Terms of Use

1. Who we are and how to reach us

Project Seneca is operated by Project Seneca (pre-incorporation, operated by its founder), whose registered address is

registered address to follow on incorporation ("Seneca", "we", "us", "our").

• General and account questions: [email protected]
• Privacy, data protection and data-rights requests: [email protected]

These Terms of Use ("Terms") are a contract between you and us. Our Community and Safety Rules

and our Privacy Notice form part of these Terms. If you do not accept all three, please do not

use Project Seneca.

Drafting note. At the audit date no Privacy Notice, Terms or cookie notice existed anywhere in

the deployed product (finding F-9). These Terms must not go live before the Privacy Notice they

refer to is also published.

2. What Project Seneca is

Project Seneca is an **invite-only community whose purpose is to help adults arrange face-to-face

meetings with one another to exchange skills.** The software is a way of finding one another,

agreeing to meet, and keeping a record of exchanges. The meetings themselves happen in the real

world, between the two people involved.

We are an introduction service, not a party to your exchange. When you and another member agree

to meet, that arrangement is between the two of you. We do not organise the meeting, choose the

venue, supervise what happens, set the terms of what is taught or learned, or take responsibility

for the outcome. Section 10 deals with this in full and you should read it carefully.

Project Seneca is not an employment service, a tutoring agency, a marketplace, a dating service, or

a regulated financial service. Skills are exchanged between members as a community activity, not

supplied by us.

3. Eligibility

To hold an account you must:

1. be at least 18;

2. have received and used a valid invitation (section 4);

3. be able to enter into a binding contract in your own name;

4. be resident in, or ordinarily present in, the United Kingdom; and

5. not be barred from using a service of this kind under any law that applies to you, and not have

been removed from Project Seneca before.

Project Seneca is designed for adults meeting other adults in person. 18 must

be settled before any invitation is issued, because it determines what safeguarding, age-assurance

and child-protection duties attach to the service, and because the core activity is arranging

in-person meetings between people who have not met before.

You confirm each of the points above every time you sign in. If any of them stops being true, you

must tell us at [email protected] and stop using the service.

Drafting note — decision required. Whether Project Seneca is a regulated user-to-user service

under the Online Safety Act 2023, and what duties follow (including any age-assurance duty), is a

legal question that must be answered before launch. It is not settled by these Terms.

4. Invitations, accounts and sign-in

Invitations. Membership is by invitation. An invitation is personal to you. You may not sell it,

publish it, post it in a group, or pass it to someone else. If you are given the ability to invite

others, invite only people you would be content to meet yourself, and only people you believe meet

the eligibility rules in section 3.

Your account. You may hold one account. Give accurate information about yourself. Do not

impersonate anyone, do not use a false identity, and do not create an account on behalf of someone

else.

Signing in. Sign-in works by sending a single-use link to your email address. Anyone who can read

that email, or who can see the link, can sign in as you. So:

• keep control of the email account you register with;
• do not forward, screenshot or paste a sign-in link anywhere;
• sign out on shared or borrowed devices; and
• tell us at [email protected] straight away if you think someone else has reached your account.

You are responsible for what happens through your account, unless it results from something we did

wrong.

Honest statement about the current build. The audit found that on mobile the sign-in link's

access and refresh tokens can remain in the browser address bar and history after use (finding

F-16), and that the invitation system as configured does not restrict who can read or redeem an

invite code (findings F-2 and F-17). These are known defects with agreed remediation. These Terms

must not be published, and invitations must not be issued to real members, until they are fixed.

5. Credits — what they are, and what they are not

Project Seneca uses credits to keep the exchange balanced: broadly, you spend a credit to reach

out to someone for an exchange, and you earn one when an exchange you took part in is confirmed as

having happened by both people.

Please read this carefully. Credits are:

• an internal accounting unit used only inside Project Seneca, to record who has given and

received within the community;

• non-monetary. They have no cash value, no exchange value, and no value outside Project

Seneca;

• **not money, not e-money, not a payment instrument, not a security, not a token or cryptoasset,

and not property**;

• not redeemable. You have no right to convert credits into money, goods, services, refunds,

discounts or anything else, from us or from anyone else;

• not transferable by you. You may not sell, trade, gift, auction or assign credits, and any

attempt to do so is void;

• not a promise of service. Holding credits does not entitle you to a meeting, a partner, or a

reply from anyone.

