Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Nsibi is a business registered in Ontario, Canada under Business Identification Number 1001736279, with its principal place of business at 3080 Yonge Street, Unit 6060, Toronto, Ontario M4N 3N1, Canada. It operates the Nsibi app and the nsibi.app websites.

You can reach us at hello@nsibi.chat or by writing to the address above. In these terms, "Nsibi", "we", "us" and "our" mean that business, and "you" means the person using the service.

2. Your agreement to these terms

You agree to these terms when you create an account, or when you use any part of Nsibi that does not need one, such as reading a shared post on our website.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. It is part of this agreement, and reading it is the only way to know what using Nsibi means for your data.

Some features carry extra rules that we show you at the point of use, such as the confirmation screen before you delete your account or the notice before you buy coins. Where those rules and these terms differ, the ones shown at the point of use apply to that feature.

3. Who can use Nsibi

Nsibi has a minimum age, and some features have higher ones. These are gates in the product, not just promises on a page.

13 to hold an account

You must be at least 13 years old, or older if the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for using a service like this one. Where it does, that higher age applies to you.

16 for direct messages

Private one-to-one and group chats are available from 16.

18 to broadcast live

Hosting a live broadcast is available from 18. Watching one is not restricted by this rule, though individual broadcasts may be.

18 for coins, gifts and earnings

Buying coins, sending a gift, receiving a gift, earning from your content and withdrawing money all require you to be at least 18.

We ask for your date of birth when you sign up and we use it to apply these gates. Giving us a false date of birth is a breach of these terms, and an account we believe is held by someone below the minimum age may be restricted or closed.

If you are between 13 and 17, your account is set to a more private default: your posts go to your followers rather than to everyone, unless you change that yourself.

You also agree that you are not barred from using Nsibi under the laws that apply to you, including sanctions and export controls, and that we have not previously closed an account of yours for breaking these terms.

4. Your account

Your account is your phone number. We verify it with a code by SMS, and anyone who controls that number and can receive that code can reach your account, so keep both secure.

You are responsible for what happens on your account. Tell us promptly at hello@nsibi.chat if you think someone else has access to it.

Give us accurate information and keep it current. Do not impersonate anyone, and do not use a name or profile picture that suggests you are someone you are not.

You can delete your account from inside the app at any time. What is removed and what is kept is set out on our account deletion page and on the confirmation screen before you confirm, and we would rather you read it there than discover it afterwards. In short: your profile, your content, your encrypted keys and your device links go, while records we are required to keep, such as settled payments and reports filed about the account, stay in an anonymised form.

5. Your content, and the permission you give us

Everything you create on Nsibi stays yours. Posting it here does not transfer ownership of it to us.

To run the service we need your permission to handle it. When you post, comment, go live, share a status or send a message, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, encode, adapt for delivery and display that content, and to distribute it to the people you sent or published it to. This licence exists so that we can operate Nsibi and for no other purpose.

For content you publish to a public audience, the licence is a little wider, because publishing has consequences beyond the moment: it also covers showing your post in recommendations and search results inside the app, rendering it on a public web page so that a shared link works for someone without the app, and generating previews, thumbnails and clips of it. If you have set a post to a limited audience, we apply that limit.

Other people can act on what you publish. Viewers of a live broadcast can cut clips from it, and viewers of a video can record its sound and use that sound in their own posts. When you broadcast or post publicly you agree to that, and the clip or the sound credits you.

The licence ends for a piece of content when you delete it, except where it has already been shared onward by someone else, where a copy sits in a backup for a limited period, or where we must keep it to comply with the law or to deal with a report about it.

You must have the rights to what you post. If your video contains someone else's music, footage, artwork or likeness, it is on you to have permission to use it here.

If you send us feedback or a suggestion about Nsibi, we can use it without owing you anything for it. Please do not send us confidential ideas.

6. Encrypted chats: what we can and cannot do

Your chats and calls are end-to-end encrypted. The keys are made on your device and never leave it, so the copy of a message that passes through our servers is one we cannot open. The same is true of your chat backup, which is encrypted with a key only you hold.

