Terms of Service: The Agreement Behind an ImageTome Account

The four that matter

01

Your key is your account

There is no password to reset and no email address to recover through. Whoever holds the private key on a device holds the account, so protect the device and export a backup.

02

Lose it and it is gone

We hold no copy of your key and no copy of your content in readable form. If the key is lost with no backup, nobody - including us - can restore the account or anything in it.

03

You answer for what you upload

We cannot see your content, which does not make it ours to excuse. Everything you put here must be lawful and must be yours to share.

04

We act on reports

We cannot scan, so we respond to what is reported: removing content, suspending accounts and closing them. Unreadable is not the same as unaccountable.

Who these terms are between

They are between you and ImageTome, which operates this service. By creating an account, by ticking the box on the registration screen, or by using the service at all, you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

You must be at least 16 years old. We ask for no date of birth and hold no way to check, so this is a statement you make and one we take at face value until we are told otherwise.

The privacy policy describes what we collect and forms part of these terms. It is short, and it is worth the two minutes.

Your account and your key

An account is a username, a display name and a keypair generated in your browser. The private half stays on your device. We never receive it, and we hold no copy of it, in escrow or otherwise.

This means the key is the account. Anyone with access to the device and its browser data can act as you, so treat the device as you would treat a house key. Export a backup on your first day and keep it somewhere a password manager would be kept.

It also means there is no recovery. If the key is lost and no backup exists, we cannot restore your account, we cannot restore your content, and no support request will change that. We are stating it three times across this page because it is the single thing people wish they had read.

You are responsible for everything done through your account, and for keeping your key and your device secure. If you think a device has been compromised, revoke it from your device list immediately.

What the service is, and its limits

Concrete numbers rather than "reasonable use". Where a limit exists, it is here.

Service limits and behaviour
What	Limit	Note
Images	Limit Up to 50MB per file, 25 per post, encrypted in your browser before upload.	Note Thumbnails are generated on your device, up to 5MB.
Video	Limit Up to 200MB per file, in MP4, WebM or QuickTime.	Note A thumbnail is required and is also generated and encrypted on your device.
Tomes	Limit Invite-only. Membership is granted by wrapping the tome key with a member's public key.	Note There are no public links and no anonymous access.
Deletion	Limit Immediate and permanent.	Note There is no trash, no undelete and no grace period.
Avatars	Limit Stored unencrypted and served from a public URL.	Note The only thing you upload that we and anyone with the link can see.
Price	Limit Free while the service is in its current form.	Note If that changes, existing accounts will be told before it applies to them.

We may change or withdraw features, and the service is offered without any promise of uptime. Keep your own copies of anything you would be upset to lose. An encrypted store you cannot recover from is not a backup.

Acceptable use

Everything you upload must be lawful and must be yours to share. Encryption changes who can read your content. It does not change what you are allowed to put here. The following are prohibited outright.

01 Material that sexually exploits or endangers a child, in any form, at any age of depiction. This is the one item on this list for which there is no discussion, no warning and no second account.
02 Content that is unlawful where you are or where we are: material that incites violence or terrorism, that harasses or stalks a person, or that exists to threaten somebody.
03 Intimate images of a person shared without their consent, and any use of the service to coerce, blackmail or humiliate somebody with them.
04 Content you have no right to share, including material that infringes somebody else's copyright.
05 Using the service to store or distribute malware, or to run any part of an attack on another system.
06 Attempting to break, overload or circumvent the service: probing other accounts, abusing the API, evading rate limits, or automating registration.
07 Evading a suspension or a removal by creating another account.

Inviting somebody into a tome hands them the key to it. They can read everything in it and can copy what they find, and no encryption undoes that afterwards. Removing a member stops their future access, not their memory or their screenshots. Invite accordingly.

Reporting abuse

How to report

Email abuse@imagetome.com with the username involved and enough detail for us to identify the account and the tome. Do not attach illegal material to the report. If a crime is being committed, report it to the police as well as to us; we will cooperate with a lawful order.

Because we cannot read content, a report is not one input among several. It is the only input. What you can see is what we have to act on.

What we will do

We remove reported content, suspend accounts while we look, and close accounts that breach the acceptable use section. For child sexual abuse material the account is closed immediately and without notice, and we will report it to the relevant authority.

What we cannot do is detect anything proactively. There is no scanning, no hash matching and no automated moderation, because there is nothing readable to scan. We do not present that as a feature. It is a consequence of the design, and the honest description of it is that this service is less able to find abuse than a service that reads your photographs.

The structure does limit the reach: tomes are invite-only, there are no public links, nothing is indexed and nothing is discoverable, so there is no audience here for anyone seeking one.

Your content stays yours

You keep every right you have in what you upload. You grant us only the permission we need to run the service: to store the encrypted bytes, to transmit them back to you and to the members you shared them with, and to make the copies that storage and delivery technically require. That permission ends when the content is deleted.

We do not use your content for anything else. Not to train a model, not to improve a product, not to show anybody a preview. This is easier for us to promise than for most services, because we could not read it in order to break the promise.

Suspension, closure and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from your profile. Deletion is immediate and final: the account, its devices and its avatar go, tomes you owned pass to another member or are destroyed if you were the last one in them, and content in tomes that other members still belong to is detached from you rather than deleted, because it is theirs as much as yours and is encrypted under a key they hold.

We can suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. For anything other than child sexual abuse material we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to answer first. We can also stop offering the service entirely, in which case we will give what notice we reasonably can.

What we do not promise

The service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure against every attack, and we do not warrant that it will keep your data safe from your own loss of a key. It has not been independently audited and its source is not published, both of which are stated plainly on the security page rather than hidden here.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits or business, or for content lost because a key was lost. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you use the service as a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything written here.

Changes, and the law that applies

We may change these terms. The date at the top changes with them, and a change that materially affects your rights will be shown in the application before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance; if you would rather not accept, delete the account.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country's mandatory consumer law or of your right to bring proceedings there.

Questions about these terms go to privacy@imagetome.com. Reports of abuse go to abuse@imagetome.com, which is read faster.

Questions about these terms

That you have read the privacy policy and accept these terms, that you are at least 16, that you understand there is no account recovery, and that you are responsible for the content you upload and for who you invite into a tome.

Reactively. We act on reports rather than on detection: content is removed, accounts are suspended, and accounts are closed. We are not able to scan for anything, and we do not present that as a virtue. The structure limits the reach of abuse - tomes are invite-only, nothing is public, nothing is indexed, nothing is discoverable - but it does not eliminate it.

Email abuse@imagetome.com with the username involved and, if you are a member of the tome concerned, enough detail to identify what you saw. Include no illegal material in the report itself. We will need what you can see, because we cannot see it ourselves.

We can delete the encrypted object, and we will where these terms require it. What we cannot do is find it for you, because we cannot read filenames or content. Give us the account and the tome and we can act on that.

You do. You grant us only the narrow permission needed to store your ciphertext and hand it back to you and to the members you shared it with. We claim no other rights over it, we do not use it to train anything, and we could not read it in order to try.

Your account, your devices and your avatar are deleted. Tomes you owned pass to another member, or are destroyed if you were the last one in them. Posts, images and comments in tomes other members still belong to are detached from your account rather than deleted, because they are encrypted under a key those members hold and are part of a space that still exists.

We can suspend or close an account for a serious breach of the acceptable use section, and for child sexual abuse material we will do so immediately and without notice. For anything less clear-cut we will tell you what the problem is and give you the chance to answer.

Terms of service