Terms of Use

Your clips, photos and words stay yours. You give us permission to show them on TrustFirst, which is what makes the app work. We do not sell them and we do not claim them.

If you post something you had no right to post, that is on you, not on us. If it breaks the rules we will take it down.

You must be 18 to buy coins, send or receive gifts, or hold a wallet balance. 13 to have an account, 16 to go live. For now, while child accounts are paused, you must be 18 to create an account.

TrustFirst does not show advertising and does not sell your information. It is paid for by a share of gifts sent on the platform.

When the rules are broken. You can appeal, and we will tell you what happened and why.

These Terms are an agreement between you and TrustFirst, which is run as a sole enterprise from Cape Town, South Africa. EDE’s Corp (Pty) Ltd is being registered to take it over, and on the day it is formed this becomes an agreement with that company, without anything you have agreed to changing. See If TrustFirst changes hands.

Where these Terms say we, us or our, they mean whoever is running TrustFirst at the time: the sole enterprise today, and EDE’s Corp once it exists.

You can reach us at contacttrustfirst@gmail.com. That is the address for legal notices, copyright complaints and anything else in these Terms.

A social app for posting short videos, photos and text, following people, messaging them privately, and streaming live. It runs in a web browser and as an installed app.

We may add features, change them, or take them away. If we remove something you were relying on, we will say so rather than let you discover it.

By making an account or using TrustFirst, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree with them, do not use TrustFirst. That is the whole of it: there is no version of using the app that is not covered by this agreement.

These Terms and the Privacy Policy together make up your agreement with us. The Privacy Policy explains what we collect and what we do with it, and it is part of this agreement rather than a separate courtesy.

• Content: anything you put on TrustFirst. Clips, photos, captions, comments, messages, live streams, your profile, your username.
• TrustClip: a short video posted to the clips feed.
• Coins: a virtual item bought with money and used to send gifts. Coins are not money and cannot be turned back into money.
• Wallet: a balance of real money held for a creator who has received gifts, which can be paid out.
• Child account: an account for someone under 18, linked to a parent or guardian.
• Eddie: the AI assistant inside TrustFirst.

There is more than one, because posting a clip and spending money are not the same act.

• 13 to have an account at all, through a child account. Child accounts are paused for now, so until they return you must be 18 to create an account.
• 16 to broadcast a live stream. Anyone old enough for an account may watch one.
• 18 to buy coins, send a gift, receive a gift, or hold a wallet balance. There is no exception to this one, with or without a parent's permission.

The money limit is not us being careful for the sake of it. A person under 18 in South Africa cannot enter a binding contract on their own, so a purchase made by a minor can be reversed by their guardian afterwards. By then the gift has been sent and the creator has been paid, and the loss falls on the platform and on them.

South African law treats anyone under 18 as a child, and your information may only be handled with the permission of a parent or guardian. On TrustFirst that permission is given through a child account linked to their account.

Without that link, an account for someone under 18 cannot be used. This is not a setting we can waive.

Child accounts are paused for now. Until they return, nobody under 18 can create an account. We will update these Terms before they come back.

By linking a child account you are agreeing to these Terms on their behalf and consenting to their information being handled as the Privacy Policy describes. You can see their activity, change what they are allowed to do, and close the account at any time.

You are responsible for what happens on that account, which is the other half of being able to control it.

We may ask you to confirm your age, particularly before anything involving money. If we have good reason to think an account belongs to someone younger than they said, we may restrict it until the question is answered.

If we find that someone under 18 has spent money on TrustFirst, we will refund what is left and close off the ability to spend. We may not be able to recover a gift that has already been paid out to a creator.

You may have more than one account, and the app is built to switch between them. What you may not do is pretend to be somebody else, run accounts automatically, or make accounts in order to get around a suspension.

Keep your password to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you, so tell us quickly if you think someone else is in it.

You may not use TrustFirst if we have already closed your account for breaking these Terms, or if the law where you are does not allow you to use a service like this.

You own everything you post. Posting a clip on TrustFirst does not hand it to us, does not make it ours to sell, and does not stop you putting it anywhere else. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of anything you made.

We need your permission to show your content to other people, because that is the entire function of the app. Without it we could not put your clip in somebody's feed.

So when you post, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to store, copy, display and distribute that content for the purpose of running TrustFirst. In practice that means: keeping it on our servers, sending it to your followers, making a thumbnail of it, resizing it so it loads on a slow connection, and letting it be found in search inside the app.

Non-exclusive means you can still do whatever you like with it elsewhere. Royalty-free means we do not owe you a fee for showing it, which is the ordinary arrangement for a platform you are not paying to use.

