Terms of Service

I, Blue, the administrator and the sole proprietor of macaw.me communication services, inform you of the following terms and conditions:

General

macaw.me does offer its communication services free of charge for friends. Each case of service is a personal favor and shall not be considered a public service. There are services with my manual verification, there are services with automatic registration but all of them nonetheless are my personal friendly favours. Therefore, macaw.me shall not be considered a mass media organization nor a traffic exchange point. It shall be considered the informal club of friends it actually is. macaw.me is not a corporation or any other sort of commercial legal entity. All services are provided with absolutely no warranty.

Conditions

Receiving an account provided by macaw.me you agree to the terms of this document. Following current terminology you become my personal friend if you haven’t been already. Providing you a service I willingly give you the benefit of the doubt and trust you to be decent. Here is the list of activities I consider indecent or inappropriate:

I value my reputation, and I wish to keep the good name of macaw.me, so I urge you to cooperate! As long as you use my services in a fair way for communication with your friends, family, colleagues and others everything is fine and I’m happy to serve you. As soon as I notice you’re doing something staining my reputation as your provider or something that makes me accountable to any crime I will terminate all of your accounts without a warning! If there is a suspicion about you causing lesser troubles using my services I’ll warn you, but only once. I wish to stay fair and just but if at some point I feel like I don’t trust you enough I will kindly ask you to back up your data and will terminate your account within a week. Please keep in mind that I do you a favor by providing you services for free, I can stop any time, especially if I feel that you’re causing more trouble than I am willing to put up with.

Bus Factor

Bus factor is a sort of reliability metrics of some enterprises. In brief, it argues the following: “how many people should be hit by a bus for your project to stop working?”. macaw.me’s bus factor is currently equals 1. It means it’s only me who can maintain services and keep them running. If something unpredictable happens to me everything will probably stop working shortly after such event.
On a bright side it also means that you have to trust only me with your valuable information and metadata.
I’m planning to raise my bus factor as I develop my services but unfortunately for now I haven’t found worthy candidates willing to share the responsibility.

Privacy Note

In order to stay functional and work as intended, macaw.me services collect the following information:

These are needed for providing services of public and private communication proper. None of these are shared with third parties unless it’s a case of federation protocol such as sending an email to a user of another server, joining conversation on another server, etc.

For technical purposes, as part of the system logs, also collected are:

Keep in mind, that I theoretically have access to your meta information. I will probably be able to see your unencrypted messages, how often, when and with what accounts you contact using my services. All of this is collected purely for debugging purposes. I have absolutely no intention to provide this information to any third party nor do I want to read it or study it. I will read those logs only if there is a complaint that something is not working well or when I perform technical actions such as updates and database migrations.
The databases are stored for the time being. The logs are stored until they reach a specific size. It is nearly impossible to tell how long it will take them to get purged, but you may estimate it to be several weeks or months.

I do not intend to violate your privacy nor profit from your sensitive data, but those are my words. It is you who decides whether you trust me or not. There is no one else apart from me operating the services, if this happens to change you will be notified. You also have to keep in mind the risk of my servers being hacked and some of your personal data being leaked. I take absolutely no financial responsibility for that, but I’ll endeavour my utmost to not let this happen. I sure want no troubles with authorities and if there is a situation that requires me to reveal your data under duress - I might have to disclose your information. Please keep in mind that I’m a simple person with a family, and you are not more than a distant friend to me. I’ll try to secure your information as long as I feel like I’m doing the right thing and there is no danger to me or my family for doing that.

If at least one of the previous statements doesn’t match your requirements or if it doesn’t suit your expectations - please do not use my services. I don’t take any responsibility for your potential financial, reputational, mental and temporal loses.
I can guarantee that I will not willingly stop my services in the nearest future. Please keep in mind that I’m a living person and may just die or fall sick or become any other way incapable to sustain their.
I can guarantee that I will not willingly browse through your personal data to get your private information nor will I transfer them to a third party. Unless it’s a technical issue, and on this case I will try to clean all personal references from those materials before sharing them with other developers or administrators.
I can guarantee that I will try to keep my services as fresh as possible and will try to improve their quality and security.