Terms of use

1. What Huddles is

Huddles is a shared space you can see. People appear as floating avatars, merge into huddles to talk, and share whiteboards, documents, screens and video. Some conversations are broadcast to anyone holding a link.

By using Huddles you agree to these terms. If you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming you may agree on its behalf.

2. Who may use it

You must be at least 13 years old, and at least 16 in countries where that is the minimum age for consenting to the processing of your data. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Huddles only with a parent or guardian's involvement.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Sign in with an identity that is yours, and do not share your account or a session with someone else.

3. What is not allowed

These are the lines. They apply to everything you say, type, draw, share or broadcast, in every space, including spaces you created and spaces you administer.

• Harassment and abuse. No targeting, threatening, intimidating, stalking or sexually harassing anyone. No pile-ons, and no encouraging others to do it for you.
• Hate. No attacking or dehumanising people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, religion, disability, disease, age, sex, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Violence and terrorism. No threats of violence, no glorifying or coordinating it, and no organising, funding or promoting terrorism or violent extremism.
• Illegal activity. No using Huddles to commit, plan or facilitate a crime. This includes trafficking, fraud, the sale of regulated or stolen goods, and the distribution of malware.
• Sexual content involving minors. Absolutely prohibited, in any form, real or generated. We report it to the authorities.
• Non-consensual and explicit material. No sexual content involving people who have not consented to it being shared, and no adult content in spaces where the people present have not agreed to it.
• Self-harm. No encouraging suicide, self-injury or disordered eating.
• Deception. No impersonating a person or organisation, and no coordinated manipulation — bots, sock puppets, or engineered pile-ons.
• Other people's work and privacy. Do not share what is not yours to share, and do not publish someone's private information without their permission.
• Interfering with the service. No scraping, no attacking, no probing for vulnerabilities without permission, no circumventing limits or moderation, and no automated access outside a documented interface.

4. Live audio, recordings and broadcasts

Huddles carries live conversations. Two things follow from that, and both are your responsibility rather than ours:

• Recording. Do not record a huddle, a broadcast or a screen share without the consent of everyone in it. In many places recording without consent is a criminal offence, and it is a breach of these terms everywhere.
• Broadcasting. A broadcast link admits anyone who holds it, without an account. If you go live, you are choosing to make that conversation reachable by strangers, and you are responsible for what happens in a room you are hosting — including bringing someone on to the stage.

We do not record your conversations. Audio is carried live and is not stored by us.

5. Spaces you run

Creating a space makes you its administrator. That is a real responsibility, not a setting:

• You decide who is admitted, by invitation, by link, or by a join code. Anyone you admit can see the boards, documents and conversations happening there.
• You are accountable for what your space is used for. A space organised around anything in section 3 will be removed, along with the account that runs it.
• Deleting a space destroys other people's work in it — every board and document, for everyone. Reports filed about what happened there are kept.

6. Moderation, and what we can see

Nothing you put in Huddles is invisible to us. Boards, documents, notes, huddle titles, event listings and reports are stored on our servers and can be read by the Huddles team when we investigate a report, respond to a legal request, or fix something that is broken. Do not put anything in Huddles you would not want a person to read.

Blocking hides people from each other inside the product. Reporting sends the report to the Huddles team, who look at it and decide. Nothing about enforcement is automatic: a person reads every report, and every action taken is recorded against the person who took it.

We may remove content, end a broadcast, remove someone from a space, suspend an account or delete one. Where we can, we will say why. For the most serious categories — content involving minors, credible threats, terrorism — we act immediately and without notice, and we contact the authorities.

7. Reporting something

Use the report button on a person's card, or write to dev.edwardstechnology@gmail.com. Reports include what you tell us, who it is about, and where it happened. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first — we cannot.

8. The software is ours

Huddles — the service, the software behind it, its design, its name and marks, and every part of it that is not your content — belongs to Huddles.Space. Using it does not transfer any of that to you. You get a limited, revocable, non-exclusive permission to use Huddles as it is offered, for its intended purpose, and nothing more.