You do not buy credits. We do not sell them. There is no payment processor in Project Seneca, and no

part of the service takes money from members.

How the record works. Credit entries are written to an append-only ledger. Each entry is

linked to the one before it by a cryptographic hash, so that the sequence forms a chain. Members

cannot write to that ledger directly; entries are created only by the service's own server

operations, under a fixed vocabulary of reasons (for example, recording an exchange as completed).

Chaining makes later alteration of the record detectable if the chain is checked. It does not

make alteration impossible: we retain administrative access to our own database, as any operator

does. We do not claim the ledger is immutable, only that it is append-only from a member's side and

tamper-evident on inspection.

Confirmation. A completed exchange is recorded only when both participants confirm it. One

person confirming twice does not count; the system prevents it. We can, at our discretion, correct

an entry that was created by error or by abuse — for example by writing a correcting entry.

A public, pseudonymised record. Project Seneca publishes a pseudonymised feed of ledger events,

so that the health of the community can be seen without exposing who did what. Each event carries a

per-event pseudonym rather than your name, and the pseudonyms are not linkable to each other across

events. This is a deliberate design choice. It is described further in the Privacy Notice.

We may change the credit system. Credits are a design feature, not a possession. We may change

how many credits an action costs or earns, introduce or remove reasons for entries, correct

mistakes, or retire credits entirely. Because credits have no monetary value, no compensation is

payable if we do. Where a change materially affects you, we will give notice under section 17.

If your account ends, any credits recorded against you cease to be usable. Nothing is owed to

you for them.

Drafting note — decision required. The audit found two parallel credit systems in the

production database: the live hash-chained ledger, and a dormant legacy table that grants a

"welcome credit" the live system never reads. The practical result is that a new member's usable

starting balance is likely to be zero in the system that actually gates activity. This must be

reconciled as a product decision before these Terms describe a starting balance, and this draft

deliberately does not promise one.

6. Your content, and the licence you give us

"Your content" means everything you put into Project Seneca: your profile and biography, the

skills you offer and want to learn, skill cards, stories and recordings, photographs and other

media, notes attached to an expression of interest, messages you send to other members, vouches you

write, and reflections you record after an exchange.

You keep ownership. Nothing here transfers ownership of your content to us.

The licence. So that the service can work at all, you grant us a **worldwide, non-exclusive,

royalty-free licence** to host, store, copy, reformat, resize, transcode, transmit and display your

content, **for the purposes of operating, securing, supporting and improving Project Seneca and

showing your content to the members it is meant for.** The licence lasts as long as we hold the

content and ends when the content is removed, except where we must retain a copy for legal reasons

or where the content forms part of a record that cannot be unpicked, such as a ledger entry. The

licence is sub-licensable only to the service providers listed in our Subprocessor Register, and

only so that they can perform their function for us.

You also grant each member who can lawfully see your content a limited right to view it inside

Project Seneca. That is not permission for them to copy it, republish it, or take it elsewhere; see

section 11.

Your promises about your content. You confirm that you own it or have the right to post it, that

it does not infringe anyone's rights, and that it does not break the law or the Community and Safety

Rules.

Content we can remove. We may remove or restrict content that breaches these Terms, the

Community and Safety Rules, or the law, or that we reasonably believe puts a member at risk. Where

we can, we will tell you why.

Two things you should know before you post.

1. **Media you upload is currently stored in a way that anyone holding the file's link can retrieve

without signing in**, and the underlying storage is currently listable. This is a known defect in

the current build (finding F-5), with remediation agreed but not yet applied. Until it is fixed,

do not upload anything you would be uncomfortable having retrievable by anyone who obtains the

link. We will update this section when the fix lands.

2. **A note you attach to an expression of interest is revealed to the other person if the interest

turns out to be mutual.** That is intended behaviour, not a fault. Write the note on the

assumption that they may read it.

7. Vouches — statements one member writes about another

A vouch is a short statement that one member writes about another member. It is a trust

signal for the community, and it is unusual in one important way: it is written by one person and it

is about a second person. Both of you have rights in it, and neither of you controls it alone.

If you write a vouch:

• Write only what you honestly believe, and only about something you actually experienced. A vouch

is not a favour and should not be traded.

• A vouch is a statement of fact or opinion about a real, identifiable person. You are responsible

for it. Defamatory, malicious or knowingly false statements are a breach of these Terms and may

also be unlawful.