Because we cannot read your chats, we cannot recover them for you, moderate them, or produce their contents to anyone, including in response to a legal request. If you lose your device and your backup key, that history is gone. This is what end-to-end encryption is, not a limitation of our support.

The rules in section 8 still apply to what you send in a chat, and we act on reports about a conversation using what the person reporting it shows us. What we cannot do is read it ourselves.

Encryption covers your conversations. It does not cover everything in the app, and section 7 says what it does not cover. Our security page sets out the same boundary in more detail.

7. Posts, status and live are not encrypted

Anything you publish to the feed, post as a status, or broadcast live is readable by our servers. It has to be: ranking, search, showing a shared link to someone without the app, and moderating a report all need the content itself.

Treat a post as public even when you have limited its audience. An audience setting controls who Nsibi shows it to; it cannot stop a person who can see it from screenshotting it or passing it on.

A post you make public may also be rendered on a public web page at nsibi.app so that a link to it works for someone who does not have the app, and it may then be indexed by search engines. If you would rather that did not happen, keep the post to a limited audience, or turn off your public profile page in your privacy settings.

8. Rules for using Nsibi

These rules apply everywhere on Nsibi, including in encrypted chats. Do not use Nsibi to post, send, broadcast or do any of the following.

• Sexual content involving anyone under 18, in any form, real or generated. We report this to the authorities and close the account, with no warning and no appeal.
• Sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, or the sharing of intimate images of anyone without their consent.
• Threats, harassment, stalking, bullying, or the coordinated targeting of a person or a group.
• Hate speech, or attacks on people because of their ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, disability, disease, age, sex, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Content that promotes, praises or facilitates terrorism, violent extremism, or a violent criminal organisation.
• Encouraging or instructing anyone to hurt themselves, including suicide and eating-disorder content.
• Graphic violence or shocking imagery posted for its own sake.
• Pornography and sexually explicit content. Nsibi does not permit it at any age.
• Selling or promoting drugs, weapons, counterfeit goods, stolen data, or anything else whose sale is illegal where you or your audience are.
• Fraud, scams, phishing, pyramid or investment schemes, or fake giveaways.
• Impersonating a person, business or organisation, or misrepresenting your affiliation with one.
• Content that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, or other rights.
• Publishing private information about someone else, such as a home address, an identity document or a phone number, without their permission.
• Deliberate misinformation that risks physical harm, and manipulated media presented as real where it would deceive.
• Spam, bulk or repetitive messaging, artificial engagement, and buying or selling accounts, followers, likes, views or gifts.
• Malware, and anything designed to disrupt or gain unauthorised access to Nsibi, to another user's device, or to any system connected to either.

You also agree not to: scrape or harvest data from Nsibi, use bots or automated tools against it, reverse engineer it except where the law says you may, resell or sublicense access to it, work around a limit or a block we have put in place, or use Nsibi to break the law where you are.

Coins and earnings carry two further rules: do not use gifts to launder money or to move value between accounts you control, and do not solicit gifts by deceiving people about what they are supporting.

9. Reporting, moderation and enforcement

Every post, comment, account, live broadcast and message can be reported from inside the app. You can also block an account, which stops it contacting you and hides its content from you, and mute a conversation or a person without blocking them.

We review reports and act on them. Depending on what we find, we may remove a piece of content, stop a live broadcast, limit an account's reach, restrict a feature such as live or gifting, suspend an account, or close it. Serious cases are reported to the authorities.

A report about a live broadcast can stop that broadcast. It never, on its own, closes an account: an account is only acted on after a person has reviewed the case.

If we act on your account and you think we got it wrong, write to hello@nsibi.chat and we will look at it again. We aim to explain what happened, except where telling you would help someone evade enforcement or where we are not permitted to say.

We are not obliged to monitor what people post, and we do not read encrypted chats. Nothing in this section makes us responsible for content someone else has published.

10. Coins, gifts and earnings

Nsibi has two kinds of balance and they are not the same thing. Confusing them is the single easiest mistake to make here, so this section keeps them apart.

Coins

Coins are a limited, personal, non-transferable licence to a feature inside Nsibi. They are not money, not a deposit, not a stored-value instrument and not your property. They have no value outside Nsibi, cannot be sold or transferred to another person, and cannot be redeemed for cash.

