Terms of Service

1.1 Acceptance

By accessing or using the Service, you represent that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and all terms and policies incorporated by reference. If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind it, and "you" refers to that organization.

1.2 Changes

We may modify these Terms. For material changes, we will provide notice by reasonable means — such as in-app notice or email to the address on your account — before the changes take effect, and where required by law we will ask you to affirmatively accept them. Continued use after the effective date of a change constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree to a change, stop using the Service and delete your account (Section 18.1).

2.1 Minimum age

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian.

2.2 Legal capacity and compliance

You represent that you have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms and that your use of the Service complies with all laws applicable to you. Blockchain technology is restricted or prohibited in certain jurisdictions; you are solely responsible for ensuring your use is lawful where you are located.

2.3 Sanctions and export controls

You represent that you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or a national of any country or region subject to a comprehensive U.S. embargo or sanctions program; that you are not identified on any U.S. government restricted-party list (including the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List); and that you will not use or export the Service in violation of U.S. export-control or sanctions laws.

3.1 Sign-in methods

The Service authenticates users through (a) a "magic link" / one-time email code sent to your email address, (b) Google sign-in (OAuth), and (c) Sign in with Apple. These authentication services are provided through our infrastructure providers (Section 12). You are responsible for maintaining the security and control of the email, Google, or Apple account you use to access the Service.

3.2 Account responsibility

You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. Provide accurate information, keep it current, and promptly notify us of any unauthorized access to or use of your account.

3.3 One account; no sharing

You may not share your account, impersonate another person, or create an account using another person's identity or credentials.

3.4 Suspension and termination by us

We may suspend, disable, or terminate your account as described in Section 18.

3.5 Account deletion

You may delete your account at any time directly within the App (Settings → Account → Delete Account) or by contacting us. Section 18.1 and the Privacy Policy describe what deletion removes — and what it cannot remove.

4.1 What the Service does

Notchd lets you capture or upload a photograph. The Service computes a SHA-256 cryptographic hash of the image file's bytes and records that hash on the public Polygon blockchain (mainnet). This creates a timestamped, tamper-evident record: if the file's bytes are later altered, the recomputed hash will no longer match the recorded hash.

4.2 What the Service does NOT do — important

The Service verifies only that a specific file's bytes correspond to a previously recorded hash. The Service does NOT verify, certify, or guarantee any of the following:

• that a photograph depicts real, unedited, unstaged, or truthful events;
• the identity of the person who captured or uploaded a photograph;
• the time, date, or geographic location a photograph was actually taken;
• that the uploader owns or has rights to the photograph; or
• that a photograph has any particular legal, evidentiary, journalistic, or commercial value.

4.3 Mandatory registration; no opt-out

Blockchain registration on Polygon mainnet is a mandatory, automatic part of submitting a photo through the Service — there is no setting to disable it on a per-upload or account basis. If you do not want a photo's hash permanently and publicly recorded on the blockchain, do not submit that photo to the Service.

4.4 Changes to the Service

We may add, change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service (including features, networks, or supported content types) at any time without liability to you, subject to applicable law.

5.1 Permanent and irreversible

When a hash is recorded on the blockchain, that record is permanent and cannot be edited, deleted, reversed, recalled, or removed by you, by us, or by anyone else. This is an inherent property of public blockchain technology.

5.2 Public and visible forever

Blockchain records — including the photo hash, transaction hash, network, and associated timestamp — are publicly visible to anyone, indefinitely. Any person may view these records using public blockchain explorers, independently of the Service.

5.3 No control over the blockchain

The blockchain networks (Polygon and associated node/RPC providers such as Alchemy) are decentralized and/or operated by third parties. We do not own or control them. We do not guarantee that any registration will succeed, be confirmed, be permanently retained, or be available at any given time, and we are not responsible for network congestion, forks, downtime, gas/fee behavior, chain reorganizations, or discontinuation of any network.

5.4 Authorization; no right to removal

By submitting a photograph to the Service, you authorize us to compute and publish its hash to the Polygon blockchain, as described in Section 4. You acknowledge that you cannot later require us or anyone else to remove, alter, or reverse that on-chain record, including after you delete the underlying photo or your account (Sections 6.4 and 12.4).

