Fine print · N° 002
The agreement between you and Vigil Guard, in the shortest form that the law lets us write it. If anything is unclear, write to hello@vigilguard.com.au and we will answer in plain words.
Vigil Guard is a residential safety membership operating in Victoria, Australia. Your membership tier determines which of our four pillars you receive: Watch (Panic + Lookout), Patrol (adds licensed dusk-to-dawn drive-bys), or Estate (adds Sentry AI camera monitoring, covers up to four properties and twelve residents).
Vigil Guard is not a replacement for Triple Zero. We are not an armed response service. Our operators do not enter your property, do not confront or detain any person, and are not authorised to act as police. If you are in immediate danger, call 000 first. The panic switch is designed to run alongside that call, not instead of it.
The panic switch is a hold-to-trigger control inside the Vigil Guard app. You must hold it for three full seconds intentionally, which prevents pocket-triggers and accidental activations. On activation, the switch opens a call in parallel to your four nominated emergency contacts using a recorded Australian voice message, and alerts the Vigil Guard members on your street, each with your live GPS location.
Vigil Guard does not dial 000 for you. In a life-threatening emergency you call 000 yourself, using the one-tap button in the app. Direct AI-routed 000 dispatch is gated on Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA Victoria) approval, a 12-week process currently underway; we will update this clause the day that approval lands. The service depends on mobile network coverage, GPS availability, and the third-party providers that carry the call and the messages. We cannot guarantee delivery where those fail.
Lookout lets you flag suspicious behaviour near you with one tap. Flags are shared with other members nearby and reviewed by the Vigil Guard team. Three validated flags in the same postcode within ninety minutes trigger a cluster alert and, once Patrol is licensed in that area, a patrol redirect.
Lookout is explicitly not for flagging people based on appearance, ethnicity, or presence in a public place. Flags of that kind are removed without action.
No objectionable content. There is zero tolerance for content or behaviour that is abusive, harassing, defamatory, discriminatory or unlawful. Every report carries controls to report it and to block its author. Reports that draw enough complaints are hidden automatically. We review reported content and remove it, and we remove members who abuse the feed, within 24 hours. By posting, you grant Vigil Guard a licence to display your report to nearby members and you confirm it is made in good faith about observed behaviour. Repeated bad-faith flagging may result in suspension or termination of your membership without refund.
Sentry is an opt-in AI service that analyses footage from security cameras you already own. You control which cameras are connected, and you control the mask zones, which are regions of the frame blacked out before any frame is sent for analysis. Masked regions never reach our vision model.
Sentry produces three tiers of response. Tier I events are logged and visible in your app feed only. Tier II events trigger an SMS to you and a task in the Vigil Guard review queue. Tier III events ask you to confirm before the panic network fires. Tier III automatic dispatch is off in the founding pilot and remains off until we have measured false-positive performance against a real corpus and ESTA approval has landed. Source clips are held in encrypted storage for thirty days and then deleted. Individual frames are not retained after analysis completes.
Patrols are slow, visible drive-bys by a licensed operator between dusk and dawn. Each pass is logged in the platform with GPS, timestamp, operator ID, and, if you request it, a pass-photo. Operators do not enter your property, do not approach your front door, and do not engage with any person on or near your premises.
Founding-pilot patrols begin once the Private Security Business Licence is granted by Victoria Police. Until then, the Patrol tier holds your seat at the founder rate and entitles you to every other pillar at no extra cost. You may veto any operator from attending your street without giving us a reason. We will honour the veto within one shift cycle and find you a different operator.
Memberships are month-to-month and billed in advance. Your founder rate is locked for the life of your membership provided it remains continuous. You can cancel any time in-app. There is no exit interview, no retention call, and no cancellation form longer than a single screen. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We do not pro-rata partial months.
We will give you at least thirty days' written notice before any pricing change or material change to the service. If you don't like the change, cancel before it takes effect and you will never be billed at the new rate.
During the founding pilot, billing is not active and nothing is charged. When paid membership opens, payments will be processed by Stripe; membership is for the Vigil Guard monitoring and patrol service, billed by Vigil Guard, and is not a purchase of digital content, with annual prepay (two months free) available. Patrol will be offered as a refundable street pledge: you pay nothing when you pledge, and a refundable deposit will only be requested once your street reaches its threshold and we are licensed in your state. If your street never reaches the threshold, or we are not licensed, the deposit is fully refunded.
The panic switch is for genuine emergencies, meaning situations where you reasonably believe a person or property is at immediate risk. Deliberate false activations waste your contacts' and your neighbours' attention. Knowingly false activations that result in emergency services being dispatched may be reported to Victoria Police.
Lookout flags must be made in good faith based on observed behaviour. Sentry must not be used to monitor household members or employees without their knowledge in a manner that breaches Victorian surveillance law.
Vigil Guard does not sell, rent, broker, or share your personal data with any third party for marketing, advertising, or any purpose unrelated to delivering the service. We do not have a data-sale business and we will not build one.
Sentry footage analysis runs on Anthropic's Claude API under enterprise terms that forbid training on customer inputs or outputs. Your camera feeds are never used to train any AI model. You can request a full export of every record we hold on you by writing to privacy@vigilguard.com.au. Deletion requests are completed within thirty days, subject to records we are legally required to retain.
The service depends on mobile networks, GPS, internet routing, electricity, and third-party API providers. None of these is perfect. We do not guarantee zero outages, instant response, or that an alert will always reach its destination. We build redundancy where we reasonably can and we publish incidents when they occur.
To the maximum extent permitted by Australian Consumer Law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of your membership is limited to the most recent monthly payment you made to us. Nothing in these terms excludes any consumer guarantee that cannot lawfully be excluded under the ACL.
Every operator engaged by Vigil Guard is licensed under the Victorian Private Security Act 2004, named on our roster, and covered by public liability and professional indemnity insurance. Operators are bound by the Operator Code, which prohibits confrontation, detention, weapons, and any contact with members of the public beyond identifying themselves if approached.
You may ask us not to send a particular operator to your street, with or without a reason. We will honour that request without questions and without telling the operator who made it.
We may terminate or suspend your membership immediately for misuse: knowingly false panic activations, repeated bad-faith Lookout flags, or abuse directed at operators or Vigil Guard staff. In those cases no refund is given for the current period.
For any other reason we will give you thirty days' written notice and a pro-rata refund for any prepaid time remaining. We will tell you the reason in writing.
These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia. Any dispute that cannot be resolved by writing to hello@vigilguard.com.au will be heard in the courts of Victoria. Nothing in this clause prevents you from bringing a complaint to Consumer Affairs Victoria.
Draft v0.2 · 2026-05-21. Pending counsel review before paid onboarding begins. Founding-pilot members operate on goodwill terms; this document becomes binding on first paid transaction.