This licence is deliberately narrower than the one most platforms take, and here is what it does not include:

• We will not use your content to train artificial intelligence models, ours or anybody else's.
• We will not sell or license your content to other companies, and we will not hand it to a partner to publish somewhere else.
• We will not put your face or your words in an advertisement. There are no adverts on TrustFirst.
• We may pass your content to the companies that store and deliver it for us, listed in the Privacy Policy, and to nobody else. They may only handle it in order to do that job.

If we ever want to do something outside this, we have to ask you first.

TrustFirst lets people repost a clip and share a link to it. By posting publicly you accept that this can happen, and your permission extends far enough to let it work.

You can turn some of this off per post, and where you have, we will respect it. What we cannot undo is somebody recording their screen, and we will not pretend otherwise.

The permission above lasts as long as the content is on TrustFirst. Delete a post, or your whole account, and it ends.

Two honest caveats. Copies can sit in caches and backups for a short while before they are cleared, so deletion is quick but not instant everywhere. And if somebody else reposted it before you deleted it, or saved it to their phone, that copy is beyond our reach. Deleting removes it from TrustFirst; it does not un-share it from the world.

When you post something, you are telling us that you are allowed to: that you made it, or you have permission from whoever did, and that showing it does not break somebody else's copyright or put someone in it who did not agree to be there.

Music is where this bites most often. A song in the background of your clip belongs to whoever wrote and recorded it, and being on TrustFirst does not license it for you.

If that turns out not to be true, the consequences are yours rather than ours, and we will take the content down.

We do not pay you for posting. What you can earn is what other people choose to send you: when someone sends you a gift, you receive 80 percent of its value and TrustFirst keeps 20 percent to run the platform. That is the whole of the arrangement, and it is covered properly in the section on coins and gifts.

Almost everything on TrustFirst was made by the people using it. We did not write it, we do not vouch for it, and showing you something is not us agreeing with it.

You may come across something you find offensive or wrong. That is the nature of a place where people post freely, and while we remove what breaks the rules, we cannot promise you will never see it.

Posts go up immediately. There is no queue where a person reads each one, because at any real size there could not be. Some images are checked automatically for adult or violent content, as the Privacy Policy describes, and the rest of our moderation happens after the fact, largely because somebody reported it.

That is also the legal position: we are not obliged to monitor everything on the platform, and we do not.

Every post, clip, comment, message and account has a report option in its menu. Use it. It reaches us with the thing you are reporting attached, which is far more useful than a description of it.

You can also block someone, which stops them contacting you, seeing your posts, or interacting with you at all.

Send a take-down notification to contacttrustfirst@gmail.com. South African law sets out what one has to contain, and a notice missing these cannot be acted on:

• Your full name and address, and your signature, written or electronic.
• Your phone number and email address.
• Identification of the right you hold and what you say infringes it.
• A link to the material on TrustFirst, precise enough for us to find it.
• What you want done about it.
• A statement that you are acting in good faith.
• A statement that what you have told us is, to your knowledge, true and correct.

Do not send one lightly. A person who knowingly misrepresents that something infringes their rights can be held liable for the damage that causes.

We look at it, and if it holds up we remove the material. We tell the person who posted it what was removed and why, and who asked, unless we are not permitted to say.

Removing something is not us deciding who owns it. That is not ours to decide, and a court is where it goes if the two of you cannot agree.

Write to us at the same address and say so, with the reason you believe you had the right to post it. We will look again. If we were wrong, we will put it back and say so.

An account that keeps posting other people's work after being told will be closed. One mistake is a mistake; a pattern is a decision.

Reporting is for content that breaks the rules, not for burying somebody you disagree with. Mass or bad-faith reporting is itself a reason to act against an account, and we look at who is reporting as well as what is reported.

Coins, gifts and the wallet are switched off for now, withdrawals included. This section describes how they work when they are switched on.

When the wallet was switched off, the only money in any wallet was our own test balance. If you believe you had money in one, write to us and we will pay it out. Coins already in an account stay there but cannot be used or cashed out until coins return. If that leaves you out of pocket, write to us and we will put it right.

Everything in this section is for people over 18. Buying coins, sending a gift, receiving one, or holding a wallet balance are all closed to anyone younger, with or without a parent's permission. The reason is in the age limits.

Coins are a virtual item you buy in order to send gifts. They are not money. You do not own a balance of currency with us; you hold a limited permission to use a feature of the app.

• Coins have no cash value and cannot be turned back into money.
• They cannot be sold, given to another person, or moved off TrustFirst.
• They do not expire while your account is open and in good standing.

Prices are shown in the app before you pay, in rand, and they are what you will be charged. Coins arrive immediately once the payment goes through.

