Last updated: 14 October 2026
1. About these Terms
These Terms govern your access to and use of Buzzy, including our website, applications, Hives and related services (together, the Service).
Buzzy is currently operated in New Zealand by Kieran Belworthy and Campbell Sharplin. In these Terms, Buzzy, we, us and our mean Kieran Belworthy and Campbell Sharplin operating the Buzzy service.
By accessing or using Buzzy, you agree to the parts of these Terms that apply to your use of the Service. Creating an account or using Buzzy’s interactive features requires acceptance of these Terms in full.
You must also follow our:
- Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle personal information;
- Code of Conduct, which contains our detailed community and moderation rules; and
- Community Guidelines, which summarise the behaviour we expect on Buzzy.
If there is a conflict about personal information, the Privacy Policy applies. If the Code of Conduct and Community Guidelines conflict about community behaviour or moderation, the Code of Conduct applies.
Organisations using Buzzy may also enter into separate agreements with us covering paid services, support, data handling or other organisation-specific arrangements.
2. Accounts and eligibility
You must be at least 16 years old to create a Buzzy account or use interactive features.
People without an account may view content that Buzzy or a Hive has made public.
To create an account, you must provide the information needed to create and authenticate it, including an active email address and mobile phone number. You must provide accurate information where Buzzy asks for information needed to determine your eligibility to use the Service or to access or participate in particular Hives. You must not deliberately provide false or misleading information to bypass age, location, membership or other eligibility requirements.
Buzzy is designed so that users can participate under a pseudonymous username rather than displaying their real-world identity to other users. We encourage you to protect that pseudonymity and the pseudonymity of others.
Pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Buzzy holds account information that can connect an account to its owner as described in our Privacy Policy, and other people may sometimes be able to infer your identity from information you choose to disclose or from the surrounding context.
If you want to remain pseudonymous to other users, you should not include your real name, email address, workplace, address, social media accounts, or other information that could identify you in your username or contributions.
Buzzy may remove, redact, or restrict content containing personal information where we reasonably consider this necessary to protect a user’s privacy or safety. This can include personal information that a user has posted about themselves.
Buzzy operates on a one account per person basis. You must not create or use multiple accounts to manipulate votes, participation, results, moderation or other platform functions. We may restrict or remove accounts used for this purpose.
You are responsible for keeping your login credentials secure. Please contact us if you believe somebody has accessed your account without permission.
If you administer a Hive on behalf of an organisation, you must have appropriate authority to do so.
3. The Buzzy service
Buzzy is a platform for structured discussion, democratic participation and collective decision-making.
Depending on the Hive and features being used, people may be able to:
- create and discuss proposals, statements and topics;
- vote, react or express agreement or disagreement;
- participate in public or private Hives;
- view participation results and aggregate information;
- analyse participation and generate, display and use insights derived from discussions, voting and other activity; and
- use AI-assisted features such as moderation, summaries, themes, opinion-group descriptions and common-ground analysis.
Buzzy provides tools for discussions, consultation, voting and collective expression. Unless a particular Hive or process expressly states otherwise, participation or results on Buzzy do not constitute an official election, legally binding referendum, governmental decision or other legally binding decision-making process.
An organisation using Buzzy may choose to rely on Buzzy results as part of its own decision-making process, subject to any rules or arrangements applying to that process.
Buzzy is free for individual users.
People or organisations establishing and administering Hives may pay for additional services under separate arrangements with us.
Buzzy is an evolving service. We may add, change, replace or remove features and may temporarily suspend parts of the Service for maintenance, security or technical reasons.
4. Public and private Hives
Buzzy supports both public and private Hives. A public Hive may allow anyone to participate or may restrict participation to invited or otherwise eligible users.
Membership of a restricted Hive may be based on invitations or eligibility criteria. Where relevant, Buzzy may determine or assign Hive membership based on information a user has provided to Buzzy.
Content deliberately submitted through a public Hive or public Buzzy feature may be visible to anyone, including people without a Buzzy account. Other people may copy, quote or share public content outside Buzzy.
Private-Hive information is intended for authorised members and administrators of that Hive.
You must not publish, screenshot or distribute another person's private-Hive content outside the Hive without appropriate permission.
This does not prevent reasonable sharing where necessary to report misconduct, protect someone's safety, obtain legal or professional advice, or comply with the law.
Access to one Hive does not give you permission to access information from another Hive or another person's Buzzy account.