• You keep the copyright in your words. You give us the licence in section 6 to display the vouch

inside Project Seneca.

• You cannot insist that a vouch you wrote stays published. We may remove it, and the person it is

about may be entitled to have it removed or corrected under data protection law.

If a vouch is written about you:

• The vouch is your personal data as well as the author's words. You may ask to see it, ask for it

to be corrected if it is inaccurate, or object to it, by writing to [email protected]. We will

handle that request under the Privacy Notice.

• You cannot require us to publish a vouch, or to keep one published.
• Removing a vouch may not remove every trace of it from our records; see the note on erasure below

and in the Privacy Notice.

How vouches behave in the current build — stated plainly.

• Every signed-in member can read every vouch in the community, not only those on profiles they

are looking at. This is a property of the data layer today (finding F-12), and it is disclosed

here rather than glossed over.

• A vouch can be recorded without a completed exchange behind it. The data layer allows a vouch

with no session attached. So a vouch tells you that a member chose to write something about

another member. It does not by itself prove that the two of them met, or that anything was taught.

• A vouch is not a reference, a qualification, a background check, or a safety assurance. Do not

treat it as one.

• Vouches currently block account deletion. Because of how the records are linked, a member who

has written or received a vouch cannot be deleted by the ordinary route (finding F-8). This is a

known defect and section 13 explains what it means for you today.

8. What we do not check

This section matters more than any other. Please read it in full.

We do not verify who anyone is. Project Seneca performs no identity verification of any

member. We do not check names, photographs, documents, addresses, dates of birth or ages against any

source. There is no identity check anywhere in the service.

Badges and labels are not verification. Where the product shows a badge or a label next to a

member, it reflects one of the following, and nothing more:

None of these is an identity check, and at the audit date **no member on the live service was

labelled as identity-verified**, because no identity verification exists to earn such a label.

Connected accounts are member-asserted. The data layer permits a member to write their own

connected-account entry directly, and permits a member to add most badge values to their own profile.

A connection or badge shown on a profile is therefore **something the member asserted about

themselves, and is not confirmation by the named provider** that the account is theirs. Treat it

as a claim, not a proof.

We do not vet skills, competence, qualifications or safety. We do not test whether a member can

do what they say they can do. We do not check qualifications, certificates, licences, insurance,

first-aid training, DBS or criminal-record status, professional registration, or anything else. A

skill listed on Project Seneca is a claim made by the person listing it.

We do not screen members for suitability or risk. Receiving an invitation is not a

recommendation, an endorsement, or a statement that a person is safe to meet.

What follows from all this. You must use your own judgement about every person you communicate

with and every person you agree to meet. Read the Community and Safety Rules before you arrange a

meeting. If a member offers something for which qualification, insurance or regulatory permission

would normally be required — anything medical, legal, financial, therapeutic, structural, electrical,

or involving vehicles, weapons, animals, heights, water or power tools — check their credentials

yourself, or do not proceed.

9. Acceptable use

Full behavioural expectations are in the Community and Safety Rules, which form part of these

Terms. In summary, you must not:

• harass, bully, intimidate, threaten or stalk anyone, on the service or after meeting through it;
• discriminate against or abuse anyone on the basis of a protected characteristic;
• send sexual content or make sexual advances to a member who has not invited them;
• misrepresent who you are, what you can do, or your reasons for being here;
• use Project Seneca to sell, recruit, canvass, market, proselytise, solicit donations, or run any

commercial or political campaign;

• use the community as a lead list, or contact members outside Project Seneca on the strength of

something you learned inside it, unless they gave you their details for that purpose;

• scrape, harvest, bulk-download, index or copy member data, profiles, photographs, recordings or

messages, whether by hand or by software;

• republish another member's content, photographs, recordings, messages or personal details anywhere

outside Project Seneca without their clear permission;

• probe, scan, overload, circumvent or interfere with the service, its access controls, its rate

limits or its infrastructure, or use anyone else's account or credentials;

• share, publish or sell invitations or invite codes;
• manipulate credits, vouches or exchange records, including by arranging fake exchanges or

confirming exchanges that did not happen;

• use the service's AI features to generate abusive, deceptive or unlawful content, or to process

other people's personal data; or

• do anything unlawful, or anything that puts another member at risk of harm.