Payment is handled by Yoco, not by us. We never see your card number. Yoco's terms apply to the payment itself alongside ours.

We may change coin prices. A change never affects coins you have already bought.

Sending a gift spends the coins. The creator receives 80 percent of its value into their wallet and TrustFirst keeps 20 percent, which is how the platform is paid for.

A gift is final. It cannot be taken back, and the coins are gone once it is sent. Send them because you want to, not expecting anything in return: a gift buys you nothing, obliges the creator to nothing, and promises you nothing.

Unlike coins, a wallet balance is real money, and it is yours. It is kept separate from coins and shown separately in the app.

• The minimum withdrawal is R50.
• Bank transfers take 1 to 3 business days once approved.
• The bank details must be yours. We do not pay a wallet out to somebody else's account.

We hold that money for you until you withdraw it. We do not pay interest on it, and it is not a savings or investment account.

Unused coins: if you change your mind, tell us within 7 days of buying and we will refund coins you have not spent. That is your cooling-off right for something bought electronically, and we would rather honour it than argue about it.

Spent coins: cannot be refunded. The value has already gone to a creator, and taking it back would mean taking it from them.

If something went wrong: a payment taken twice, coins that never arrived, a gift the app sent by mistake. Write to contacttrustfirst@gmail.com and we will put it right. This is separate from changing your mind, and there is no time limit on us fixing our own error.

If a payment is reversed after coins were delivered (a chargeback, or a card that turns out to be stolen), we will remove those coins. If they have already been spent, the balance can go negative and must be settled before you can buy again.

Doing this deliberately is fraud, and the account will be closed.

Money you earn from gifts may be income, and declaring it is yours to do. We do not deduct tax for you and we cannot advise you on it. If you are earning meaningfully, speak to someone who does this properly.

We may pause a withdrawal while we look into it if there are signs of fraud, stolen cards, or gifts being cycled between accounts to move money about. We will tell you it is happening and why, and release it as soon as we are satisfied.

We will not hold your money because we disagree with what you post. Enforcement against an account and holding earned money are separate things.

You close it: withdraw your wallet balance first. Unspent coins are not refunded on closure, because they were bought to be used here. Tell us before you close if there is a balance you cannot withdraw and we will sort it out.

We close it for breaking the rules: you can still withdraw money already earned, unless it came from the fraud that got the account closed. Coins are forfeited.

Then we would give reasonable notice, stop selling coins, and let you withdraw your wallet balance whether or not it reaches the usual R50 minimum. We would rather say that now, while it costs nothing to promise, than leave you guessing.

Do not use TrustFirst to hurt people. Everything below is that idea applied to specific situations, and where something is not listed but is obviously in that spirit, the spirit wins.

Sexual content involving anyone under 18 is forbidden absolutely. So is sexualising a child in any way, grooming, or asking a minor for images.

There is no warning, no appeal and no second look. The account goes, and it is reported to the authorities. This is a crime in South Africa, not merely a rule of ours, and we will not treat it as a moderation question.

Do not post a nude or sexual image of another person without their permission, including images made or altered to look like them. Threatening to do it is also forbidden.

This is a criminal offence in South Africa under the Cybercrimes Act. If it happens to you, report it in the app and write to us, and we will remove it as fast as we can see it.

TrustFirst is not a place for pornography or explicit sexual content, and that includes profile pictures, live streams and messages.

Some images are checked automatically and blurred behind a tap rather than removed, so that nobody is shown something graphic without choosing to look. That is a safety net, not permission.

Do not threaten to hurt anyone, encourage others to, or celebrate it having happened. Do not post graphic violence or real injury for its own sake, and do not glorify people who commit atrocities.

A credible threat against a specific person is passed to the police, not just deleted.

Do not attack people for what they are: race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, illness. That means slurs, dehumanising comparisons, and calls to exclude or harm.

Disagreeing with an idea is not the same as attacking the people who hold it, and we do try to tell the difference.

Do not follow someone around the app to torment them, pile on with others, sexually harass anyone, or keep contacting a person who has made it clear they want you to stop.

Blocking exists and it works: a blocked person cannot message you, see your posts, mention you or interact with you at all. Making new accounts to get around somebody's block is itself harassment and is treated as such.

Do not encourage anyone to hurt themselves, give instructions for it, or post it as entertainment.

Talking about your own struggle is not against the rules and never will be. There is a difference between someone saying they are not coping and someone urging others to stop coping, and we are not going to punish the first to be seen doing something about the second.

Do not post somebody's home address, ID number, phone number, bank details, medical information or location without their permission, and do not tell others to go and find them.

No investment schemes, no fake giveaways, no phishing, no pretending to sell something you will not send.