5. Your content
You retain ownership of the content you create on Buzzy.
By submitting content, you give Buzzy a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, transmit, format, moderate and process it where reasonably necessary to:
- provide and operate Buzzy;
- show it to the audience selected by you or the relevant Hive;
- analyse discussions and participation, and generate, display and use insights through enabled analysis and AI-assisted features;
- support, secure and troubleshoot the Service;
- enforce these Terms and our community rules; and
- use aggregated or appropriately de-identified information as described in our Privacy Policy.
This licence does not give Buzzy an unrestricted right to sell your content or use private-Hive content for unrelated advertising, profiling or research.
Public content and Buzzy promotion. If you deliberately publish content publicly through Buzzy, Buzzy may quote, excerpt, format or reproduce that public content, and may share public results, insights and other outputs derived from public participation, in our own website, demonstrations, social media or promotional communications to explain, demonstrate or promote Buzzy and its use.
We will take reasonable care not to present your contribution misleadingly or imply an endorsement you did not make.
We will not publicly use private-Hive content, results or information about a private Hive for promotional purposes without permission from the relevant Hive operator and any other permission or safeguards reasonably required by the circumstances or applicable law.
Deleted content. Account and content deletion are handled as described in our Privacy Policy.
Because Buzzy contains threaded discussions, deleting an account may leave a neutral structural placeholder such as “This comment has been deleted” so that other people's remaining contributions continue to make sense.
6. Hive administrators
Hive owners and administrators may have additional permissions to manage memberships, moderation, participation results and other Hive functions.
They must use those permissions only for legitimate purposes connected with operating their Hive.
Where a Hive administrator or an organisation operating a Hive provides Buzzy with another person’s contact details for the purpose of inviting them to a Hive, they must have a legitimate reason to use those details for that purpose.
Hive administrators and organisations operating Hives must not use Buzzy’s invitation tools to send unsolicited bulk invitations, provide contact information obtained for unrelated purposes, or otherwise use another person’s contact details in a way that would be misleading, abusive or unlawful.
Hive administrators must not:
- use administrative access for unrelated purposes;
- bypass Buzzy's privacy or access controls;
- misuse pseudonymous participant information;
- attempt to re-identify people, or reconstruct individual votes, stances, demographic information or other non-public participant information, from aggregated, de-identified or analytical outputs;
- disclose non-public Hive information outside the purposes for which they are authorised to receive it; or
- use exported information in breach of applicable privacy, ethical, research or legal obligations.
Being a Hive administrator does not give an organisation ownership of a participant's Buzzy account or access to that participant's activity in unrelated Hives.
Buzzy may restrict or remove administrative privileges where they are misused.
7. Community behaviour and moderation
You must follow our Code of Conduct and Community Guidelines.
These rules prohibit behaviour including harassment, discrimination, hate speech, threats, unlawful activity, privacy violations, impersonation, spam, deliberate disruption and other conduct that undermines the safety or integrity of Buzzy.
Buzzy and authorised Hive moderators may take proportionate action where those rules are breached. This may include warnings, content removal, restrictions, temporary suspension, removal from a Hive or termination of an account.
Serious safety, security or legal concerns may require immediate action.
Where available, moderation decisions may be appealed using the process described in the Code of Conduct.
Removing someone from a Hive does not necessarily remove their Buzzy account or their access to unrelated Hives. Reports must be made in good faith. Knowingly false, malicious or abusive reporting may itself breach our community rules.
8. Automated and analytical features
Buzzy uses analytical and automated systems, including Pol.is and AI-assisted features.
These tools may help identify patterns of agreement and disagreement, generate summaries or themes, assist moderation, describe opinion groups or identify areas of common ground.
These outputs can be incomplete or inaccurate and should not be treated as authoritative assessments of a person's beliefs, identity, character or intentions.
Buzzy may also use automated systems to help identify, flag or assess content that may breach our rules. Automated assessments inform moderation, but moderation and enforcement remain subject to these Terms, the Code of Conduct and the available moderation and appeal processes.
Our Privacy Policy explains how personal information is processed through these features and the external service providers we use.
Hive owners may be able to disable some AI-assisted features.
9. Privacy
Our Privacy Policy explains how Buzzy collects, creates, uses, shares, stores and deletes personal information.
Nothing in these Terms gives Buzzy permission to use personal information in a way that is inconsistent with the Privacy Policy or applicable privacy law.
