Last updated: July 23, 2026
Policy version: 2026-07-23.5
1. Introduction and acceptance
BichoVets (“we”, “us”, “our”) operates an online directory that helps pet owners discover veterinary and pet-care businesses. By accessing or using our website and services, you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not use the platform.
These Terms apply to visitors, registered users, and business users who publish listings. Some sections apply only to business users, as indicated.
2. About BichoVets
BichoVets is an information and discovery platform. We are not a healthcare provider, veterinary practice, insurer, or telehealth service. We do not employ the professionals listed on the platform and we do not provide veterinary care.
3. No medical advice
Content on BichoVets (including listings, descriptions, and any user-submitted material) is provided for general information only. It is not medical or veterinary advice and must not be relied on for diagnosis or treatment.
Nothing on the platform creates a veterinarian–client or doctor–patient relationship between you and BichoVets or any listed business.
Emergencies: If your pet needs urgent care, contact local emergency veterinary services or emergency services immediately. Do not use this platform for emergency assistance.
4. Accounts
You must provide accurate registration information and keep your credentials secure. You are responsible for activity under your account. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or pose a security risk.
Business users must have authority to represent the business they register.
5. Business listings (business users)
If you publish a listing, you are the publisher of that content. You warrant that information you provide (including services, hours, credentials, contact details, and images) is accurate and that you are entitled to publish it.
The public contact email shown on a listing may differ from the email address on your account if you choose to provide a separate business contact address.
You must keep your listing up to date. We may review listings before publication; such review is a quality check only and does not guarantee ongoing accuracy of licences, certifications, hours, or availability.
Pet owners should independently verify credentials and services before relying on any listing.
6. Ownership claims
Authenticated users may submit an ownership claim for an existing listing. Claims may require verification (for example, matching email domains or uploading a business document). We review claims manually and may approve or reject them. Approved claimants may receive store management access according to our internal policies.
7. Prohibited uses and content
You must not use BichoVets to:
- Engage in illegal activity or offer illegal products or services (including unlawful online pharmacies, trafficking of controlled substances, or fraudulent clinics).
- Make misleading medical claims, advertise fake cures, or imply unlicensed practice or false certifications.
- Post false reviews or testimonials, impersonate others, or use fake addresses.
- Abuse the platform (spam, duplicate listings, keyword stuffing, misleading SEO manipulation).
- Harass others, scrape personal data without permission, distribute malware or phishing content, run unauthorized automated attacks, or abuse credentials.
- Publish adult content, hate speech, or violent or extremist material.
- Scrape, crawl, bulk-copy, reverse engineer, clone our UI or functionality, resell our database, use automated extraction, train AI/LLM models on our content, or harvest datasets without our written permission (see also our intellectual property section).
8. Intellectual property
We own or license the website design, software, code, database structure, branding, text, map presentation, search features, and ranking logic. EU database rights (Directive 96/9/EC) and copyright apply. You receive a limited, revocable licence to use the platform for personal or legitimate business purposes in accordance with these Terms.
Except as expressly permitted, you may not copy, scrape, redistribute, or commercially exploit our content or data.
Machine-readable opt-outs (e.g. robots.txt, TDM reservation signals) supplement these Terms regarding text and data mining.
9. Your content
You retain ownership of content you submit. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, display, translate, and promote that content in connection with the service. You represent that you have all rights necessary to grant this licence.
10. Accuracy and verification disclaimer
We do not guarantee that listings, maps, search results, or other information are complete, current, or accurate. Verification efforts may occur but are not guaranteed. Third-party and publisher errors may occur.
11. Maps, geolocation, and Google Maps
Location data, map positions, distances, and “nearby” results are estimates and may be inaccurate, delayed, or unavailable. We may use precise GPS coordinates only after browser-native permission, which you can revoke in browser settings, or derive an approximate city and coordinates from your IP address through an in-memory or local server database lookup. No persistent server-side location record is created for map centering.
The browser may keep a bv_user_location object in sessionStorage containing lat, lng, method, city, and timestamp. It remains within the current tab; GPS entries expire after 15 minutes and approximate entries after 1 hour. We do not use this location data for advertising.
Optional map displays, address autocomplete, and related map features may use Google Maps Platform services. Google scripts and resources load only after you consent through google_maps_consent. Google then receives technical data such as your IP address and browser information and may set or read cookies on Google domains. Google acts as an independent controller for that processing, subject to its Google Maps terms, Privacy Policy, and cookie information. Our use is also subject to applicable contractual data protection terms, including a data processing agreement where Google acts as a processor. We do not guarantee map, geocoding, navigation, distance, or safety-critical routing accuracy.
You can withdraw Google Maps consent at any time via Cookie preferences. Interactive maps and Google-powered address suggestions may then be unavailable until you consent again.
Declining Google Maps consent only disables the interactive map and Google-powered address suggestions; the rest of the website, including all listings in list form, remains fully available. This is a consequence of your own cookie choice and not a malfunction, and it is not a cookie wall—you are never required to accept optional cookies to reach the site’s core content.
12. Third-party services
We integrate third-party services including Google Maps Platform (when you consent), machine translation, and email delivery through our configured mail infrastructure. Those providers have their own terms and privacy practices. We are not responsible for third-party content or outages.
