Terms of Service

Effective date: June 7, 2026 Last updated: October 8, 2026

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") govern your use of the CertifiedPhotos mobile application (the "App"), the website at https://cert.photos (also reachable at https://certified.photos), and any related services we offer (collectively, the "Services"). The Services are provided by Platform Technology Ventures LLC ("CertifiedPhotos," "we," "us," or "our"), a Delaware limited liability company with a principal office at One Broadway, 14th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

Please read these Terms carefully. Every certification, at every tier of the Services, is signed, watermarked and anchored to a public ledger; tiers differ only in how many photographs you can certify each year and in account features. See §5 (tier descriptions) and §6 (logged records and long-term storage of validation data). Other important provisions include:

• How location data is included in certified records and in content you share or export, and the precision controls available to you (§8)
• An absolute prohibition on certifying AI-generated or AI- synthesized content (§9.3 — violation is grounds for an account ban)
• Your representations and warranties about each photograph you capture, certify, or share (§10)
• A binding individual arbitration agreement, a waiver of class actions, and a mass-arbitration batching protocol (§17 — you may opt out within 30 days of accepting these Terms)
• Limits on our liability to you (§15)

If you do not agree to these Terms, do not create an account or use the Services.

1. Acceptance of these Terms

By creating an account, downloading or installing the App, or otherwise using any part of the Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy at https://certified.photos/privacy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. If you are using the Services on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" refers to both you and that organization.

2. Who can use the Services

You may use the Services only if:

• You are at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your state if that is older.
• You are located in the United States. The Services are currently offered only to users located in the United States. We do not offer the Services to users located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or other regions outside the United States.
• You are not on any U.S. government list of prohibited or restricted persons, and you are not located in any country subject to a U.S. government embargo or designated as "terrorist-supporting."
• You have not previously been suspended or banned from the Services.

3. Your account

To use most features of the Services, you will need to create an account. You agree to:

• Provide accurate and current information when you create your account and keep it up to date;
• Maintain the security of your account, including the phone number or email address and the devices you use to sign in, and any passkeys you create;
• Promptly notify us at privacy@cert.photos if you suspect any unauthorized access to your account;
• Be responsible for all activity that occurs under your account.

We may suspend or terminate your account if we believe you have violated these Terms, violated applicable law, or created a risk of legal liability for us or our users.

4. Description of the Services

The Services let you capture photographs through the App and create a tamper-evident record of when and how each photograph was made. The Services use industry-standard provenance and content authentication technologies, including the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) standard.

When you certify a photograph, the Services create an immutable verification record. At every tier, a cryptographic fingerprint of the photograph is also anchored to a public, append-only ledger that supports later verification of the photograph's authenticity (see §5.1 and §6).

Every certification, at every tier, includes a watermark-based verification capability, currently rolling out, that lets a certification be identified as ours from a copy of the photograph even after its C2PA content credentials have been stripped — provided enough pixel information survives to recover the watermark. The embed runs in production for all newly certified photographs at every tier, but the user-facing surface for verifying by watermark is not yet generally available. We will update these Terms or our help center when the user-facing capability is in production. Watermark detection requires sufficient surviving pixel information; not all re-encodings preserve enough information to recover the watermark.

Absence of detection is not proof of inauthenticity. A photograph that does not return a positive watermark match — for example, because it is a photograph from another source or a photograph that has been re-encoded beyond the watermark's recovery threshold — is not, by that fact alone, established to be inauthentic, fabricated, or otherwise not what it purports to be. The watermark-based verification capability returns positive identifications when it can; a non- result means only that we could not recover our watermark from that particular image.

4.1 Signing in

You sign in with your mobile phone number or an email address. We send a one-time code by text message through our messaging provider; message and data rates may apply. After you sign in, you may add a passkey on your device.

4.2 Changes

We may add to, change, or remove features of the Services at any time. We will use reasonable efforts to give notice of material changes that affect your existing certifications or subscription.

4.3 Our discretion to refuse or revoke certifications

We reserve the right, in our reasonable discretion, to refuse to issue a certification for any photograph, or to revoke or annotate a certification we have previously issued, including (without limitation) for content-moderation reasons, technical failures of the capture or integrity-verification process, suspected fraud or abuse, violation of these Terms, or other risks to the Services or other users.

Where we revoke a certification, we will remove the corresponding badge, verification page, and certification metadata from the Services. Where a certification's cryptographic fingerprint has already been recorded to the public ledger (see §6), that fingerprint cannot be removed; it will simply no longer be surfaced as a valid certification through the Services.

You acknowledge that the cryptographic verification provided by the Services depends on the integrity of the capture and verification process, and that exercising our discretion under this §4.3 is a necessary feature of the Services, not a defect.

5. Tiers and payments

5.1 Free tier

The Free tier of the Services lets you capture and certify photographs. Every certification includes the same protections at every tier, as described in this §5.1.

Each certified photograph carries C2PA content credentials signed by CertifiedPhotos at the time of capture. The certification record includes a cryptographic fingerprint of the photograph, a timestamp issued by an independent timestamp authority, and (if you grant location permission) the location of capture. C2PA content credentials travel with the photograph file but can be removed by third-party platforms during re-encoding or upload processing — see §8.4.

Free tier users also receive a public verification page for each certified photograph at a unique CertifiedPhotos URL (for example, https://cert.photos/v/<id>). This page lets anyone you share the link with confirm the certification, including its timestamp, capture context, and any associated metadata that you choose to display. The public verification page works by the unique identifier we issue at certification; it does not recover provenance from a photograph that has been stripped of its C2PA content credentials and shared without the verification link.