Specific to this app: do not send gifts between accounts you control in order to move money through the platform, and do not buy coins with a card that is not yours. Both are fraud, both are visible to us in the transaction record, and both end the account.

Do not buy or sell followers, likes, views or comments, run accounts automatically, or coordinate groups to push something up or bury it.

On a platform called TrustFirst, numbers that lie are worse than most things on this list.

Do not pose as another person, a business, or us. Parody and fan accounts are fine when it is obvious from the profile that is what they are.

A verification badge means a person on our team checked a document. Faking one, or claiming to have one, is treated as impersonation.

We are not the arbiters of what is true, and we are not going to pretend to be. Being wrong on the internet is not against these rules.

What is against them is a narrow, deliberate set: false medical claims that could get somebody hurt, lies about how and when to vote, and made-up emergencies during a real one. The test is harm, not disagreement.

No selling drugs, weapons, stolen goods, counterfeit items or people. No malware, no phishing links.

And do not attack the app itself: no scraping it, no breaking into accounts, no probing it for holes without asking us first, no flooding it to knock it over. If you find a security problem, tell us at contacttrustfirst@gmail.com and we will thank you rather than come after you.

A listing must be real, yours to offer, and described honestly, photos included. Not allowed, whatever the price:

• Weapons, ammunition, drugs, medicines and anything else that is illegal to sell in South Africa.
• Stolen, fake or counterfeit goods, and accounts or documents that belong to someone else.
• Jobs, rooms or "opportunities" that charge the person answering a fee or deposit before anything is delivered or viewed.
• Investments, loans and anything promising returns.
• Sexual services.

We remove listings that break this, and the rules on scams and fraud apply in full.

The rules apply in direct messages exactly as they do in public. What is different is what we look at: we do not read or scan private conversations, so we will not find a rule being broken in one on our own. Some messages we could not read even if we tried, because they are end-to-end encrypted. Section 9 says exactly which.

You can still report a message. When you do, the message is sent to us so there is something to act on. Blocking cuts off contact immediately and does not need us at all.

Everything above applies while you are live, and a stream that breaks the rules is ended rather than reviewed afterwards, because afterwards is too late.

You are responsible for what your guests do on your stream. If you invite someone up and they behave badly, that lands on your account as well as theirs.

Not everything is a ban, and treating a first rude comment the same as a scam would be its own kind of unfairness. Depending on what happened we may:

• Remove the post, clip, comment or message.
• Put it behind a tap rather than remove it, where it is graphic rather than forbidden.
• Show it to fewer people.
• Take away a feature for a while: going live, sending messages, posting.
• Remove a verification badge.
• Suspend the account for a period.
• Close it permanently.

We try to pick the smallest thing that fixes the problem.

Three ways: somebody reports it, an automatic check flags an image, or we come across it ourselves. Most of it is the first, which is why the report button matters more than it looks.

Being honest about the size of this: TrustFirst is reviewed by a very small team. We look at reports as quickly as we can and we will not promise a time we cannot keep. Anything involving a child, a credible threat, or somebody in danger goes to the front of the queue ahead of everything else.

If we act against your account we will tell you what we did, what it was about, and how to challenge it. Enforcement you have to guess at is not enforcement, it is just things breaking.

The exception is where telling you would put somebody at risk, or where the law says we may not.

Every decision can be challenged. Open a support request in the app, or write to contacttrustfirst@gmail.com, and say why you think we got it wrong.

A different look is a real look. If we were wrong we will undo it, put the content back, and say so rather than quietly reversing it and hoping you do not notice.

For a small set of things we remove or suspend immediately and work it out after: anything involving a child, a threat against a specific person, intimate images posted without consent, an account that has been taken over, or fraud in progress.

You can still appeal. It just happens after the thing has stopped rather than before.

We keep a record of what we have done to an account and why, so that a pattern is visible as a pattern. Repetition moves you up the list above. One mistake is a mistake; the same thing three times is a decision.

If we have suspended or closed your account, do not make another one to carry on. Doing so is itself a reason to close the new one, and it turns a temporary suspension into a permanent one.

This is the one place where having several accounts, which is otherwise perfectly allowed, becomes a problem.

A suspension hides your profile and posts from other people; it does not delete them. If the suspension is lifted they come back. If the account is closed permanently, your content goes.

Money is handled separately and deliberately so: see your wallet. Being suspended does not forfeit what you have already earned, unless the earnings are themselves the fraud.

We generally do not police what you do off TrustFirst. The exception is narrow and serious: where something elsewhere means you are a real danger to people here, such as using another platform to organise harm to someone on this one.

We will remove content and hand over information when South African law requires us to, and we will tell you when that has happened to your account unless we are forbidden from saying.