5.5 No legal or evidentiary guarantee

We make no representation that any blockchain record will be recognized, accepted, or given weight by any court, agency, or other body, or that it satisfies any legal, regulatory, or evidentiary standard.

6.1 Your ownership

As between you and Notchd LLC, you retain all ownership rights you have in the photographs, captions, and other content you submit to the Service ("User Content").

6.2 License to Notchd LLC

You grant Notchd LLC a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable (to our service providers), and transferable license to host, store, cache, reproduce, hash, process, adapt (e.g., generate preview/social-share images), publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute your User Content for the purposes of operating, providing, securing, promoting, and improving the Service, and as otherwise described in these Terms. This license lasts as long as your User Content is on the Service and, to the extent your User Content or its hash has been shared, distributed, or recorded on a blockchain, may persist thereafter.

6.3 User Content is public by default — important

When you upload a photo, the Service generates a publicly accessible URL for the image file and a public web page at notchd.io/photo/{id}, designed so that anyone with the link can view the photo and so that the photo appears in link previews (Open Graph / social "unfurl" images) when shared. You should treat all User Content you upload as public. Do not upload anything you are not comfortable making publicly available.

6.4 Deletion does not reach everything

We provide tools to hide or delete a post and to delete the stored image file and database record. However, deletion from Notchd cannot remove: (a) the corresponding hash and transaction already recorded on the blockchain (Section 5); or (b) copies, screenshots, caches, or shares that others may have made while the content was public. You accept these limitations.

6.5 Feedback

If you send us feedback or suggestions, you grant us an unrestricted, perpetual, royalty-free license to use them without obligation to you.

7.1

you own the content or have all rights, licenses, consents, and permissions necessary to submit it and to grant the licenses in Section 6;

7.2

it does not and will not infringe or violate any third party's intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, moral, or other rights;

7.3

you have obtained all necessary consents from any identifiable individuals depicted, including consent to make the content and its hash public and permanent as described in these Terms; and

7.4

it is not unlawful and does not violate Section 8.

8.1 Prohibited content

You may not submit, upload, or register any content that:

• is unlawful, or depicts or facilitates illegal activity;
• constitutes child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or sexualizes minors in any way;
• is sexually explicit, pornographic, or contains nudity;
• depicts graphic violence, gore, or the infliction of harm;
• promotes hatred, harassment, bullying, or discrimination against individuals or groups;
• infringes intellectual property or violates privacy or publicity rights;
• is defamatory, fraudulent, or deceptive; or
• contains malware or otherwise harmful code.

8.2 Prohibited conduct

You may not:

• attempt to circumvent, disable, or defeat content moderation or security measures;
• upload another person's photograph and misrepresent it as your own or as authentic;
• exceed, evade, or abuse rate limits or other usage controls (the Service currently limits registration to a maximum number of uploads per hour, which we may change at any time);
• access, scrape, or harvest the Service or other users' data by automated means without authorization;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract source code or credentials from the Service;
• interfere with, overload, or attack the Service, our backend, or our providers; or
• use the Service to violate any law or the rights of others.

8.3 Enforcement

We may investigate and take any action we deem appropriate for violations, including removing or hiding content, refusing registration, limiting or terminating access, and reporting to law enforcement.

8.4 Zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive users

Notchd has zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive behavior. By using the Service you agree not to post objectionable content (including any content prohibited by Section 8.1) and not to engage in abusive, harassing, or threatening conduct toward other users. The Service provides tools to (a) filter submitted content through automated moderation (Section 9), (b) report objectionable content using the in-app reporting tool, and (c) block abusive users at any time from their profile or from the Blocked Users screen in Settings. We review reports of objectionable content and, where a violation is found, will remove the offending content and eject the user who provided it within 24 hours of receiving the report. We may take these actions without prior notice. Contact information for reports is provided in Section 20.7.

9.1 Automated screening

Uploaded images are automatically screened by a third-party artificial-intelligence content-moderation service (currently Sightengine) before any blockchain registration or storage occurs — in part to avoid recording violating content immutably on a blockchain.