Where an organisation operates a Hive, that organisation may also provide additional privacy, research or participant information explaining how it intends to use information generated through that Hive.
10. Buzzy intellectual property and misuse of the Service
Except for User Content and third-party materials, Buzzy's software, design, branding, interfaces, graphics and other proprietary materials belong to or are licensed to Buzzy's operators.
We give you a limited, non-exclusive and revocable right to use Buzzy for its intended purposes.
You must not, unless permitted by law or by us:
- bypass or interfere with authentication, permissions or security controls;
- gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to accounts, Hives, systems or data;
- scrape, harvest or systematically extract Buzzy content, participant information, participant results or datasets without permission;
- use Buzzy content or participant data to create unrelated participant profiles, commercial datasets, or to train or evaluate external machine-learning or AI systems without permission from Buzzy and, where applicable, any additional permission from the relevant Hive operator or affected people;
- introduce malicious software or deliberately interfere with the Service;
- manipulate Buzzy participation or results;
- copy or commercially exploit Buzzy's software or branding; or
- reverse engineer Buzzy except where applicable law expressly permits it.
If you voluntarily give us product feedback or suggestions, you allow us to use those ideas to improve Buzzy without an obligation to compensate you.
11. Communications
We may contact you where reasonably necessary to provide Buzzy. This may include authentication messages, account-security communications, Hive invitations, important service notices, policy updates and responses to requests you make.
We may also offer optional product or promotional communications. Where required, these will include appropriate consent or unsubscribe options.
You can control certain push notifications through Buzzy or your device settings.
12. Service availability, suspension and termination
We work to provide a reliable Service but cannot guarantee that Buzzy will always be uninterrupted, error-free or available.
Some features depend on third-party technology or infrastructure operated by others.
You may stop using Buzzy and delete your account at any time.
We may restrict, suspend or terminate access where reasonably necessary because:
- you materially or repeatedly breach these Terms or our community rules;
- you attempt to manipulate Buzzy through duplicate accounts or other abuse;
- your account creates a security or safety risk;
- we are required to act by law;
- continued access creates a material risk to Buzzy or others; or
- Buzzy or a relevant part of the Service is being discontinued.
Where reasonable, we may first warn you or give you an opportunity to correct the issue. Serious misconduct, security incidents or safety concerns may require immediate action.
Personal-information deletion following account closure is handled under our Privacy Policy.
13. Responsibility and legal rights
Buzzy does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy of content posted by users.
We also do not guarantee that automated, analytical or AI-generated outputs will always be accurate, complete or appropriate.
To the extent permitted by law, Buzzy is not responsible for loss caused solely by:
- content or behaviour of other users;
- actions independently taken by a Hive operator outside Buzzy's control;
- unauthorised account access caused by your failure to take reasonable care of your credentials;
- internet or third-party service failures outside Buzzy's reasonable control; or
- unreasonable reliance on automated or AI-generated outputs.
Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right, guarantee, remedy or liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including applicable rights under New Zealand consumer, privacy and fair-trading law.
Separate terms may apply to paid services supplied to organisations.
14. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms as Buzzy, our technology or our legal obligations change.
We will publish the current version and its effective date.
If a change materially affects users' rights or obligations, we will provide reasonable additional notice, such as through Buzzy or by email.
If you do not agree to a material change, you may stop using Buzzy and delete your account.
Buzzy may transfer operation of the Service and these Terms from the current operators to a company or other successor entity established or acquired to operate Buzzy.
If this occurs, we will tell users who the new operator is and update these Terms and the Privacy Policy accordingly.
This clause does not give Buzzy a general right to transfer users or their information to an unrelated third party for unrelated purposes. Any transfer of personal information remains subject to the Privacy Policy and any applicable privacy law.
Changes to these Terms do not by themselves allow Buzzy to use personal information for materially incompatible new purposes.
15. New Zealand law and contact
These Terms are governed by the laws of New Zealand, and you and Buzzy submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the New Zealand courts.
Nothing in these Terms prevents either party from using another dispute-resolution process or tribunal available under New Zealand law.
Questions about these Terms can be sent to:
Buzzy, operated by Kieran Belworthy and Campbell Sharplin, New Zealand
support@buzzyapp.co.nz
Privacy questions can also be directed to Buzzy's Privacy Officer, Kieran Belworthy, through the same email address.
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