With Affection Terms of Use

Draft: 25 items still to be filled in, highlighted below.

Effective date: [TBD: effective date]
Last updated: [TBD: date of last update]

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and the operator of With Affection. They cover the With Affection app and its letter service, which we call "the Night Mail." They also serve as the end-user license agreement (EULA) for the app.

These terms are written in English and Simplified Chinese. If the two versions differ, the English version prevails.

In brief

• You must be 16 or older. If you are 16 or 17, read section 4 with a parent or guardian.
• You bought the app once. No subscriptions, no in-app purchases. Stamps can't be bought. Apple handles payment and refunds.
• Be kind, and follow the rules in section 7. We have zero tolerance for abuse, sexual content involving minors, threats, hate, scams and spam.
• You can refuse anyone's letters and report any letter. We review reports [TBD: report handling time — suggested within 24 hours] and may remove content and close accounts.
• A sealed letter cannot be taken back. The reader can keep it, even if you delete your account.
• Your letters are yours. You give us only the permission we need to check, store and deliver them.
• The service is provided as is. Our liability is limited (section 13), and Apple is not responsible for the app (section 16).

1. Who you are agreeing with

With Affection is operated by [TBD: operator's full legal name], an individual living in mainland China ("we," "us"). There is no company behind the service.

• Email: [TBD: contact email — suggested [email protected]]
• Postal address: [TBD: postal address — Apple requires the developer's address for questions, complaints or claims]
• Website: withaffection.app

By downloading or using the app, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the app.

2. What With Affection is

With Affection is a slow way to write to real people.

• You write a letter and seal it. Every letter goes to the Night Mail first, and the Night Mail passes it on.
• You never pick a reader from a list. A letter to a stranger goes to someone the Night Mail chooses. You can also write back to a letter you received, or write to a pen pal.
• Letters take days to travel. The Night Mail estimates travel time from the cities the two of you chose.
• Each letter uses one stamp. The Night Mail gives out stamps on a schedule.
• Letters are plain text only.
• Nobody has to write back. The Night Mail does not guarantee that you will receive letters, that anyone will write back, or that a letter to a stranger will find a reader. A letter to a stranger that finds no reader in 14 days is returned to sender.
• The Night Mail is a fictional mail service inside the app. It is not a postal service, and nothing is sent by physical mail.

The rules for stamps, travel time and delivery are described in the app ("How the Night Mail works"). We may change them to keep the service fair and working (section 15).

3. Your account

• You sign in with Sign in with Apple. You need an Apple Account to use the service.
• You must give your real birth year and month.
• Choose a pen name. It doesn't have to be unique, but it must follow the rules in section 7. You can change it once a year. After a change, your letters show the new pen name with your most recent former pen name beside it.
• Choose your city from the list. It is used only to estimate travel time and is never shown to other users.
• Keep your Apple Account and device secure. You are responsible for what is done with your account.
• One person, one account. Don't share, sell or transfer your account, and don't create accounts for other people.

4. Age requirements, and users aged 16 and 17

• You must be at least 16 to use With Affection. If you are under 16, you may not use it.
• At sign-up, you enter your birth year and month, and iOS asks whether we may read the age range on your Apple Account. If either shows you are under 16, you cannot create an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close it and delete its data.
• Letters to strangers are separated by age. If you are under 18, letters to strangers you send only go to users under 18, and you only receive letters to strangers from users under 18. Users 18 and over only exchange letters to strangers with each other. When you turn 18, you move to the adult group for new letters to strangers; existing pen pals stay pen pals.
• Giving a false birth date breaks these terms. We may close the account.

If you are 16 or 17: you may use With Affection only with the permission of a parent or legal guardian, who should read these terms and the Privacy Policy with you. [TBD: where a state law requires parental consent to be given through the App Store, add: "Where the law requires it, we rely on the consent your parent or guardian gives through Apple."] Be careful about what you share; see section 10 of the Privacy Policy.

Parents and guardians: if you have a concern about your child's use of With Affection, email [TBD: contact email].

5. Price and payment

• With Affection is a paid download. You pay once, at the price shown on the App Store (USD 4.99 in the United States). There are no subscriptions, no trials and no in-app purchases.
• Apple handles payment completely. We never receive your payment details.
• Refunds are handled by Apple under Apple's rules. We cannot issue refunds ourselves. You can request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com.
• Stamps have no money value. They cannot be bought, sold, transferred or exchanged for money, and paying for the app does not give you extra stamps. Stamps you hold end when your account ends.

6. Your letters

You own what you write. You keep all rights you have in your letters, drafts and pen name.

Permission you give us. So the service can work, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free permission to store, copy, check (including automatically), transmit and display your letters, drafts and pen name, only as needed to:

• run the Night Mail: hold, check, deliver and return letters;
• show your letters and pen name to the people you write to;
• review reports, keep the service safe, and comply with the law.

This permission lasts as long as the content is in the service. For letters already delivered, it continues after you delete your account, because those letters stay with their readers (section 11). We do not use your letters for advertising, and we do not use them to train artificial intelligence.