What we cannot hand over is what an end-to-end encrypted message says. We do not hold a readable copy, so there is nothing to give, and that is a property of how the app is built rather than a position we take case by case.

The rest of a conversation is different. Group chats, photos, voice notes, videos, files, shared locations, and any message that was not encrypted are held in a form we could read, and the law can oblige us to hand them over like anything else. Section 9 lists what is encrypted and what is not.

Moderation at any scale involves judgement calls made quickly with incomplete information, and some of ours will be wrong. We aim to be consistent, and the fact that something similar was missed elsewhere does not mean a decision about you was wrong. It more likely means we have not seen the other one yet.

Tell us when we get it wrong. That is what the appeal is for.

It means we checked something specific and it held up. Nothing more than that, and the colour tells you which thing:

• Blue, Verified: a real person, confirmed by a face check or an identity document.
• Silver, Business: a real business, confirmed by registration papers or a company email address.
• Red, Official: a government body or official, confirmed by an official email address or a letter of employment, and always read by a person.
• Green, Protected: a child account, linked to a verified parent or guardian.
• Gold, Public Figure: granted by us, not applied for.

A badge is not us vouching for someone. It is not a mark of quality, honesty or safety, and it is not our endorsement of anything they post.

A verified account can still lie to you, and a verified business can still be one you should not buy from. The badge tells you they are who they say they are. Whether they are worth trusting is still yours to judge.

You need to be verified to start a conversation with someone new. That is the only thing gated behind it. It exists because opening a direct message to a stranger is how most scams and harassment begin, and making that step cost something stops most of it.

Everything else (posting, clips, comments, going live, replying to messages already open) works without a badge.

It goes into private storage only a reviewer can open, and it is deleted the moment your application is decided, whichever way it goes. If nobody reviews it within 7 days it is deleted anyway. We keep the outcome, never the document or your ID number.

Cover your ID number before photographing it. A reviewer needs your face, your name and the type of document, and nothing else. The full account of this is in the Privacy Policy.

We can refuse an application, and we do not have to explain the reasoning in detail. Saying exactly what failed a check is a manual for getting past it next time.

We can also remove a badge later: if it was obtained with false documents, if the account is handed to somebody else, if a business closes or an official leaves the post it was granted for, or if the account is used to abuse the trust the badge creates.

Do not put a tick in your display name or profile picture, and do not claim to be verified when you are not. It is treated as impersonation, and the account is closed.

Badges cannot be bought, and nobody offering to sell you one is able to deliver it.

Typed messages in a one-to-one chat are end-to-end encrypted. They are scrambled on your device before they leave it and unscrambled on the other person's device when they arrive. What sits on our servers in between is the scrambled version. We cannot turn it back into words, and neither can anyone who steals it from us.

These are not encrypted yet:

• Group chats.
• Photos, videos, voice notes and files, shared locations, contact cards, checklists, and the record of a call.
• A typed one-to-one message that could not be encrypted, usually because the other person's app has not set up its keys. The app sends it anyway, and does not yet show you that it went unencrypted.

What is not encrypted is kept in private storage. The people in the conversation can open it, and so could we, because we run that storage. We do not read it, but you should know that we could.

One more limit: the app has no way yet for you to check that you hold the other person's real key, so you rely on us to hand out the right one.

Encryption hides what you said. It does not hide that you said it. We can see that an account messaged another account, roughly when, and how big the message was. We need that much to deliver it at all.

So: private conversation, visible correspondence. If the fact of talking to someone is itself sensitive, know that this is the part encryption does not cover.

This is the cost of encryption. An encrypted message can only be opened with the key on your device. Lose the device or clear its data without a message backup, and those messages cannot be opened again. There is no copy we are holding back, no support request that recovers them, and no amount of proving who you are that helps.

Message Backup, in Settings under Security, keeps a copy of your key with us, locked with a PIN only you know. On a new device, the PIN unlocks it. We never see the PIN and cannot reset it. Choose a long one: anyone who got hold of the locked copy, including us, could try PINs one after another, and a short PIN would not hold out for long.

Messages that were not encrypted are kept on our servers, so they come back when you sign in on a new device.

If a conversation matters to you, keep your own copy of it.

Sometimes a message shows as encrypted for a different device and cannot be opened. That is the encryption working, not a fault: it was locked for a key this device does not have.

It usually happens after signing in on a new device without restoring your message backup. Restoring the backup with your PIN usually fixes it. Without a backup, that message cannot be opened.

Everything in the rules applies in a private message. Private does not mean permitted.

What changes is how we find out. We do not scan private conversations, so a report from the person receiving a message is the only way it reaches us. Reporting one sends us that message, which is what lets us act on it.

