Terms and Conditions

01These Terms, and your acceptance of them

These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Unbirden, India ("Unbirden", "we", "us"), governing your access to and use of unbirden.com (the "Platform").

By accessing, browsing, registering for or otherwise using the Platform, you confirm that you have read, understood and agree to be bound by these Terms in full, together with our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. If you do not agree to these Terms, you must not use the Platform.

02Who may use Unbirden

To use the Platform you confirm that:

• You are at least 18 years old.
• You are capable of entering into a contract under the Indian Contract Act 1872, or the equivalent law where you live.
• You are not barred from using the Platform under any applicable law, and your use of it does not breach any law that applies to you in your country.
• You have not previously been removed from the Platform by us.

03Your account

• Accounts are created by entering an email address and confirming a one-time code. What we do and don't keep is set out in the Privacy Policy.
• One person, one account. You may not create multiple accounts, and you may not create a new account to evade a suspension or removal.
• You are responsible for everything done through your account and for keeping access to your email secure.
• You may not sell, transfer, rent or share your account.
• We may refuse to create, suspend, or close an account where we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached.

04What Unbirden is — and what it is not

Unbirden is a space to share experiences anonymously and read the experiences of others. It exists so that things which are hard to say aloud can be said at all.

You use the Platform, and rely on anything you read on it, at your own risk.

05Your content, and the rules for it

"Your Content" means anything you post, comment, submit or otherwise make available on the Platform.

5.1  You are responsible for it

You confirm that Your Content is yours to post, that it does not infringe anyone else's rights, and that it does not break any law. Anonymity is a feature of the Platform. It is not a defence, and it is not a shield from liability.

5.2  What you must not post

You must not post, or attempt to post, anything that:

• Involves a child sexually. Any content that sexualises, exploits or endangers a minor is met with immediate removal, permanent account closure and referral to the appropriate authorities. This is absolute and there is no version of it we tolerate.
• Identifies someone. Real names, phone numbers, addresses, workplaces, vehicle numbers, social media handles, photographs, or any other detail that could identify a real person — yours or anyone else's. This includes identifying someone by an accumulation of details that would be harmless separately.
• Threatens, harasses, stalks or intimidates any person or group.
• Incites or glorifies violence, terrorism, or any unlawful act, or promotes an organisation that does.
• Attacks people for who they are — on the basis of religion, caste, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any comparable characteristic.
• Encourages or instructs self-harm, suicide or disordered eating. You are welcome to write about your own experience of these things, and to say how bad it has been; that is part of why the Platform exists. What is prohibited is encouraging another person towards harm, or supplying method or instruction. The difference matters and we enforce on it.
• Contains links, contact details, invitations to message elsewhere, or any other attempt to move a person off the Platform. See section 6.
• Recruits, solicits, proselytises, campaigns or advertises, including for any cause, group, organisation, product or service.
• Impersonates another person or organisation, or fabricates an account presented as real.
• Is unlawful in India under the Information Technology Act 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, or any other applicable law, or is unlawful where you are.
• Is spam, repetitive, machine-generated at scale, or posted to manipulate attention.
• Infringes copyright, trade marks or any other right belonging to someone else.

5.3  Content about other people

Unbirden exists for you to tell your own story. Other people appear in almost everyone's story, and that is expected — but they appear as unnamed and unidentifiable participants in your account of events, never as targets. Do not use the Platform to expose, accuse, punish or track a real identifiable person.

06No private messaging, and no moving off the Platform

The Platform has no private messaging. This is deliberate: no private channel means no place where someone can be groomed, defrauded or pressured out of sight.

Accordingly, you must not use posts or comments to share an email address, phone number, social handle, invite link, group link or any other route to contact you or anyone else elsewhere. Our systems remove links and contact details automatically, and attempts to evade that removal are treated as a serious breach.

07Lifespan, deletion, and what we cannot undo

• When you post, you choose how long the post lives. When that period ends, the post and its comments are deleted, as described in the Privacy Policy.
• You may delete your own post at any time before that using Delete Now.
• Deletion removes content from the live Platform, and it then cycles out of encrypted backups on the schedule in our Privacy Policy.

We may also retain content for longer than your chosen lifespan where we are required to by law, or where it is needed to investigate a report, enforce these Terms or respond to a legal claim.

08The permission you give us

You keep ownership of Your Content. We do not claim it, and we do not acquire it.

You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for technical purposes, publish and display Your Content solely in order to operate, secure and provide the Platform to you and other users. "Adapt for technical purposes" means things like reformatting for different screen sizes or storing a copy in a backup — not editing what you said.