9.2 Outcomes

Based on moderation results and our own review, content may be approved, flagged (and hidden pending review), rejected, or removed. Rejected content is not registered on the blockchain and is not published. We maintain the ability to conduct manual administrative review of flagged content and to change a moderation decision.

9.3 Moderation is imperfect and not an endorsement

Automated and human moderation may produce false positives or negatives. Approval or publication of any content is not an endorsement by us, and we do not guarantee that all violating content will be detected or removed. We are not liable for content that is not detected, or for the removal or non-registration of content our systems flag or reject.

9.4 Reporting to authorities

We may report unlawful content — including suspected CSAM — to law enforcement and to organizations such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and may preserve related information as required by law.

10.1 Reporting

The Service provides an in-app mechanism to report content you believe violates these Terms; reports may also be sent to dev@notchd.io. We review reports and act as described in Section 8.4. Note: even where we hide or remove a post, we cannot remove the associated on-chain hash (Section 5).

10.2 Copyright — DMCA notices

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent containing: (a) your physical or electronic signature; (b) identification of the copyrighted work; (c) identification of the allegedly infringing material and its location (e.g., the notchd.io/photo/{id} URL); (d) your contact information; (e) a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized; and (f) a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are authorized to act. Notices should be sent to our Designated Copyright Agent: Notchd LLC, 7000 Hadley Rd, South Plainfield, NJ 07080-1139, United States — Email: dev@notchd.io.

10.3 Counter-notices

If your content was removed due to a DMCA notice and you believe the removal was mistaken, you may send our designated agent a counter-notice meeting the requirements of 17 U.S.C. §512(g), and we will process it as the statute provides.

10.4 Repeat infringers

We will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are repeat infringers.

12.1 Providers we use

The Service depends on third-party providers, currently including: Supabase (authentication, database, and file storage), Railway (backend hosting), Vercel (web hosting), Polygon and node/RPC providers such as Alchemy (blockchain and network access), Sightengine (content moderation), Google (sign-in), and Apple (sign-in). Your use of the Service may be subject to these providers' own terms and privacy policies.

12.2 No control; no liability

We do not control third-party services and are not responsible for their acts, omissions, availability, security, changes, or discontinuation. Interruptions or failures of these services may affect the Service.

12.3 Data we process

In providing the Service, we and our providers process data including your email address and/or Google or Apple account identifier, your photos and captions, timestamps, SHA-256 hashes, blockchain transaction hashes and network identifiers, moderation results, and technical data such as IP addresses and rate-limiting information. Our collection and use of personal data is described in our Privacy Policy.

12.4 Privacy and blockchain immutability — important

You have certain rights over your personal data under applicable laws (which may include, depending on your location, the GDPR or the CCPA/CPRA). We can delete database records and stored image files upon a valid request. However, we cannot delete, alter, or "forget" information that has already been recorded on a public blockchain, because that data is outside our control and is technically immutable (Section 5). Because registration is a mandatory part of submitting a photo (Section 4.3), you acknowledge this limitation on data deletion each time you submit one. Please review our Privacy Policy for details on your rights and how to exercise them.

14.1 "AS IS."

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT AND RECORDS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

14.2 No guarantee of results

WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, ACCURATE, OR ERROR-FREE; THAT ANY BLOCKCHAIN REGISTRATION WILL SUCCEED OR PERSIST; THAT MODERATION WILL DETECT ALL VIOLATING CONTENT; OR THAT ANY RECORD HAS AUTHENTICITY, EVIDENTIARY, OR LEGAL VALUE (SEE SECTIONS 4 AND 5).

14.3 Jurisdictional limits

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so some of the above may not apply to you.

15.1 Exclusion of certain damages

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL NOTCHD LLC OR ITS MEMBERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, OR PROVIDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, GOODWILL, OR REPUTATION, LOSS OR IRREVERSIBILITY OF BLOCKCHAIN RECORDS, BLOCKCHAIN/GAS COSTS, OR THE PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF CONTENT, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, WHETHER BASED ON CONTRACT, TORT, OR ANY OTHER THEORY, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

15.2 Cap on liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (US$100).

15.3 Jurisdictional limits

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you.