Once sealed, a letter cannot be taken back. After you seal a letter, you cannot read it, cancel it or change it. The only time a letter's text comes back to you is when it is returned to sender, which happens only if no one read it. The person who receives your letter can keep it, copy it or take screenshots. Don't put anything in a letter you are not comfortable with someone else keeping.

You are responsible for your letters. You promise that you have the right to send what you write, and that it follows these terms and the law.

Letters you receive. A letter you receive is the sender's writing. You may keep it and read it in the app. Do not publish someone else's letter, or use it to identify, harass or embarrass them, without their permission.

Machine translation. Translations are made by Apple's Translation framework on your device. They may be wrong. The original letter is what the sender wrote.

7. The Night Mail's rules

We have zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive users. Don't use With Affection to:

1. Harass, bully, threaten, stalk or intimidate anyone.
2. Send hate: attacks on people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or serious illness.
3. Send sexually explicit content, or pressure anyone for sexual content or contact.
4. Send any content that sexualizes or exploits a minor, or try to groom, lure or meet a minor. We report apparent child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), as US law requires, and we close the account.
5. Encourage or glorify suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or violence, or promote terrorism or violent extremism.
6. Scam or defraud anyone, ask for money, gifts or financial information, or advertise, sell or recruit.
7. Send spam, chain letters, or the same letter to many people.
8. Pretend to be another person, or a member of the With Affection team, or the Night Mail.
9. Share someone else's private information, such as their real name, address, phone number or photos, without permission.
10. Send content that infringes someone's copyright, trademark or other rights.
11. Break the law, or help or encourage others to.
12. Interfere with the service: hack, reverse engineer (except where the law allows), scrape, overload, use bots or automated scripts, get around the age rules, stamp rules, refusals or the automated check, or create accounts to get around a closure.
13. Try to find out where another user lives or who they are, if they have not told you.

Users under 18. In addition: adults must never try to contact users under 18 through With Affection, and users under 18 should not share ways to find them outside the app.

8. Refusing, reporting and what we do

Refuse. You can refuse letters from any pen pal or from the sender of a letter to a stranger, at any time, without a reason. They are not told. Letters they seal after that are returned to them. You can accept letters again from a pen pal. Refusing the sender of a letter to a stranger is permanent, and you can no longer write back to them. Refusing someone does not stop you being pen pals; it only stops their letters reaching you.

Remove. You can remove any letter you received from your mailbox.

Report. Open a letter and choose Report this letter. Tell us what happened. The sender is not told that you reported it. When you report a letter, the operator can read that letter.

What we do. We review reports [TBD: report handling time — suggested within 24 hours]. If content breaks these terms, we may do any of these, without notice:

• remove the letter [TBD: the product does not yet remove a delivered letter from a reader's mailbox; keep only once it can];
• give a warning;
• limit what the account can do [TBD: e.g. stop it from sending letters to strangers];
• suspend or permanently close the account of the person who sent it;
• report it to NCMEC or law enforcement.

We decide what breaks these rules. We may also act on what the automated check finds (see section 6 of the Privacy Policy). We do not have to tell you the outcome of a report, but we will tell you if we close your account, unless the law or safety reasons prevent it. If you think we made a mistake about your account, email us.

We do not read letters except as described in the Privacy Policy. This means we cannot monitor everything people write. Refusing and reporting are how you protect yourself.

Danger. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact local emergency services. In the US, call or text 988 for crisis support. Reporting a letter is not an emergency service.

9. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

We respect copyright. If you believe a letter in With Affection infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent:

[TBD: DMCA designated agent — name, postal address and email registered with the US Copyright Office; suggested email [email protected]]

Your notice must include:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. a description of the copyrighted work you say is infringed;
3. a description of the material you say infringes it, and enough information for us to find it (for example, the sender's pen name and the letter's date);
4. your contact information (address, phone number and email);
5. a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law;
6. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act for them.

If we remove material because of a notice, we will try to tell the sender. The sender may send a counter-notice with: their signature; a description of the removed material and where it was; a statement under penalty of perjury that they believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification; their name, address and phone number; and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for their address (or, if outside the US, any judicial district where we may be found) and to accept service from the person who sent the notice. We will close the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

Because no person reads letters unless they are reported, the most practical way to point us to a letter is for the person who received it to report it.

10. Our rights in the app

The app, its design, text, illustrations, the name "With Affection," and the Night Mail are ours or licensed to us. Except for your own letters, you may not copy, change, distribute or sell them.

License to use the app. We give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the app for your own personal, non-commercial use on any Apple-branded product that you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions. The app may also be used by other accounts associated with you through Family Sharing or volume purchasing, as those rules allow. You may not rent, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the app.

If you send us suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything.

11. Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time in Settings → Delete account. This cannot be undone.

• Your account, city, drafts, stamps and the letters you received are deleted.
• Letters you sent that were already delivered, and your pen name, stay with the people who received them.
• Letters still on their way are delivered.
• Letters people write to you afterward are returned to them.

