The deal

These terms are a contract between you and the company below. Using the app or this site means you accept them. If you do not, do not use it.

Who you are contracting with

Who can use OTR

You must be at least 13, and old enough where you live for us to hold your data with your own consent. One account per person. Accounts are not transferable — a username is not a thing you can sell.

You must not be barred from using the service under the laws that apply to you, and you must not have been banned from OTR before.

Your account

You sign in with an email address you control. Keep access to it: anyone who can read your email can take your account. Tell us at once if you think somebody has.

You are responsible for everything sent from your account.

What you may not do

Anonymity is a licence to be honest, not a licence to be cruel. You may not use OTR to:

• Harass, threaten, stalk, bully or intimidate anybody.
• Post sexual content involving minors, or sexualise a minor in any way. This is the one rule where there is no warning, no suspension and no appeal — the account goes and the matter is reported.
• Share intimate images of somebody without their consent.
• Incite violence or self-harm, or celebrate either.
• Attack people for their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Impersonate somebody else, or pretend to be us.
• Publish somebody's private information — address, phone number, workplace.
• Send spam, scams, or anything selling something.
• Try to unmask another user by technical means, or to break, scrape, overload or reverse-engineer the service.
• Use OTR to do anything illegal where you are.

What happens if you do

Conversations can be reported by the person receiving them, and posts can be reported by anybody who can see them. A moderator reads the reported thing — and only that thing — and decides. The outcomes are a suspension with an end date, a permanent ban, or nothing at all.

A moderator is not shown whose account they are deciding about. An administrator can ask, and that asking is recorded against their name. We do it when a decision cannot honestly be made without it — a pattern across accounts, a threat that may need reporting to somebody who can act on it.

If you are suspended you will be told why. If you think we got it wrong, write to [email protected] and a person will read it. We aim to answer an appeal within seven days.

Reporting something to us

Anything illegal, or anything breaking the rules above, can be reported from inside the app — on a conversation, on a post, or on a person — or by writing to [email protected]. Reports are read by a person. If you are reporting something urgent involving a risk to life, contact the police first; we are not an emergency service and cannot act at that speed.

Your messages and posts

What you write stays yours. You give us a licence to host it, store it, back it up, transmit it to the people you sent it to or published it for, and show it to a moderator if it is reported. That licence is worldwide and royalty-free because servers and backups are, non-exclusive because it stays yours, and limited to running and moderating OTR. It ends when the content goes, except for backups already taken and moderation records we have explained in Privacy.

We do not use what you write for anything else, we do not sell it, and we do not train anything on it.

Once a message has been delivered you cannot unsend it, and deleting your account does not remove what you wrote from the phone of the person who received it. See Privacy for exactly what deletion does.

Our side of it

OTR is free, and is provided as it is. We will try to keep it up, keep your messages safe and fix what breaks, but we do not promise it will never be down, never lose anything, or suit any particular purpose of yours.

We may change, suspend or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you are relying on, we will give reasonable notice where we can.

Where we are and are not liable

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited. That includes death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and anything else the law does not allow us to exclude.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for loss of profit, business, goodwill, opportunity or anticipated savings, or for indirect or consequential loss.
• We are not liable for what other users do, say or send. We moderate what is reported and we read every post before it goes up, but we are not the author of somebody else's message.
• Our total liability to you, for everything arising out of these terms, is limited to £100 — which reflects that OTR is provided free of charge.

If you are a consumer, you get these terms as a consumer, and nothing here affects your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or any other law that applies where you live.

If you cost us something

If we are sued, fined or made to pay because of something you did on OTR that broke these terms or the law, you agree to cover what it reasonably costs us, including legal fees. We will tell you promptly if that ever happens and give you the chance to deal with it yourself.

Things outside anyone's control

We are not liable for failing to do something because of an event we could not reasonably control — an outage at a supplier, a cable, a court order, a war.

Ending it

You can delete your account at any moment from You → Settings → Your account, or by the route on this page. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or if we have to stop running the service. If we close the service down, we will give you notice and time to get your things.

If you are reading this on an iPhone

Apple requires us to say some of this, and it is true whoever is reading:

• This contract is between you and us. It is not with Apple, and Apple is not responsible for OTR or anything in it.
• Apple has no obligation to provide any support or maintenance for OTR. If something is wrong, write to [email protected].
• If OTR fails to conform to any warranty that applies, you may tell Apple and Apple will refund what you paid for it, which is nothing. Beyond that refund, Apple has no warranty obligation at all, and anything else — claims, losses, costs — is ours to deal with, not Apple's.
• Apple is not responsible for dealing with any claim you or anybody else has about OTR, including product liability claims, claims that it fails to meet a legal requirement, and claims under consumer protection law.
• If somebody claims OTR infringes their intellectual property, we are responsible for dealing with that, not Apple.
• You confirm you are not in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and may enforce them against you.

Changes

We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and continuing to use OTR after that means you accept it. If you do not, you can delete your account.

The small print of the small print

• If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to.
• We may transfer these terms to somebody else if the service changes hands. You cannot transfer yours.
• These terms, with the pages they link to, are the whole agreement between us.
• Nobody other than you, us and Apple can enforce any of it.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer elsewhere, this does not take away rights your own country gives you, or your right to bring a claim in your own courts where the law says you can.

Contact

[email protected]