The one automatic check happens on your own device: before a message is sent, the app looks for words on a short banned list and will not send it if it finds one. That check tells us nothing.

You can set a conversation so new messages disappear once seen, after 24 hours, or after 7 days. Either person can turn it on or change it, and both are told when it changes.

It removes messages from the conversation. It cannot remove them from somebody's memory, their notes, or a photograph of their screen. Treat it as tidying up, not as a guarantee.

Where the app can tell that a screenshot was taken, it says so in the conversation. It cannot always tell. A web browser gives an app no way of knowing, so a screenshot taken there is silent, and there are other ways to photograph a screen that nothing can detect.

So do not treat the absence of a notice as proof that nothing was captured. Anything you send to another person is, in the end, in their hands.

Encryption protects the message in transit. It says nothing about whether the person at the other end is who they claim to be, or what they will do with what you send them.

You must be verified to open a conversation with someone new, which raises the cost of pretending, but it does not eliminate it. Be as careful about what you send as you would be with anyone you have not met.

Blocking is immediate and does not need us. A blocked person cannot message you, see your posts, mention you, tag you or interact with you anywhere in the app. You do not have to explain it to anyone, including them.

Media sent in a conversation is kept in private storage rather than anywhere public, and is not reachable by a stray link the way a posted clip is. You and the people in the conversation you sent it to can open it.

It is not end-to-end encrypted yet, so unlike a typed one-to-one message, it is not protected from us. We do not open it unless it is reported to us.

Eddie is switched off for now. It does not answer messages, and it does not reply when it is mentioned in a post or a comment. This section describes how it works when it is switched on, and we will update these Terms before it comes back.

Conversations you had with Eddie before it was switched off are kept. While it is off you cannot open them in the app; deleting your account deletes them, or write to us and we will delete them for you.

Eddie is an AI assistant. It is not a member of staff, it does not speak for us, and nothing it says is a promise from TrustFirst. If Eddie tells you how something on the app works and these Terms say otherwise, these Terms are what counts.

Language models invent things. Eddie can state a fact that does not exist, get a date wrong, or describe a feature this app has never had, and it will do all of that in the same certain tone it uses when it is right.

Check anything that matters. Do not use Eddie as your source for medical, legal, financial or safety decisions. It is not qualified to give any of that, and neither are we through it.

Eddie does not run on our own machines. What you send it is passed to an outside AI provider, which produces the reply and sends it back. Depending on our arrangement with that provider, what passes through may be used by them to improve their own systems.

So treat Eddie as a conversation that leaves TrustFirst, because it does. Do not paste anything into it you would not want outside this app: not passwords, not ID numbers, not somebody else's private information.

Eddie has no access to your direct messages. It is not connected to them, and nothing you write to another person is sent to it.

If you are in danger or thinking of hurting yourself, Eddie is not the thing to talk to. It is not a counsellor, it cannot call anyone, and it cannot tell how serious a situation is.

Please contact a real service. In South Africa, the SADAG suicide crisis line is 0800 567 567, and emergency services are 10111 or 112 from a mobile.

They are kept so you can scroll back to them, and you can delete them whenever you like. There is a limit on how much you can use Eddie in a day, which exists because each reply costs us money and the limit is what keeps it free for everyone.

We do not claim ownership of an image you generate. We also cannot promise you own it: in most countries the law has not settled whether anyone owns something made this way, and we are not going to pretend that question is answered.

What is certain is that you are responsible for what you do with it. If you generate something that infringes somebody's rights or breaks the rules, that is on you exactly as if you had drawn it.

Everything forbidden elsewhere is forbidden through Eddie: making sexual imagery, harassing content, somebody's face put where it does not belong, scam material. Trying to trick it into producing that is itself a reason to lose access to it, and posting the result is a reason to lose the account.

If you mention Eddie in a post or a comment, its reply is public, exactly like any other comment. Anything you put in a public mention is public, and none of the privacy of a one-to-one conversation applies to it.

Some images are examined automatically for adult or violent content and blurred behind a tap if flagged. It is imperfect in both directions: it will sometimes blur something harmless and sometimes miss something it should have caught. Report anything it misses.

Live streams are paused for now. This section describes how they work when they are switched on.

You must be 16 to start a live stream. Anyone old enough to have an account can watch one. The reasoning is in the age limits: broadcasting yourself to strangers in real time is a different act from posting a clip you had time to think about.

Everything you say, show, and have in the background of your room goes out as it happens. Nobody reviews it first, and you cannot edit it afterwards, because there is no afterwards.

Look behind you before you start. Addresses, school uniforms, post with your name on it, other people who did not agree to be on camera: all of it is broadcast the moment it is in frame.