09Moderation and enforcement

• We are not obliged to review content before it is published, and we do not.
• Content that is reported enough times is hidden automatically, before any person on our side reads it.
• Where we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached, we may remove or hide content, limit the reach of an account, suspend an account, close an account permanently, or refuse future access — with or without prior notice, depending on the seriousness.
• We may act on content that technically sits inside the rules but which, in our reasonable judgement, endangers a person or the integrity of the Platform.
• Enforcement decisions are ours to make, and we make them with the safety of users as the priority. We are not obliged to explain a decision in detail where doing so would help someone evade enforcement.

Nothing in this section obliges us to monitor the Platform, and our exercise (or non-exercise) of these rights does not make us responsible for user content.

10Reporting content, and grievances

Every post and comment can be reported from within the Platform. Reports are confidential: the person reported is never shown who reported them.

We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 15 days. Complaints concerning content that exposes a person's identity or sexual conduct without consent are actioned within 24 hours.

11Our intellectual property

The Platform itself — the name Unbirden, the logo, the software, the design, and everything we have created that is not user content — belongs to us or our licensors. These Terms give you permission to use the Platform, and nothing more.

You must not copy, modify, distribute, sell, lease, reverse engineer or attempt to extract the source code of any part of the Platform, except to the extent the law says you may despite this restriction.

12Things you must not do to the Platform

You must not:

• scrape, crawl, harvest or otherwise systematically collect content or data from the Platform, whether manually or by automated means;
• use bots, scripts or automation to create accounts, post, vote or report;
• attempt to identify or de-anonymise any user, or to correlate posts to a person;
• probe, scan or test the security of the Platform, or attempt to circumvent any security, filtering or rate-limiting measure;
• interfere with the Platform's operation, or place an unreasonable load on it;
• use the Platform to develop a competing service, or to build a dataset of any kind.

13Availability of the Platform

We aim to keep the Platform running, but we do not guarantee that it will be available uninterrupted or error-free. We may modify, suspend, restrict or discontinue any part of the Platform, or the Platform as a whole, at any time.

If we discontinue the Platform permanently, we will give reasonable notice where we can, so you can delete anything you would rather not leave behind.

14Free access, and paid features

The Platform is currently provided free of charge.

We reserve the right to introduce paid features, subscriptions or other charges in future. If we do, we will publish clear terms describing the price, what it covers, how to cancel and how refunds work, and no charge will apply to you unless you expressly choose to pay it. Nothing in these Terms obliges you to pay for anything you have not agreed to buy.

15Ending your use of the Platform

You may stop using the Platform at any time. Deleting your account removes your account identifier and your content, as described in the Privacy Policy — request it via our Contact page.

We may suspend or terminate your access, with immediate effect and without refund of anything you have paid, where we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms, where required by law, or where continuing to provide access to you would create a risk to other users.

Sections 5.1, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 survive the end of these Terms.

16Disclaimers

The Platform is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations that are not expressly stated in these Terms, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

In particular, we do not warrant that:

• content posted by users is true, accurate, lawful, or safe to rely on;
• the Platform will be uninterrupted, secure, or free of errors or harmful components;
• automated filtering will catch most pieces of prohibited content or every identifying detail;

We are an intermediary. We host what users write; we do not author it, endorse it, or verify it.

17Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

Subject to that, and to the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, opportunity or anticipated savings.
• We are not liable for loss or damage arising from content posted by other users, from your reliance on anything you read on the Platform, from a third party copying or recording your content before it expired, or from unauthorised access to the Platform not caused by our negligence.

18Your responsibility to us

If a third party brings a claim against us because of Your Content, your breach of these Terms, or your breach of any law, you agree to indemnify us against the reasonable, direct losses and legal costs we incur as a result, provided we notify you of the claim, do not settle it without your agreement (not to be unreasonably withheld), and give you a reasonable opportunity to participate in the defence.

This does not apply to the extent the loss was caused by our own breach or negligence.

19Changes to these Terms

We reserve the right to amend, update, replace, add to or withdraw these Terms, in whole or in part, at any time and at our sole discretion — for example to reflect changes to the Platform, our business, or the law. The version published on this page is the version in force, and the "Last updated" date shows when it last changed.

A revised version takes effect from the date it is published, unless we state a later date. Your continued access to or use of the Platform after a revised version is published constitutes your acceptance of it. It is your responsibility to review this page from time to time. If you do not agree to a change, your remedy is to stop using the Platform and delete your account.

Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give notice within the Platform before it takes effect. Where a change concerns the processing of your personal data and your consent is the basis for that processing, section 14 of the Privacy Policy applies.

20Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them (including non-contractual disputes), are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of India.

The courts at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India shall have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any such dispute or claim.

If you access the Platform from outside India, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for complying with the law where you are.

21General

• Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right immediately, we do not lose it.
• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Platform.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor of our business, on notice.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• Language. These Terms are in English. Any translation is provided for convenience, and the English version prevails.