Terms of use
This is the agreement between you and the person who makes Callifornia. It is short, it is in the same plain words as everything else here, and it says what it means. If you disagree with any of it, the answer is simply not to install the app.
What you are agreeing to
Ticking the box before you download, and using Callifornia at all, means you accept these terms. They cover three things that are not the same, and each of them is named where a rule applies to only one. The app that runs on your computer. The service it talks to. And this website, which mostly hands out an installer. How your personal data is handled is a separate document, the privacy policy, and the box points at both because you should have read both.
Who may use Callifornia
You need to be 16 or older. Somebody younger may use it only if a parent or guardian agrees to these terms for them and is willing to stand behind that. We do not ask your age when you sign up, and saying that we verify it would be untrue, so instead this is the rule and an account we learn belongs to a child under 16 is closed.
What you may do with the app
Install it on the computers you use, at home or at work, and call whoever you like. That permission costs nothing, is not exclusive to you, cannot be handed to somebody else, and can be withdrawn if these terms are broken. The app itself is not open source, and downloading a copy buys you the right to run it rather than any ownership of it.
What the permission does not extend to.
- Selling it, renting it, or passing it on as though it were yours
- Taking it apart to rebuild it, beyond whatever the law allows you to do regardless of what a document like this says
- Shipping a changed build, and above all one whose update signature has been stripped or forged, since that signature is the one thing standing between somebody else's computer and a program you wrote
- Using the name Callifornia, or the artwork, for something that is not Callifornia
Your account is yours to keep
One person, one account, under a name that is not somebody else's to claim. Keep the password, because whatever happens under your account is treated as done by you, and tell us if you think it has been taken. This matters more here than in most places. Your conversations are locked with a key that lives on your computers and nowhere else, so a lost password is recoverable and a lost key is not.
What you may not do
The short version is that a call is a room with people in it, and the rules are the ones any room has.
- Nothing unlawful, and nothing that exists to harm, threaten, harass or impersonate somebody
- Nothing sexual involving children, ever, under any framing
- No malware, no phishing, and no using a call to hand somebody a file that is not what you told them it was
- No attacking the service, no flooding it, no probing it for holes without asking first, and no working around the limits on how often it will answer you
- No automating an account to behave as a crowd, and no collecting other people's profiles in bulk
- Nothing that is against the law where you are sitting
What we cannot police, and why
Messages and calls are sealed on your computer with keys the service never receives, which is the whole design and is explained in the privacy policy. One honest consequence follows from it. We cannot read what is said, so we cannot moderate it, cannot review a report by looking at the conversation, and cannot produce its contents to anybody who asks, including a court. What we can act on is what we can see, which is an account and the fact that somebody complained about it. Everything in the list above is still a rule, and breaking it can still cost you the account. It simply is not enforced by reading over your shoulder, because nobody here can.
What you say stays yours
Your messages, your voice, your face and your files belong to you. Using Callifornia grants us no licence over any of it, and there is no clause further down quietly saying otherwise. This is easy to promise and hard to break, since the service holds ciphertext it cannot open.
The service is free, and makes no promise of being up
There is no subscription, no paid tier and nothing behind a paywall. In exchange there is no guarantee of uptime and no support desk with hours. It runs on one machine, paid for by one person, and it can be slow, unreachable or gone for a while. If it is going to stop for good, we will say so on this site before it does, with as much notice as we can manage.
Updates, including the ones you cannot refuse
The app checks for new versions and installs them, and every update is signed and checked before anything is applied. Some releases are marked mandatory, and a version older than that floor stops being served until it updates. That sounds heavy handed and it is deliberate. When a release fixes something about keys or about how a call is joined, an old copy left running is a hole in everybody else's security, not only in yours. What changed and when is on the changelog.
Ending this
You can stop at any moment by uninstalling the app, and you can ask for your account to go by writing to the address below, which is described in the privacy policy. From our side, an account that breaks the rules above can be suspended or closed, and where the break is not serious we will say what it was and give you a chance to answer first.
What is not promised
Callifornia is provided as it is. It is not promised to be free of bugs, to work with every camera, to reach every network, or to be fit for anything in particular, and it should not be the thing you rely on for an emergency call. Encryption protects a conversation in transit and at rest on our side; it cannot protect you from a computer that somebody else already controls.
Two limits on that paragraph, and they are not small print. Nothing here removes a right the law gives you and does not let you sign away, and if you are using Callifornia as a consumer you keep every protection consumer law grants you. Where a limitation in this document conflicts with such a right, the right wins and the rest of the document stands.
Changes to these terms
These terms can change, and the date at the top is how you tell. A change that actually affects what you may do, or what you are agreeing to, is announced on this site before it takes effect and the box before the download asks again. Carrying on using Callifornia after that is how you accept the new version, and if you would rather not, uninstalling is the way out.
Which law applies
The law of the Russian Federation, and disputes that cannot be settled by writing to each other go to the courts of the Russian Federation. If you are a consumer, this does not take away your right to bring a claim where consumer law says you may, which is usually where you live.
Contact
Callifornia is made and run by one person rather than a company. Anything about these terms goes to fmtab2014@gmail.com, and the person who answers is the one who writes the code.