10. Meeting in person — how risk is allocated

Project Seneca exists so that people meet face to face. That is the point of it, and it is also the

part that carries real-world risk. This section sets out plainly who is responsible for what. It

does not, and cannot, take away rights you have as a consumer under UK law, and section 12 says what

we can never exclude.

You decide whether to meet, and on what terms. Whether to meet a particular member, where, when,

for how long, and what to do together, is entirely your decision. You may decline any meeting, leave

any meeting at any moment, and stop replying to anyone, without giving a reason and without any

consequence from us.

We are not present and we are not responsible for the meeting. We do not attend, arrange,

supervise, chaperone, risk-assess, host or insure meetings. We do not choose or inspect venues. We

do not control what any member says or does before, during or after a meeting. We are not

responsible for the conduct of members, and members are not our employees, agents, contractors or

representatives.

We do not check anyone, and you must not assume otherwise. Section 8 sets out everything we do

not verify. Please treat every member as what they are: a stranger from the internet whom you have

chosen to meet.

Your responsibilities. You agree to:

• follow the meeting-safety guidance in the Community and Safety Rules, including meeting in public

places, telling somebody you trust where you are going and when you expect to be back, and ending

a meeting the moment you want to;

• satisfy yourself about any activity's safety before taking part, and refuse anything you are not

comfortable with;

• make sure any place you host or propose is safe, lawful and suitable, and that you are entitled to

use it;

• hold any insurance appropriate to what you are doing, and tell the other person if the activity

carries a risk they may not expect;

• obey the law, including road, safety, licensing and equipment law; and
• report to us anything that goes wrong, and to the police where a crime may have been committed.

Emergencies. Project Seneca is not an emergency service and cannot help in an emergency. **If

you are in immediate danger, call 999.** If you are worried about someone's safety but it is not an

emergency, call 101. Report to us afterwards so that we can act on the account.

Allocation of risk. Subject to section 12, and to the extent the law permits:

• you take part in meetings arranged through Project Seneca at your own risk;
• we are not liable for the acts or omissions of any member, including anything that happens at,

before or after a meeting, whether or not the meeting was arranged through the service;

• we are not liable for any loss, injury, damage, theft, illness, distress, dispute or cost arising

from a meeting between members, or from anything a member taught, showed, advised, lent, sold or

gave to another; and

• we give no warranty that any member is safe, honest, competent, insured, qualified or who they say

they are.

**Nothing in this section limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our own

negligence, for our fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be

excluded under UK law.** If we are ever at fault ourselves, this section does not protect us.

11. Other members' content and privacy

What you see inside Project Seneca is shared with you for the purpose of finding an exchange

partner. It is not yours to take.

• Do not copy, save, share, publish, post, screenshot-and-circulate, or feed into any external tool

another member's profile, photographs, recordings, messages, vouches or personal details.

• Do not use anything you learn inside Project Seneca to contact, profile, research or approach a

member outside it, unless they have given you their details for that purpose.

• Do not record a meeting — audio, video or photograph — without the other person's clear agreement

at the time.

• If a member asks you to delete something of theirs that you hold, do it.

Breach of this section is treated seriously and may end your membership immediately.

12. Our responsibilities, and the limits of our liability

What we owe you. We will provide Project Seneca with reasonable care and skill, as UK consumer

law requires. If we fail to, we will put it right.

What we do not promise. Project Seneca is provided as it is and as it is available. We do not

promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against every threat, or free of

defects; that any member will reply to you, be interested in you, or turn up; that any exchange will

happen or will be worthwhile; or that any information a member gives about themselves is true.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• any breach of the terms implied by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that cannot lawfully be excluded;

or

• anything else that cannot be excluded or limited under UK law.

Subject to that, we are not liable for: the conduct of members; loss or damage that was not

reasonably foreseeable when you accepted these Terms; loss of profit, business, opportunity,

goodwill or anticipated savings; or content you lose because you did not keep your own copy.

A cap on liability. Project Seneca is provided to members free of charge. Subject to the

exclusions above, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with

these Terms is limited to a capped amount.

Drafting note — decision required. The cap figure and its formulation are not set in this

draft and must be settled under the law of England and Wales with legal advice. A liability cap

in a consumer contract must be fair and transparent under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and a cap

that is not fair is simply unenforceable — so this must not be drafted aggressively, and a nominal

figure in a free service may not survive a fairness assessment at all.