Earnings

Earnings are what a creator receives when someone sends them a gift, or when a sound they own is used in a video that receives one. Earnings are recorded in your wallet in United States dollars and can be withdrawn, subject to the conditions below.

You buy coins with real money and spend them on gifts. A gift sent to a creator is consumed at the moment you send it: it converts into earnings for the recipient at the rate shown in the app, and the transaction is final. We keep a share, which is the fee for running the service.

You can also convert your own earnings into coins at the rate shown in the app. That is not a purchase. No money changes hands and nothing is charged to you; you are spending a balance you already earned here.

Coins are non-refundable except where the law where you live requires otherwise, or where the app store you bought them through gives you a refund under its own rules. If you buy coins through Apple or Google, their refund process applies and we cannot override it.

We may change the price of a coin pack, the number of coins a gift costs, the rate at which a gift becomes earnings, and the share we keep. Changes apply to purchases and gifts made after the change, never retroactively to coins you already hold or earnings already credited.

Withdrawing earnings requires you to be 18, to have a payout method we support in your country, and to pass any identity or anti-fraud checks we are required to run. A minimum withdrawal amount and processing times are shown in the app. We may hold or refuse a withdrawal while we investigate a report of fraud, a chargeback, or a claim over ownership of a sound.

We may reverse coins or earnings that arose from a payment that was charged back, from fraud, or from a breach of these terms. If your account is closed for breaking these terms, coins are forfeited; earnings already properly credited to you remain payable unless they came from the conduct we closed the account for.

Coins and earnings expire only where the law allows it and we have told you in advance. If Nsibi closes down, we will say so with reasonable notice and give you a period to withdraw earnings; unspent coins are not refundable in that case beyond what the law requires.

Taxes are yours. Earnings from Nsibi may be income where you live, and it is your responsibility to declare and pay what is owed. We may be required to collect tax information from you or to report and withhold amounts, and we may hold a withdrawal until you have given us what is needed.

11. Payments

Payments to and from Nsibi are handled by payment providers, not by us. Depending on what you are doing and where you are, that may be Apple, Google, a card processor, or a mobile money operator. Your card number, your mobile money PIN and the like go to that provider; we receive a record that a payment succeeded, not the credential behind it.

Each provider has its own terms and its own limits, and those apply to your payment as well as these terms. Mobile money operators in particular cap the amount of a single transaction, so a large payment may be split into several prompts. We tell you how many to expect before you start, and each one is a separate approval on your handset.

A price shown in your local currency is converted at the time of the charge. The amount your bank or operator actually takes is the authoritative one.

Donations made on our website are gifts to Nsibi. They buy nothing, they earn no coins and they are not refundable.

12. Music and sounds

Nsibi has a library of sounds you can use in a video, and any video you post can itself become a sound that others use.

A sound from our library is licensed to you for use inside Nsibi only, in a post you make here. It does not come with the right to use that recording anywhere else.

When someone uses the sound from your video, your video is credited as its origin, and if a gift is sent on a video that carries your sound, a share of it may be credited to you as earnings. The share is set in the app and we can change it.

A sound has one owner of record. If a recording of yours is on Nsibi under someone else's name, you can file an ownership claim from inside the app with evidence. While a claim is open, the earnings that sound produces are held rather than paid, and they are released to whoever the claim is decided in favour of. We check the audio automatically and refuse a claim that does not match; a claim that does match is decided by a person.

Do not upload a recording you do not have the rights to, and do not file a claim over one that is not yours. Both are breaches of these terms.

13. Copyright and other rights

If you believe something on Nsibi infringes your copyright or another right you hold, write to hello@nsibi.chat with enough for us to act on it:

• What you own, and what makes you the owner or the person authorised to act for them.
• Where the infringing material is on Nsibi, precisely enough for us to find it. A link is best.
• Your name, postal address and email address.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.
• Your signature, electronic or physical.

We remove material that is the subject of a valid notice and tell the person who posted it. They can send us a counter-notice if they believe the removal was a mistake, and we will pass it to you.

We close the accounts of repeat infringers.

Filing a notice you know to be false has consequences under the law in most places, and it wastes the time of the people who deal with real ones. Please do not.

