Terms of Service

1. This agreement

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are an agreement between you and [Company legal name] (“Burner”, “we”, “us”), [Registered address]. They cover the Burner app, Burner Mail, Burner AI, the website burnerchat.ai and everything else we provide (together, the “Service”).

By creating an account or using the Service you agree to these Terms, to our Privacy Policy, and, if you create a channel, to the channel creator terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use Burner.

2. Who can use Burner

• You must be at least 13 years old, or older if the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for using online services without a parent’s consent.
• Children below that age may only use Burner through a Betoo child account that a parent or legal guardian creates and manages. The parent or guardian agrees to these Terms on the child’s behalf and is responsible for the child’s use of the Service.
• You must be 18 or older to create a channel.
• You may not use Burner if the law forbids you from doing so, or if we have previously banned you.

3. Your account

• Keep your password and your 12-word recovery phrase safe. We never see your recovery phrase and cannot recover it for you; without it, you may not be able to unlock older messages on a new phone.
• You are responsible for everything that happens on your account and for keeping your phone secure.
• Your username is public and is also your Burner Mail address. We may reclaim or change usernames that impersonate others, infringe rights, are offensive, or are held without being used.
• Tell us straight away at support@burnerchat.ai if you think someone else is using your account.

4. Your data, your content and your backups

You are responsible for your own data, content and backups. Burner works like WhatsApp and Signal: our server relays your end-to-end encrypted messages and deletes them once they are delivered. Your chat history is stored on your phone, not with us. This means:

• If your phone is lost, stolen, broken or reset, or you uninstall the app, your chats may be lost for good. The exception is messages you secured, which we keep (encrypted) and which you can restore with your recovery phrase.
• Keeping copies of anything important — for example with “Download all chats” — is up to you. We are not responsible for lost messages, media, mail or other content.
• Messages you send are stored on the recipients’ phones. “Delete for everyone” removes them where it can, but we can’t guarantee that a recipient hasn’t already copied, photographed or recorded something.

You own your content. You give us only the permission we need to store, relay, display and deliver it for the purpose of running the Service. You are responsible for what you send, post and share, and you confirm that you have the right to share it.

5. Acceptable use

You may use Burner only for lawful purposes and in line with these Terms. You must not use it to send, post, store or share — or to help anyone else with — any of the following:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any sexual content involving minors, or grooming or sexualising children. Zero tolerance: we remove the content, ban the account and report it, with the information we hold, to the relevant authorities (in the US, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, NCMEC).
• Buying, selling or promoting illegal goods or services, including illegal drugs, weapons, explosives, stolen goods or data, or counterfeit items.
• Terrorism or violent extremism, or content that supports, promotes or glorifies it.
• Harassment, bullying, threats, stalking, hate speech, or incitement to violence against anyone.
• Sexual or intimate images of anyone without their consent, or sextortion.
• Publishing someone else’s private information without permission (doxxing).
• Spam, bulk or unsolicited messages or mail, chain messages, or artificially inflating followers or engagement.
• Malware, viruses, phishing, scams, fraud or any other deceptive activity.
• Impersonating another person, brand or organisation, or misrepresenting who you are.
• Content that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark, privacy or other rights.
• Anything else that is illegal where you or your recipients are.

You also must not: try to break, overload or get around the security of the Service; access accounts or data that aren’t yours; scrape or harvest data; create accounts by automated means or run bots without our permission; or copy, modify, reverse-engineer or resell the Service, except where the law expressly allows it.

6. Channels

Channels are public. Channel posts are not end-to-end encrypted, anyone who can open the channel can read them, and Burner can review them. Creating a channel requires a verified phone number, being 18 or older and accepting the channel creator terms, which form part of these Terms. The creator is responsible for everything posted in the channel, including posts by admins they add.

7. Burner Mail

• Your Burner Mail address (username@burnerchat.ai) is part of your account and ends when your account ends. Mailboxes have a storage limit.
• No bulk, unsolicited or automated mailing, no mailing lists you don’t have permission for, and no attempts to disguise who you are.
• We automatically scan mail for viruses and spam and reject mail with dangerous attachment types, in both directions. We may reject, delay or filter mail to protect users and our mail server’s reputation, and we don’t guarantee delivery of any mail.
• Email to and from other providers is not end-to-end encrypted.