Your consumer rights are unaffected. Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights. If

any part of these Terms is found to be unfair or unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

13. Suspension, ending your membership, and what happens to your data

You may leave at any time, without giving a reason, by writing to [email protected].

We may suspend or end your membership where we reasonably believe that you have breached these

Terms or the Community and Safety Rules; that your continued presence puts another member at risk;

that you have misrepresented who you are; that your account has been compromised; or that we are

required to act by law. We may act immediately where there is a risk to someone's safety.

How we will treat you. Except where safety or the law prevents it, we will tell you what has

happened and why, and give you a route to respond. The appeals process is set out in the Community

and Safety Rules.

What happens to your data. Ending your membership does not by itself delete everything about you.

Some records — for example ledger entries, and vouches you wrote or received — are linked to other

members' records and cannot simply be removed without affecting them.

Honest statement about the current build — please read. At the audit date, **member account

deletion was not possible by any self-service or administrative route.** Several records are linked

to a member's account in a way that blocks deletion, and every member has at least one such record

from the moment they join (finding F-8). No automatic deletion or retention job exists. That means

that today, a request to erase an account could not be honoured within the statutory time limit

without manual database work. This is a known defect. Whether erasure will be handled by

anonymising records in place or by full deletion is a founder and legal decision that must be

taken, and the mechanism must be built, before real members join.

Retention. How long we keep your data is set out in the Privacy Notice as

not yet fixed — being decided during the beta; this page will be updated. No retention period is currently defined anywhere in the

service. This must be decided before publication; we will not invent one here.

14. Your privacy

Our Privacy Notice explains what personal data we hold, why, on what lawful basis, who processes it

on our behalf, and what rights you have. Our Subprocessor Register lists the service providers

involved. Both are part of the documentation set these Terms belong to, and both must be published

alongside these Terms.

Two points belong here because they bear on the contract:

• Administrators can see member data. Operating the service, investigating reports and

supporting members all require it. The Community and Safety Rules and the Privacy Notice describe

what that access covers. We do not claim that anything you put into Project Seneca is hidden from

us.

• Some features send text to AI providers. Where you use a feature that drafts or interprets

text for you, a limited set of your own profile fields or a transcript you spoke is sent to an AI

provider to produce the result. The audit confirmed that email addresses, message bodies, private

reflections and connected-account data are not sent to any AI model, and that AI requests and

responses are not written to our logs. We make no claim about how long a provider retains what it

receives; that is set out, so far as it is known, in the Subprocessor Register.

Data-protection questions and requests go to [email protected].

15. Things we may change about the service

Project Seneca is early and will change. We may add, alter, restrict or withdraw features, including

features you rely on, and we may stop offering the service altogether. Where a change materially

reduces what the service does for you, we will give you reasonable notice where we can. Because the

service is free, no refund or compensation arises.

16. Intellectual property in the service

The Project Seneca name, brand, software, design, text and structure belong to us or our licensors.

These Terms give you permission to use the service as a member, and nothing more. You may not copy,

modify, reverse-engineer, resell or build a competing service from it.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. When we do:

• we will post the updated Terms with a new version number and date;
• for changes that materially affect your rights or obligations, we will give you reasonable notice

before they take effect (the notice period is to be set with legal advice under

the law of England and Wales; 30 days is the usual expectation for a UK consumer service);

• if you do not accept a change, you may leave before it takes effect; and
• continuing to use Project Seneca after a change takes effect means you accept it.

We will not apply a change retrospectively to something that already happened.

18. General

Whole agreement. These Terms, the Community and Safety Rules and the Privacy Notice are the whole

agreement between us about Project Seneca.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we do not lose the right to enforce it

later.

Severability. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest still applies.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours to a

successor to the business, provided your rights are not reduced.

Third parties. Nobody other than you and us may enforce these Terms.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Project Seneca, are governed

by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of the law of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

Nothing in this section removes any right you have to bring proceedings in the courts of the country

where you live, or to rely on the consumer protection law of that country, where the law gives you

that right.

Before going to court, please talk to us. Most problems are quickest to solve directly. Write to

[email protected] and we will try to resolve it with you.

Drafting note — decision required. The governing-law and jurisdiction clause must reflect

the United Kingdom. If members are admitted outside the UK, mandatory consumer protections in

their country will apply regardless of what this clause says, and the clause must be drafted so as

not to mislead them about that.

Schedule — decisions required before publication