Terms of Use

1. Acceptance and eligibility

These Terms of Use are a binding agreement between you and SolveHFX. By accessing the site or submitting a report, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

You must be at least 13 years old to submit a report. If you are between 13 and the age of majority in your province, you may use SolveHFX only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.

2. What SolveHFX is

SolveHFX is a free tool that helps residents describe a civic issue and send it by email to the public body responsible for it, and where applicable to their district councillor. SolveHFX is a messenger. It does not repair anything, does not operate any municipal system, and has no authority over how a public body handles what it receives.

3. Not affiliated with HRM or any government

SolveHFX is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, operated by, or acting on behalf of Halifax Regional Municipality, Halifax Transit, Nova Scotia Public Works, Halifax Water, Nova Scotia Power, or any other public body or utility. Names of public bodies are used only to describe where reports are sent. Official municipal channels, including 311, remain available and operate independently of SolveHFX.

4. Do not use SolveHFX for emergencies

SolveHFX is not an emergency service and is not monitored around the clock.

If there is a risk to life, health, or property — including fire, flooding, a downed power line, a gas leak, a collision, a crime in progress, or any immediately dangerous road condition — call 911. For urgent municipal matters call 311. For electrical hazards contact Nova Scotia Power; for water or sewer emergencies contact Halifax Water.

Reports submitted through SolveHFX are delivered by email and may not be read for hours or days, if at all. Never rely on SolveHFX to summon emergency assistance or to prevent harm.

5. AI-generated content

SolveHFX uses an automated AI service to analyse the photo you upload and produce a draft title, category, and description. That draft is a suggestion generated by software. It can be wrong, incomplete, or misleading, including about the nature or severity of an issue.

You are shown the draft before anything is sent, and you can edit it. When you submit, you adopt the content as your own report and are responsible for it. SolveHFX makes no representation that AI-generated text is accurate, and we are not liable for the content of any draft you choose to submit.

6. Your responsibility for what you submit

• Submit only truthful, good-faith reports about genuine civic issues.
• You are responsible for the accuracy and legality of everything you submit, including after you edit an AI draft.
• You confirm you have the right to upload each image and that submitting it does not breach anyone's rights.
• Do not include information about identifiable individuals, licence plates, or private property interiors that you do not have permission to share.
• Do not include sensitive personal information about yourself or anyone else in report text or images.

7. Prohibited conduct

• No false, misleading, defamatory, harassing, or abusive reports.
• No hate speech, threats, or unlawful material.
• No impersonation of public officials, residents, or organizations.
• No spam, promotional content, or commercial solicitation.
• No automated bulk submission, scraping abuse, malware, or attempts to disrupt or compromise the platform or the public bodies we send to.
• No use of the service to burden or interfere with municipal operations.

8. Content licence and public use

You keep ownership of everything you submit. By submitting a report, you grant SolveHFX a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable licence to display, reproduce, adapt, and share the report content — the photo, description, issue category, and general location — for purposes connected to the service. This includes displaying it on public SolveHFX pages such as the issue map, reports feed, and scorecards, sharing it on social media or with news media to raise awareness of civic issues, and including it in aggregated statistics or open data exports.

Personal contact details are excluded from this licence. Your name, email address, and IP address are never published, shared with media, posted to social media, or included in any public export. They are used only to route your report and, if you provided an email, to send you status updates.

This licence survives deletion of your report to the extent needed for copies already published or distributed. If you want a report removed from public display, contact support@solvehfx.ca and we will review the request.

9. No guarantee of delivery, response, or resolution

We cannot guarantee that a report will be delivered, received, opened, read, accepted, prioritized, or acted on by any public body or councillor, or that any issue will be resolved within any timeframe or at all. Email delivery can fail, be filtered, or be ignored for reasons entirely outside our control. Response and resolution figures shown on the site are estimates based on the limited information available to us and should not be relied on as an official record.

10. Third-party services

SolveHFX depends on third-party providers for hosting, data storage, mapping, AI analysis, and email delivery. Those providers operate under their own terms, and outages, errors, or changes on their side can affect the service. We are not responsible for the acts or omissions of third parties. Links to external sites are provided for convenience and are not an endorsement.

11. Moderation, suspension, and termination

We may review, edit, limit, reject, remove, or suspend any content or access at our discretion and without notice, to protect residents, public bodies, and platform integrity. We may stop providing the service to anyone at any time. You may stop using SolveHFX at any time.

12. Feedback

If you send us suggestions, bug reports, or ideas, you grant us an unrestricted, royalty-free right to use them without obligation or compensation to you. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential.

13. Availability and changes

SolveHFX is provided free of charge and may be modified, interrupted, suspended, or discontinued at any time without notice. We may also change these Terms by publishing a revised version on this page with a new effective date. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the revised Terms.

14. No professional advice

Nothing on SolveHFX is legal, engineering, safety, or other professional advice. Information about jurisdiction, responsibility for a road or asset, timelines, or how to escalate an issue is general information only and may be incorrect or out of date.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

SolveHFX is provided on an as-is and as-available basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express, implied, or statutory, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. You use the service at your own risk.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, SolveHFX and its operator are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits, revenue, reputation, or goodwill, arising from or related to your use of the service.

This includes, without limitation, any loss or harm arising from a report that was not delivered, not acted on, delayed, inaccurate, or generated in whole or in part by AI, and from any condition or hazard that remained unrepaired.

Because SolveHFX is provided free of charge, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to CAD $100.

17. Your consumer rights

Some jurisdictions, including Nova Scotia, do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain liabilities. Nothing in these Terms limits rights you have under applicable consumer protection law that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing here excludes liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, where such exclusion is prohibited. Where a limitation is unenforceable, it applies to the maximum extent permitted.

18. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless SolveHFX and its operator from claims, damages, liabilities, losses, and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising from your use of the service, content you submit, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or third-party right.

19. Time limit for claims

Any claim relating to the service must be brought within one year after the event giving rise to it, to the extent such a limitation is permitted by applicable law.

20. Resolving disputes

If you have a problem, contact support@solvehfx.ca first. Most issues can be resolved quickly and informally, and we ask that you give us a genuine opportunity to do so before starting formal proceedings.

21. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Nova Scotia and the applicable federal laws of Canada, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. The courts of Nova Scotia have jurisdiction, subject to any non-waivable right you have to bring proceedings where you live.

22. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the service.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in full force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them in connection with a transfer of the project.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• Survival. Sections on content licence, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law survive termination.

23. Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent to support@solvehfx.ca.