You may not copy, reproduce, modify, translate, adapt, republish, sell, rent, sublicense or otherwise make the software or any part of it available to anyone, except where the law says a licence cannot forbid it.

9. Do not tamper with it

You may not reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise try to derive the source or structure of the software, except to the extent the law expressly allows despite this term.

You may not interfere with how it works: no probing, scanning or testing its vulnerabilities without our written permission; no circumventing a limit, a gate, a permission, a rate limit or a stage; no forging, replaying or tampering with the links, tokens or sessions it issues; no automated access — scrapers, bots, bulk requests — except through interfaces we publish for that purpose. Do not introduce anything malicious, and do not use Huddles to build a competing service by copying how it behaves.

If you find a security problem, tell us at dev.edwardstechnology@gmail.com and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before you tell anyone else. We will not take action against good-faith research conducted that way.

10. Your content

What you make in Huddles is yours. You keep every right you have in it.

To run the product we need permission to do the obvious things with it: store it, transmit it to the people you are sharing it with, and display it back to you. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to do that, for as long as you keep the content in Huddles and for as long afterwards as our backups take to expire. We do not use your content to advertise, and we do not sell it.

Boards and documents that nobody touches are deleted after the retention period your plan sets. A huddle's board and document are temporary by design and are discarded when the huddle ends — the surface says so while it is open.

11. Your data

We keep the least we can: your verified email address, your display name and avatar, which spaces you belong to, what you have made, and a log of actions taken in the product so that moderation can be answered for. We use a third party to carry live audio and video, and another to send email.

You can delete your account by writing to dev.edwardstechnology@gmail.com. Deleting it removes your profile and your personal surfaces. Reports about you, and the audit record of moderation actions, are kept — deleting an account must not be a way to erase a complaint about yourself.

12. Payments, refunds and disputes

Premium is optional and is bought for a space, by one of its admins, at a monthly amount that person chooses within the range shown on the Premium page. Every Premium space gets the same features regardless of the amount. Payments are taken by card through Stripe; we never see or store card details.

• Renewal. The chosen amount is charged monthly, on the same day, until cancelled. You can change the amount at any time from the billing portal; a change applies from the next renewal.
• Cancelling. You can cancel at any time from the Premium page or the billing portal. The space keeps Premium until the end of the period already paid for, then returns to the free plan. A cancellation can be withdrawn up to that day.
• What happens on the way down. Nothing you made is deleted when a space leaves Premium. Boards and documents beyond the free limit are kept; the free limits apply to making more. Huddle length, huddle size and screen-share quality return to the free plan's values.
• Refunds. Any charge may be refunded in full on request within 14 days of being made, for any reason — write to dev.edwardstechnology@gmail.com or reply to the receipt. After 14 days a refund is at our discretion, and we will usually grant it. A refund ends Premium for that space from the date it is issued unless we agree otherwise.
• Failed payments. If a renewal cannot be charged, the card is retried over several days with Premium left on. If every retry fails, the space returns to the free plan as described above. Nothing is deleted.
• Disputes. If you believe a charge is wrong, please contact us first: we can refund within a day, whereas a chargeback through your bank takes weeks and carries a fee. If a chargeback is opened we will provide the bank with the record of what was agreed to on the Premium page and this section, the space's subscription history, and the receipts sent. We may end Premium on a space whose charge is reversed, and may refuse future payments from a card that has been used to reverse a charge that was validly made.
• Taxes. Amounts shown are exclusive of any tax that Stripe is required to add for your location, which appears on the receipt.
• Price changes. Because the amount is yours to choose, we do not raise it. If the range itself changes, an existing subscription keeps its amount.

13. Availability, and what we do not promise

Huddles is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, that a conversation will connect, or that anything you put in it will survive a fault — keep your own copy of anything you cannot lose. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties and are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

14. Ending it

You can stop using Huddles at any time. We can suspend or end your access if you break these terms, if we are required to, or if continuing would put other people at risk.

15. Changes

These terms will change as the product does. When something material changes we will say so in the product before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will move. Continuing to use Huddles after that means you accept the new version.

16. Contact

Write to dev.edwardstechnology@gmail.com.