8. Burner AI and translation

Burner AI is developed by Arc IO and runs on your phone. It is a small language model and it can be wrong: it may misunderstand, miss or invent things, and translations may be inaccurate. Don’t rely on it for medical, legal, financial, safety or other important decisions, and check anything that matters. Using Burner AI requires a one-time download of a large file (about 1 GB); mobile data charges from your carrier may apply. The model is based on open-source software provided under its own licence.

9. Calls and emergencies

Burner is not a replacement for a telephone and cannot be used to call emergency services. Always have another way to reach emergency services. Call quality depends on your connection and on our calling provider, and calls may drop or fail.

10. Reports and enforcement

You can report users, channels and posts in the app. Because chats are end-to-end encrypted, we can’t see their content unless someone reports it and shares it with us. We may investigate reports and, at our discretion and without prior notice, remove content, limit features, suspend or ban accounts, preserve information and involve the authorities when we believe these Terms or the law have been broken, or to protect someone from harm. Deliberately false reports are also a breach of these Terms.

11. Changes, suspension and closure

Burner has the full right to change, suspend or close the Service, any part or feature of it, or any account, at any time, with or without notice, and for any reason — including to comply with the law, for security, for technical or business reasons, or because we choose to discontinue it. Where it’s reasonable and lawful to do so, we’ll try to give you notice so you can save anything you need, but we are not obliged to.

12. Termination

• By you: you can stop using Burner at any time and delete your account in the app (Settings → Account security → Delete account).
• By us: we may suspend or terminate your account or access, with or without notice, if you break these Terms, if we are required to by law, if your account creates risk or legal exposure for us or others, or under section 11.
• When your account ends, your right to use the Service ends, and your data is handled as described in the Privacy Policy. Sections 4, 14–20 and any others that by their nature should survive will continue to apply.

13. Security

We follow at least minimum industry-standard security practices, including end-to-end encryption of chats, encrypted connections, hashed passwords and hardened servers (see our Security page). However, no service can be completely secure, and we cannot and do not guarantee absolute security or that your data will never be accessed, lost or disclosed without authorisation. You use the Service at your own risk.

14. No warranty

The Service is provided “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE”, without any guarantee or warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, free of viruses or other harmful components, or that messages, calls, mail or other content will be delivered, stored or kept.

Some countries don’t allow certain warranties to be excluded. If you live in one of them, the exclusions above apply only as far as the law permits, and you keep any statutory rights that cannot be waived.

15. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• Burner, its owners, directors, employees, partners (including Arc IO) and suppliers will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, content, messages, profits, revenue, goodwill or business opportunity, arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms — even if we were told such damage was possible.
• Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the claim arose, or (b) 50 US dollars.
• We are not responsible for content sent or posted by other users, or for their actions.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

16. Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Burner, its owners, directors, employees, partners and suppliers from any claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to your content, your use or misuse of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else’s rights.

17. Third-party services

Burner relies on and links to services run by others — for example Google Play for downloads, ZEGOCLOUD for calls and Google Firebase for notifications. Those services have their own terms and policies, and we are not responsible for them. Links and content shared by users are their own responsibility.

18. Our intellectual property

The Service, the Burner name and logo, and the app’s software and design belong to us or our licensors. These Terms give you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the app for its intended purpose; they don’t give you any other rights. Open-source components are licensed under their own terms. If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without any obligation to you. To report copyright infringement, see our copyright policy.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of [Governing law / jurisdiction: to be confirmed by Burner], and the courts of [Governing law / jurisdiction: to be confirmed by Burner] have jurisdiction over any dispute, except where the law of your country of residence gives you the right to bring a claim in your local courts or under your local law. Before starting any formal proceedings, please contact us at legal@burnerchat.ai so we can try to resolve the issue informally.

20. General

• These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any feature-specific terms (such as the channel creator terms), are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
• If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we haven’t given it up.
• You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours, for example as part of a merger or sale of the business.
• We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• If we offer paid features, additional terms shown at the time of purchase will apply.
• These Terms may be translated. If a translation differs from the English version, the English version applies, unless the law requires otherwise.

21. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We’ll change the “Last updated” date above and, for significant changes, tell you in the app before they take effect. If you keep using Burner after the changes take effect, you accept the updated Terms. If you don’t agree, stop using Burner and delete your account.

22. Contact

[Company legal name], [Registered address]
Legal: legal@burnerchat.ai · Support: support@burnerchat.ai