We do not record the video. When a stream ends, it is gone from our side: there is no replay, and no copy sitting in storage. If we ever change that, we will say so before it happens rather than after.

The chat and reactions are kept, so somebody arriving late can follow the conversation. Treat a live chat as public and permanent, because that is what it is.

When somebody asks to join, you see their username and picture so you can decide. If you accept, their camera and microphone go out to everyone watching until they leave or you remove them.

You are responsible for what happens on your stream, including what a guest does on it. Choose who you bring up, and remove them the moment it goes wrong. Do not bring up somebody you cannot see the account of.

Asking to join shares your username and picture with the host before anything else happens. Being accepted puts your camera and microphone in front of everyone in that room, which may be a great many people you know nothing about.

You can leave at any time, and leaving ends it immediately.

Gifts sent while you are live work exactly as they do anywhere else: 80 percent to you, 20 percent to the platform, and final once sent. The full arrangement is in coins, gifts and your wallet.

Do not promise things in exchange for gifts that you do not intend to do, and do not ask a viewer for anything that would break the rules. Pressuring viewers to send gifts, especially any you can tell are young, is a reason to lose the ability to go live.

Everything in the rules applies while you are live, and a stream that breaks them is ended rather than reviewed afterwards.

Two that catch people out in particular. Do not stream other people's work: films, series, sport, concerts, or music playing loudly enough to be the point. And do not stream people who have not agreed to be on camera, which includes strangers in public places who did not know you were filming.

We do not keep the video, but a viewer can point a second phone at their screen and there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it. Anything you broadcast may end up saved and shared somewhere else entirely.

Go live as though it is being recorded, because sometimes it is.

We may end a stream immediately where it is breaking the rules or somebody is at risk. We will tell you why, and you can appeal it as you can any other decision. See disagreeing with us.

Streams also fail for ordinary reasons: bad signal, a device running out of battery, our own service having a problem. Those are not enforcement, and we cannot promise a stream will never drop.

Delete your account from Settings. You do not have to ask us, give a reason, or talk to anyone first, and nothing in this agreement traps you here.

• Withdraw your wallet. Money left in a closed account is a problem to unpick afterwards. If the balance is under the R50 minimum and you cannot withdraw it, write to us before you close and we will sort it out.
• Download your data if you want to keep it. After deletion we cannot produce it for you, because it is not there.

Unspent coins are not refunded when you close an account. They were bought to be used here.

An account that has ever had a payment cannot be deleted from the app, because the law makes us keep those records. Write to us and we will close it for you.

Your profile, posts, clips, stories, comments, the messages you sent, the photos, videos and voice notes you uploaded, and the account itself, including the email address and password you signed in with. It stops being reachable straight away, and the data goes from our systems rather than being hidden and kept.

Copies can persist briefly in caches and backups before those are cycled out. That is a matter of days, not a quiet archive.

Four things, and it is better to know them now than to discover them after.

• What other people kept of your messages. Closing your account deletes the messages you sent from our servers, so they disappear from the other person's chat as well. A copy their device had already stored, a screenshot, or anything they forwarded can stay with them.
• Copies other people made before you left: anything they downloaded, screenshotted or saved. Their own posts and replies stay, without yours inside them.
• Reports you made about someone else. We keep them, without your name, so we can still act on them.
• Records we are required by law to keep, chiefly transactions. We keep the record of a payment, not your profile.

It is released and somebody else may take it. If you think you might come back, that is a reason to keep the account rather than delete it.

We may suspend or close an account for breaking these Terms, as section 7 describes. We may also have to close one where the law requires it, or where keeping it open would put other people at risk.

We will tell you, and you can appeal. Money already earned stays yours unless the earnings are themselves the fraud that ended the account.

We may close an account that has gone unused for a very long time, so that storage is not held for ever for nobody. If we ever do this we will email you first and give you a fair chance to log in and stop it. We will not do it to an account holding money.

A parent or guardian can close a linked child account at any time, and withdrawing their consent closes it. The same deletion applies as anywhere else.

Most of these Terms stop applying when you leave. A few carry on because they would be meaningless otherwise: the sections on liability, on content somebody else has already reposted, on records we must keep, and on how disputes between us are resolved.

You are welcome to make a new account later, unless we closed the last one for breaking the rules. What you cannot do is get the old one back: deletion is final, and there is nothing to restore.

The Marketplace puts people in touch. We do not handle the payment, hold the money, check the item, inspect the room or stand behind either side, and a deal you make is between you and the other person.

Every seller has been verified as a real person, which raises the cost of lying but does not make it impossible. See it in person before you pay, meet somewhere public, and never share a one-time PIN or your banking details. If something goes wrong, report it to us and to the police.