18.1 By you

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account directly within the App (Settings → Account → Delete Account) or by contacting us. Deletion removes your account, photos, and database records from our systems within a reasonable period, but cannot remove on-chain records or third-party copies (Sections 5 and 6.4).

18.2 By us

We may suspend or terminate your access to all or part of the Service at any time, with or without notice, including for violation of these Terms or to comply with law or protect the Service or other users.

18.3 Effect of termination

Upon termination, your right to use the Service ends. We may delete your account and stored content. On-chain records will persist and cannot be removed (Section 5). Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including Sections 4.2, 5, 6.2–6.4, 7, 12.4, 14–17, 19, 20, and 21) will survive.

19.1 Governing law

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or the Service are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey and applicable U.S. federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

19.2 Informal resolution

Before filing a claim, you agree to try to resolve the dispute informally by contacting us; we will try to resolve it with you for at least 30 days.

19.3 Binding arbitration and class-action waiver; opt-out

To the extent permitted by law, any dispute not resolved informally will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, seated in New Jersey (or conducted by videoconference or telephone at your election), rather than in court, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court. You and Notchd LLC waive any right to a jury trial and to participate in a class, collective, or representative action. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement and class waiver by sending written notice to dev@notchd.io within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, stating your name, the email on your account, and your intent to opt out; if you opt out, disputes will be resolved in the courts identified in Section 19.4.

19.4 Venue

If arbitration does not apply, you and Notchd LLC consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in New Jersey for any dispute, and each party consents to personal jurisdiction there.

20.1 Entire agreement

These Terms and the documents incorporated by reference are the entire agreement between you and Notchd LLC regarding the Service and supersede prior agreements.

20.2 Severability

If any provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect, and the unenforceable provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary.

20.3 No waiver

Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it.

20.4 Assignment

You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them freely, including in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

20.5 Force majeure

We are not liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including blockchain network or third-party provider failures.

20.6 Notices

We may provide notices to you via the Service or the email associated with your account.

20.8 California users

Under California Civil Code §1789.3, California users may contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or (800) 952-5210.

21.1 Acknowledgement

These Terms are concluded between you and Notchd LLC only, and not with Apple Inc. ("Apple"). Notchd LLC, not Apple, is solely responsible for the App and its content.

21.2 Scope of license

The license granted to you for the App is a limited, non-transferable license to use the App on any Apple-branded product that you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules set forth in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions, except that the App may be accessed and used by other accounts associated with you via Family Sharing or volume purchasing where applicable.

21.3 Maintenance and support

Notchd LLC is solely responsible for providing any maintenance and support services for the App. Apple has no obligation whatsoever to furnish any maintenance or support services with respect to the App.

21.4 Warranty

Notchd LLC is solely responsible for any product warranties, whether express or implied by law, to the extent not effectively disclaimed. In the event of any failure of the App to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price (if any) for the App to you; to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Apple will have no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to the App.

21.5 Product claims

Notchd LLC, not Apple, is responsible for addressing any claims by you or any third party relating to the App or your possession and/or use of the App, including but not limited to: (a) product-liability claims; (b) any claim that the App fails to conform to any applicable legal or regulatory requirement; and (c) claims arising under consumer-protection, privacy, or similar legislation.

21.6 Intellectual-property rights

In the event of any third-party claim that the App or your possession and use of the App infringes that third party's intellectual-property rights, Notchd LLC, not Apple, will be solely responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim.

21.7 Legal compliance

You represent and warrant that (a) you are not located in a country that is subject to a U.S. Government embargo, or that has been designated by the U.S. Government as a "terrorist supporting" country; and (b) you are not listed on any U.S. Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

21.8 Developer contact

Any questions, complaints, or claims regarding the App should be directed to: Notchd LLC, dev@notchd.io.

21.9 Third-party terms

You must comply with applicable third-party terms of agreement when using the App.

21.10 Third-party beneficiary

You acknowledge and agree that Apple, and Apple's subsidiaries, are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms, and that, upon your acceptance of these Terms, Apple will have the right (and will be deemed to have accepted the right) to enforce these Terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.