14. Our rights in Nsibi

Nsibi, its name, its logo, its software, its design and everything in it that is not user content belongs to us or to whoever licensed it to us. We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app for its intended purpose, and nothing more. All other rights are reserved.

The camera effects, filters and sounds we provide are ours to license and are for use inside Nsibi. Do not extract them.

15. Third-party services

Nsibi relies on services run by other companies: app stores, push notification services, SMS gateways, payment providers, cloud hosting and the infrastructure that carries live video. Their terms apply to their part of what happens, and we are not responsible for how they behave.

Links people share on Nsibi lead to places we do not control. We show a preview of some of them for convenience; that is not an endorsement and we do not check what is on the other side.

16. If you installed Nsibi from the Apple App Store

These additional terms apply to you, and where they conflict with the rest of this document, these ones win for the App Store version of the app.

• This agreement is between you and Nsibi only. It is not with Apple, and Apple is not responsible for the app or its content.
• Your licence to use the app is limited to using it on any Apple-branded device that you own or control, as permitted by the App Store Terms of Service.
• Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app. Support requests go to us.
• If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may tell Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app, if any. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim by you or anyone else relating to the app, including product liability claims, claims that the app fails to conform to a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims under consumer protection or similar law.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for investigating and defending any claim that the app infringes someone's intellectual property rights.
• You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a United States Government embargo or designated as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

17. Changes to Nsibi, and availability

We are building Nsibi and it changes. Features arrive, change and are removed. Where a change materially reduces something you rely on, we will give you notice where we reasonably can.

We do not promise that Nsibi will be available without interruption. Networks fail, providers have outages, and we take the service down to maintain it. A deploy should not cost you an outage and we work to keep it that way, but nothing here is a guarantee of uptime.

Some features depend on where you are: coin purchases, payout methods and live broadcasting are not available everywhere.

18. Ending this agreement

You can stop using Nsibi at any time, and you can delete your account from inside the app.

We can suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, if your account has been dormant for a long period, or if keeping it open would create a risk to other people or to us. Where the reason is a breach that is not serious, we will normally warn you first.

When an account ends, the licence in section 14 ends with it. Sections that by their nature should survive do survive: your content licence to the extent described in section 5, coins and earnings under section 10, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law.

19. Disclaimers

Nsibi is provided as it is and as it is available. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that Nsibi will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that the content anyone else posts is accurate, lawful or safe. You use Nsibi at your own risk, and you are responsible for what you choose to share and who you choose to talk to.

Nothing here excludes a right you have under consumer law that cannot be excluded. Where your local law gives you guarantees we cannot disclaim, those guarantees apply and this section is read down to fit them.

20. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, or the cost of substitute services, however caused and whatever the theory of liability, even if we were told the loss was possible.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to Nsibi is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

We are not liable for the loss of encrypted chat history. We cannot read it, which is also why we cannot restore it, and section 6 explains what that means for you.

None of this limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not permit us to limit.

21. Your indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, losses and reasonable legal costs arising out of your content, your use of Nsibi, or your breach of these terms or of anyone else's rights. We will tell you about any such claim and you can take conduct of the defence, with our agreement, which we will not withhold unreasonably.

22. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada that apply in it, without regard to conflict of law rules. The courts of Ontario, Canada have jurisdiction, and you and we agree to submit to them.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, or your right to bring a claim in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

Before starting anything formal, please write to us at hello@nsibi.chat. Most disputes are a misunderstanding, and the ones that are not are usually cheaper to resolve in an email than in a courtroom.

23. Changes to these terms

We update these terms as Nsibi changes. When we do, we change the date at the top of this page, and where the change is material we tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Continuing to use Nsibi after a change takes effect means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, delete your account.

24. General

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is limited to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable.

Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. You cannot transfer your rights under these terms to anyone else; we can transfer ours to a company that takes over the business, and we will tell you if that happens.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any rules shown at the point of use, are the whole agreement between you and us about Nsibi.

These terms are published in English. Where we provide a translation, it is for convenience, and the English version governs if the two differ.

25. Contact us

Questions about these terms, a report, an account, or anything else: hello@nsibi.chat.