When you consent to Google Maps, Google receives technical data and acts as an independent data controller for that data under its own terms and privacy policy. See section 11 and our Privacy Policy for details.
13. Analytics and Business Insights
On public pages we use self-hosted, first-party analytics to understand how visitors use listings and search. This processing is based on your consent through cookie_consent and is described in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. No analytics events are collected until you accept analytics, analytics data is not transferred to a third-party analytics provider, and it is retained for a maximum of 30 days.
When you use the management dashboard as an authenticated user, we may also collect self-hosted page-view and interaction signals to improve the service, subject to your analytics preferences where the preference panel is shown.
Business users with appropriate permissions may access Business Insights in the management dashboard. These reports show aggregated metrics (such as listing views, contact clicks, and audience breakdowns by country or language) for stores you are authorised to manage. Insights are derived from the consent-gated analytics pipeline and do not identify individual visitors in the reports.
We keep append-only evidence of cookie-preference decisions. Anonymous decisions use the random bv_consent_id; authenticated decisions may also be linked to the logged-in account while it exists, and that link is removed if the account is hard-deleted. Each decision has a unique event UUID for idempotent processing.
Your choice applies immediately. If audit confirmation fails, the pending confirmation is temporarily queued in necessary first-party localStorage and retried. We retain the exact policy and consent-interface snapshots shown, with SHA-256 integrity hashes, as evidence. Consent decision records are retained for 730 days (approximately 24 months) from each decision and then purged.
Consent-audit data is not sent to our analytics system or third-party monitoring. Monitoring uses aggregate operational signals without consent identifiers or user identifiers.
14. Moderation, removal, and termination
We may remove illegal or harmful content immediately. For business users, we will generally provide at least 15 days’ notice before suspending or terminating access for non-urgent breaches, and at least 30 days’ notice before material changes to business terms where required by law. We may block bots, IPs, or abusive automation without notice where necessary for security.
We will provide a clear reason when we restrict a business listing or account, where required by applicable law.
15. Notice of illegal content
Anyone may report illegal content via our Contact page. Include the URL, a description of the issue, and the legal basis. We process notices diligently and may remove content and apply repeat-infringer measures where appropriate. This procedure covers copyright and other unlawful content under applicable EU rules (including the Digital Services Act).
16. Complaints and appeals (business users)
Business users may submit an internal complaint via the Contact page if they disagree with a moderation decision affecting their listing or account. We will review complaints in good faith with human oversight. We do not currently operate a separate formal appeals portal beyond this contact process.
17. Ranking and search
How listings are ordered depends on the feature:
- Homepage carousel: initially a random sample of live listings (with preference for stores that have a logo); after you allow browser location or we derive approximate location from your IP address, results are ordered by distance to you.
- Explore (map and list): results are filtered by your search text, map viewport, category, amenities, country, languages spoken, and “open now” where selected. Within those filters, results are capped and ordered primarily by listing creation date (newer first), not by distance. The interactive map loads only after Google Maps consent.
- Filter dropdowns: categories and amenities with more live listings may appear earlier in selection lists.
We do not currently offer paid ranking placement. If we introduce paid placement, paid listings will be clearly labelled.
18. Reviews and ratings
We may display aggregate rating information on listings where rating data exists. We do not currently offer a public form for visitors to submit reviews on the platform. Any rating data shown may originate from administrative or import processes. Fake or incentivised reviews are prohibited. If we enable public reviews in the future, we will disclose how they are collected and moderated.
19. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, BichoVets is not liable for indirect or consequential damages, loss of profits, inaccurate listings, provider misconduct, treatment outcomes, outages, data loss, or third-party acts. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under mandatory consumer protection law (including death or personal injury caused by our negligence or fraud).
20. Indemnity (business users)
Business users agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims arising out of their listings, misrepresentation of credentials, intellectual property infringement, or violation of law, except where caused by our fault.
21. Security
You must not probe, scan, or test vulnerabilities without our prior written consent, exploit vulnerabilities, or interfere with platform operations. Good-faith security reports may be submitted via the Contact page.
22. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. We will give reasonable notice (at least 15 days; 30 days for material changes affecting business users where required). Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance, or you may close your account before changes take effect.
23. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of Portugal. Consumers may bring proceedings in their country of habitual residence where mandatory EU rules allow.
For consumer disputes, you may use out-of-court dispute resolution mechanisms available in your country. In Portugal, information on consumer alternative dispute resolution is available from the consumer portal at https://www.consumidor.gov.pt/.
24. Contact
For legal notices, copyright or illegal-content reports, security disclosures, and the controller’s applicable identity and publication details, use our Contact page and the website’s publication fields. No email address, legal name, address, or Data Protection Officer is invented in these Terms.
25. Miscellaneous
If any provision is unenforceable, the remainder stays in effect. These Terms constitute the entire agreement regarding use of the platform. We may assign our rights; you may not assign without consent. We are not liable for events beyond our reasonable control.
26. Legal review
These Terms should be reviewed by qualified legal counsel before publication and after material changes to the service or applicable law.