create and distribute derived works from it, including in combination with other contributors’ data, and including in commercial products or datasets.
Why the grant is this broad. A shared chart is not a collection of separable files; it is one thing built out of everyone’s data at once. A heat map of the approach to a wreck is made of dozens of tracks. A landmark position is a weighted average of many reported fixes. A calibration reference is derived from sensor runs across many devices and many divers. Once your data is folded into those products, it cannot be pulled back out without degrading — or destroying — work that other divers now depend on. A revocable, per-contributor license would mean the map could be dismantled from under the people using it, and in practice it would mean the map could never be built at all.
So: contribute on the understanding that what you contribute stays. The grant survives deletion of your account (see the Privacy Policy, Section 9).
Credit. In exchange, contributions are attributed. The divers who find the wrecks, run the lines, and bring back the data get their usernames on their work, and that attribution is kept as the data moves into derived products wherever it is practical to do so. Aggregate layers built from many people’s tracks are not individually attributed, because at that point the useful fact is that a diver went there, not which one — but the underlying contribution is still yours, still credited in the record, and still yours to point at.
You represent that you have the right to grant this license for everything you contribute, and that your contributions do not infringe anyone else’s rights.
8. What you may not contribute
Don’t post:
- content you don’t have the right to share, including data copied from commercial charts, proprietary databases, or other people’s surveys without permission;
- other people’s personal information, or identifiable information about other divers’ locations or activities without their consent;
- the location of human remains, or of sites you know to be legally protected — including archaeological and historic sites protected under Washington law (RCW 27.53 and related statutes) or comparable law elsewhere — where publishing that location would be unlawful or would expose the site to disturbance;
- deliberately false, fabricated, or misleading positions, hazards, or reports;
- anything unlawful, harassing, or malicious.
If you are unsure whether a site is protected, ask before posting it.
If you’re diving a site you don’t want to share, log it anyway — just mark it private. Every dive, track, and report carries a visibility setting. Set it to private and the entry is yours alone: visible on your own map, excluded from public layers, excluded from aggregate products, and not used to build anything other divers see. You can flip it to shared later, when you’re ready, or never. There is also a force-share setting for the opposite case — a track you specifically want published and credited to you rather than absorbed anonymously into an aggregate layer.
Use the flags rather than withholding the dive or fudging the position. A site held back honestly is fine. A deliberately wrong position entered to protect a site is a hazard to the next diver, and falls under the “deliberately false” item above.
9. Acceptable use
Don’t attack the site, probe it for vulnerabilities without permission, attempt to access other users’ private data, impersonate other users or devices, or automate bulk extraction of the database. Reasonable personal-scale API and export use is fine; systematically scraping the dataset to reconstitute or redistribute it is not.
If you find a security problem, please report it to [email protected] rather than exploiting it. Good-faith reports are welcome and will not be met with legal threats.
10. Devices
Devices that upload to Divemap (including DPV-Nav units) authenticate with tokens tied to your account. Treat those tokens like passwords. Uploads made with your token are treated as your contributions.
11. Suspension and termination
You may stop using Divemap and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate any account, or remove any content, at our discretion — including for violating these terms, for contributing data that degrades the map, or for no reason at all. Sections 5, 6, 7, 12, and 13 survive termination.
12. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator of Divemap will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, loss of profits, property damage, personal injury, or death, arising out of or related to your use of — or inability to use — Divemap or its data, regardless of the theory of liability and even if advised of the possibility of such damages.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, total aggregate liability for any claim relating to Divemap is limited to the amount you have paid to use Divemap.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations of liability, and nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited. Where a limitation is unenforceable, it applies to the maximum extent permitted.
13. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the operator of Divemap from claims, damages, and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your contributions, your use of the site, or your violation of these terms.
14. Governing law and venue
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Kitsap County, Washington, and you consent to that jurisdiction and venue.
15. Changes to these terms
These terms may change. Material changes will be noted on this page with a revised effective date, and where practical announced in the app. Continuing to use Divemap after a change means you accept the revised terms. If you don’t accept them, stop using the site and delete your account.
16. Contact
Questions, corrections, takedown requests, and data disputes: [email protected]