Details are in section 12 of the Privacy Policy. Deleting the app from your iPhone does not delete your account.

We can end your account or your access to the service if you break these terms, if we must by law, or if your use creates risk for other users or for us. When we close an account, we may keep the records described in the Privacy Policy. [TBD: what happens to a closed account's delivered letters and letters still on their way. Recommended: same as account deletion, except that reported letters are kept as safety records.]

If we stop the service. We may stop offering With Affection. If we do, we will give at least [TBD: notice period — suggested 30 days] notice in the app or at withaffection.app, unless we have to stop sooner for legal or safety reasons. The app has no feature for exporting letters; [TBD: whether we will offer a way to save received letters before shutdown].

Sections 6 (permission for delivered letters), 9, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17 continue after your account ends.

12. Disclaimers

• With Affection is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
• We do not promise that the service will always be available, error-free or secure, that letters will arrive on any particular date, or that any letter will find a reader or get an answer.
• Travel times are estimates made by the app. They have nothing to do with real postal services.
• Other users are strangers. We do not check anyone's identity beyond what is described in these terms. We are not responsible for what other users write, or for what happens if you choose to share personal information or meet anyone outside the app. Use good judgment.
• The automated check is not perfect. It may miss content that breaks the rules, and it may stop a letter that does not.
• Some places do not allow some of these disclaimers. If so, they apply only as far as the law allows.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of data, letters, goodwill or profits, arising from the service.
• Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid for the app and (b) USD 50.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud. Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have as a consumer that cannot be waived under the law where you live.

14. Indemnity

If you break these terms or the law, or your letters infringe someone's rights, and someone makes a claim against us because of it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs and losses from that claim, as far as the law allows. This does not apply to the extent the claim was caused by us.

15. Changes to these terms and to the service

We may change the service, including the rules for stamps, travel time and delivering letters to strangers, to keep it working, fair and safe.

We may change these terms. We will post the new version at withaffection.app with a new "Last updated" date. For important changes, we will tell you in the app at least [TBD: suggested 30 days] before they take effect, unless the change is required by law or for safety [TBD: the app needs a way to show this notice]. If you keep using the service after a change takes effect, you accept the new terms. If you don't accept them, delete your account.

16. Apple

These terms are between you and us only, not with Apple Inc. ("Apple").

1. Responsibility. We, not Apple, are solely responsible for the app and its content.
2. License. Your license to use the app is limited to the terms in section 10.
3. Maintenance and support. We are solely responsible for providing any maintenance and support for the app, as described in these terms or as required by law. Apple has no obligation at all to provide maintenance or support for the app.
4. Warranty. We are solely responsible for any product warranties, whether express or implied by law, to the extent they are not effectively disclaimed. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app to you. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses caused by any failure to conform to a warranty are our responsibility, to the extent not disclaimed.
5. Product claims. We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claims by you or any third party relating to the app or your possession or use of it, including: (i) product liability claims; (ii) any claim that the app fails to conform to any applicable legal or regulatory requirement; and (iii) claims arising under consumer protection, privacy or similar laws.
6. Intellectual property. If a third party claims that the app or your possession and use of it infringes their intellectual property rights, we, not Apple, are solely responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement and discharge of that claim.
7. Legal compliance. You represent and warrant that (i) you are not located in a country that is subject to a US Government embargo, or that has been designated by the US Government as a "terrorist supporting" country; and (ii) you are not listed on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
8. Developer name and address. Questions, complaints or claims about the app should be directed to: [TBD: operator's full legal name], [TBD: postal address], [TBD: contact email].
9. Third-party terms. You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using the app, such as your wireless data service agreement.
10. Third-party beneficiary. Apple and Apple's subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms. Once you accept these terms, Apple will have the right (and will be deemed to have accepted the right) to enforce them against you as a third-party beneficiary.

17. Disputes and governing law

Talk to us first. Most problems can be solved by email. Before starting any legal claim, please email [TBD: contact email] and give us 30 days to try to resolve it.

Governing law and venue. [TBD: governing law and dispute venue. Proposed text: "These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be decided by the state or federal courts located in San Francisco County, California, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction. However, you may bring an individual claim in small claims court in the county where you live, if it qualifies. If you live outside the United States, you may also bring a claim in the courts where you live, and the mandatory consumer protection laws of your country continue to apply."]

There is no arbitration agreement in these terms, and nothing here waives your right to join a class action where the law allows it.

Regions. With Affection is not offered in mainland China, the member states of the European Union, the United Kingdom or Australia. You may not use it from those places.

18. General

• These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about With Affection.
• If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we don't enforce a part of these terms right away, we can still enforce it later.
• You may not transfer these terms to anyone else. We may transfer them to someone who takes over the service; if we do, we will tell you, and your rights under these terms continue.
• We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

19. Contact

[TBD: operator's full legal name]
Email: [TBD: contact email — suggested [email protected]]
Postal address: [TBD: postal address]
In the app: Settings → Contact us