We build this carefully and we want it to work. What we cannot do is guarantee it. We do not promise the app will be available without interruption, free of faults, or that it will suit whatever you are hoping to use it for.

It is a free app made by a very small team. Treat it accordingly, and keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

Servers fail, deployments go wrong, a service we depend on has a bad day, and a stream drops halfway through. We will fix what we can as fast as we can, and we are not going to pretend that outages are somebody else's fault.

But we cannot compensate you for a post that did not go out, a live that ended early, or engagement you believe you would otherwise have had.

We did not write what other people post and we cannot vet it in advance. If somebody lies to you, scams you, harasses you or infringes your copyright, the person responsible is them.

That is not us washing our hands of it. We will remove content, close accounts and help where we can, and we would rather you reported it than absorbed it. What we cannot do is stand behind every one of our users as if we had chosen them.

TrustFirst runs on services we do not control: hosting, storage, video, payments, listed in the Privacy Policy. When one of them fails, part of the app fails with it, and we are as stuck as you are.

Payments are handled by Yoco, and its own terms cover the payment itself.

Some things cannot be signed away, and we are not going to try. Nothing in these Terms limits our responsibility for:

• Death or injury caused by our negligence.
• Fraud or dishonesty on our part.
• Gross negligence.
• Anything else South African law does not permit us to exclude, including your rights under the Consumer Protection Act.

If a court decides any part of this section goes further than the law allows, that part is cut back to what is allowed and the rest still stands.

Outside the things above, if we do owe you something, the most we are liable for in total is the greater of R2,000 or whatever you have paid us in the six months before the claim.

We are also not liable for indirect losses: lost profit, lost followers, lost opportunity, damage to reputation, or the value you place on data you did not keep a copy of.

This is a small free platform run by one person. A limit like this is the only basis on which it can exist at all, and it is set out plainly rather than hidden in a paragraph of capitals.

The cap above does not apply to money in your wallet. That is yours, we are holding it, and if we lose it or fail to pay it out we owe you the balance in full regardless of anything else in this section.

Capping our liability for money we are holding on your behalf would be indefensible, so we do not.

If somebody brings a claim against us because of what you posted or did here, you are responsible for it: the claim, and what it reasonably costs us to deal with it.

This applies to what you actually did. It does not make you responsible for our own mistakes, and we will not use it to shift the cost of something that was our fault.

Anything you decide off the back of something you saw here (buying from someone, meeting them, believing a claim, acting on something Eddie said) is yours. We do not check it and we cannot stand behind it.

The app grows, the law moves, and something here will eventually be out of date. When that happens we update these Terms rather than let them describe an app that no longer exists.

For any change that actually affects you (what you may do, what we may do with your content, anything about money), we will tell you in the app or by email at least 14 days before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page always shows when it last changed.

Small corrections, a clearer sentence or a fixed typo, we simply make.

Stop using TrustFirst and close your account before the change takes effect, and it will not apply to you. Withdraw your wallet first, see section 5.

Carrying on using the app after a change has taken effect means you accept it. That is how this has to work, but the 14 days are there so it is a choice rather than something that happened while you were not looking.

Occasionally the law or a serious safety problem requires a change at once, without the 14 days. We will still tell you as soon as we can and explain why it could not wait.

These Terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the courts of Cape Town have jurisdiction.

If you are somewhere else, your own country may give you consumer rights that cannot be signed away by a clause like this. Nothing here is meant to take those from you.

If something has gone wrong, write to contacttrustfirst@gmail.com and set out what happened and what you want. We will answer.

Most things that end up in a dispute started as something that could have been fixed by somebody reading the complaint properly. This is not a hoop you must jump through before you are allowed to go elsewhere. It is just the fastest route, and it costs you nothing.

You are not limited to us, and we are not going to pretend otherwise:

• The Small Claims Court, for modest amounts, with no lawyer and no fee.
• The National Consumer Commission, for consumer complaints.
• The Information Regulator, for anything about your personal information.

We may transfer this agreement to a company we form to run TrustFirst, or to whoever takes it over if it is sold. Your rights under these Terms come with it unchanged, and we will tell you when it happens.

You cannot transfer your side to somebody else. Your account is yours and is not a thing to be handed on or sold.

• These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us. Nothing said anywhere else (a post, a support reply, something Eddie told you) changes them.
• If a court finds one part unenforceable, that part goes and the rest stands.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• These Terms are written in English. A translation is a convenience, and the English is what governs.
• Headings are there to help you find things and carry no legal weight of their own.

contacttrustfirst@gmail.com for legal notices, copyright complaints, privacy requests, appeals, and anything else in these Terms.

You can also open a support request in the app, which is usually faster for anything about your own account.