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Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated: 5 May 2026

Note. These terms are a draft tailored to how the service is built today. Have a qualified lawyer review them before relying on them.

These terms govern your use of Secrets by Ampersand ("the Service", "we", "us"). By creating an account or sending a secret you agree to them.

1. The Service

The Service lets you create encrypted, time-limited links to share sensitive content with stackable protection layers (password, biometric, hardware-key, geographic, document acceptance, NDA signing, single-use, single-device, recipient identity verification, etc.). Every access is logged and watermarked.

Content is encrypted at rest with keys derived from your tenant's secrets. We do not have the ability to read your content. If you lose the inputs needed to decrypt (your password, your team key, your face, whatever you required), the content is gone. We cannot recover it.

2. Your account

You're responsible for:

  • Keeping your login credentials and 2FA factors secure.
  • All activity that occurs under your account.
  • Telling us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.

You must be at least 16 years old (13 where local law permits) to use the Service.

3. Acceptable use

You may not use the Service to:

  • Distribute content that is illegal where you or your recipients are located, including child sexual abuse material, content that incites violence, or content that infringes others' intellectual property.
  • Distribute malware, phishing pages, or content designed to defraud.
  • Impersonate another person.
  • Circumvent the Service's security or rate limits, attempt to break the encryption, or attack the Service's infrastructure.
  • Use the Service to send unsolicited bulk communications.

We may suspend or terminate accounts we believe in good faith are violating this section. If we receive a credible legal request to preserve or disclose data, we comply with applicable law.

4. Your content

You keep all rights in the content you upload. You grant us a strictly limited licence to store, transmit, and render your content for the sole purpose of operating the Service for you. We do not use your content for any other purpose.

You are responsible for the legality of the content you share, for obtaining any necessary consents from your recipients, and for setting appropriate retention.

5. Verification, signatures, and audit trails

The Service captures signatures, identity attestations (email + SMS verification), document hashes, and access logs to provide an audit trail.

This audit trail is intended as evidence, not as an authoritative legal instrument by itself:

  • Whether a digital signature satisfies a particular legal requirement depends on the jurisdiction and the type of document. The Service is not a Qualified Electronic Signature ("QES") provider under eIDAS.
  • The Service's "liveness" check during face verification is a heuristic (image quality + eyes-open detection) and can be defeated by determined spoofing. It is not certified anti-spoofing.
  • Watermarks embedded in rendered content can be stripped by anyone willing to retype or screenshot the content.

If you need stronger guarantees (QES, certified anti-spoofing, tamper- evident PDFs), use the Service in conjunction with a specialist provider.

6. Pricing & billing

Plans, prices, and limits are listed at ampersand-hosting.test/#pricing. Paid plans are billed in advance per the cadence shown at checkout. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice; changes apply at the start of your next billing period.

The free Personal tier carries usage limits described in the pricing page. We may rate-limit or temporarily suspend Personal accounts that exceed those limits.

7. Service availability

We aim for high availability but do not guarantee uninterrupted service. Scheduled maintenance is announced in advance where feasible.

We are not liable for outages caused by events outside our reasonable control: ISP failures, DDoS attacks, force majeure, third-party sub-processor outages (AWS, Twilio, etc.).

8. Disclaimer

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law:

  • We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
  • We do not warrant that the Service will be error-free or that any particular protection layer will defeat any particular adversary.
  • We do not warrant that the cryptography used will remain secure against future cryptanalytic advances.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service is capped at the greater of (a) €100 or (b) the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of data, loss of business, or reputational harm.

This section does not limit liability for fraud, gross negligence, or liability that cannot be excluded by law.

10. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against third-party claims arising from content you uploaded to the Service, your breach of these terms, or your violation of applicable law.

11. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time from your profile page.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms, if required by law, or if your continued use poses a security or legal risk to the Service. We provide reasonable notice when feasible. On termination, we delete your data per the retention policy.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by Swiss law. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the canton in which Ampersand is registered, except where mandatory consumer-protection law requires otherwise.

13. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms materially we email account holders at least 14 days before the change takes effect. Continued use of the Service after that constitutes acceptance.

14. Entire agreement

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in force.

15. Contact

Ampersand Legal — legal@ampersand-hosting.test