Every certification at every tier also includes:

• An invisible content watermark embedded into the pixel data of certified photographs. The watermark is designed to survive the most common forms of platform re-encoding and image processing.
• Public ledger anchoring of the photograph's cryptographic fingerprint, as described in §6.

Each Free-tier certification also includes an invisible content watermark and is recorded in a public timestamp record (see §6). The Free tier does not include a verified-user indicator.

The Free tier includes up to 100 certified photographs per year. We may notify you as you approach this limit. We may change this limit with reasonable notice.

5.2 Pro tier

The Pro tier includes everything in the Free tier and adds:

• Up to 10,000 certified photographs per year.
• A verified-user indicator attributed to the CertifiedPhotos Services (not to you personally — see §7).

Pricing. The Pro tier is offered at a recurring fee, currently $20 per year.

Purchase and billing. The Pro tier is purchased and billed through our website at https://cert.photos (also reachable at https://certified.photos) using a third-party payment processor. Pro tier purchases are not made through Apple's In-App Purchase system or Google Play's billing system. By purchasing the Pro tier, you authorize us (and our payment processor) to charge your chosen payment method.

Auto-renewal. Your Pro subscription renews automatically at the end of each one-year subscription period at the then-current price. We will send you a renewal reminder by email before each renewal.

Cancellation. You may cancel auto-renewal at any time from your account settings on the website or by contacting us at support@cert.photos. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid period; you will continue to have Pro access until that date.

Refunds. Except where required by applicable law, payments are non-refundable. We may, in our discretion, issue refunds for isolated cases (for example, accidental purchases reported within 14 days).

Price changes. We may change the price of the Pro tier from time to time. We will give you at least 30 days' notice of any price increase, and the new price will apply to your next renewal unless you cancel before the renewal date.

5.3 Enterprise tier

The Enterprise tier includes everything in the Pro tier and adds features for organizations, offered under a separate Enterprise agreement.

The Enterprise tier is offered separately under an Enterprise agreement and is not generally available to consumer users at the time these Terms take effect. References to the Enterprise tier elsewhere in these Terms describe how Enterprise-tier features operate; they do not constitute an offer of Enterprise service to all users. Pricing, eligibility, and contractual terms for the Enterprise tier will be set forth in a separate Enterprise agreement.

5.4 Taxes

Prices do not include taxes unless stated otherwise. You are responsible for any taxes, duties, or government charges that apply to your purchase.

6. Logged records and long-term storage of validation data

This section applies to every certification, on every tier.

When you certify a photograph through the Services, a one-way mathematical fingerprint of the photograph (a cryptographic hash, also called a "cryptographic fingerprint") is combined with the fingerprints of other certified photographs into a single summary value, and that value is recorded, at least once a day, to a public, append-only ledger utilized by the Services.

What this means:

• The fingerprint cannot be reversed. The recorded entry does not contain your photograph, your name, your email address, your account identifier, your location, or any other information that directly identifies you. The original photograph cannot be reconstructed from the fingerprint alone.
• The recording is public. A party who already possesses your photograph can confirm it was certified through the Services by computing its fingerprint and checking it, with the receipt shown on the photograph's verification page, against the ledger entry. The timestamp of the certification is also visible.
• Only the fingerprint is kept in long-term storage. You can delete the photograph and its data at any time. Once a summary value is recorded to the ledger, it cannot be removed by you, by us, or by anyone else. If you delete your account, we will remove from our systems the link between you and your ledger entries, but the entries themselves remain on the ledger.

By certifying a photograph through the Services, you consent to logged records with an option for long-term storage of validation data.

We rely on the design described above to honor account deletion and data-correction requests under applicable law. If you have questions about this design or its implications for you, contact privacy@cert.photos before certifying photographs.

7. Certification is attributed to the Services

The Services are designed to certify the time, capture context, and integrity of photographs as a disinterested third-party system. This is a core feature of the Services and the principal source of their value.

You acknowledge and agree that:

• Each certification is attributed to the CertifiedPhotos Services, not to you personally.
• You are credited as the capturer and owner of the photograph, but you are not the certifier and may not represent that you certified the photograph or that the certification reflects any judgment or warranty by you.
• We may publicly identify the Services as the certifier in metadata, badges, verification pages, and other surfaces.

These rules do not prevent you from claiming authorship of, or rights in, your photographs. They prevent the certification itself from being misattributed.

8. Location data in certifications and shared content

8.1 Location data is part of the certified record

If you grant the App permission to access your device's location, and you choose to certify a photograph that includes location, the precise geographic coordinates where the photograph was captured become part of the certified record. This is a feature of the Services, not incidental data collection: location is one of the contextual facts the certification attests to.

The cryptographic fingerprint recorded to the public ledger (described in §6) does not contain your location coordinates or any other directly identifying information. Your precise coordinates are stored only in our own systems, where they are protected by our usual access controls and are subject to the deletion rights described in our Privacy Policy.

You can disable location permission for the App at any time in your device settings. Photographs captured after you disable location permission will not include location data in their certified records.

8.2 Location precision when sharing or exporting

When you share or export a certified photograph through the Services, the App provides three precision settings for the location data embedded in the shared or exported file:

• None. No location data is included in the exported file. The certification itself remains valid; verifiers who look up the certification on our verification page will see whatever level of precision we choose to display publicly (see §8.5).
• Coarse (default). Location data is included in the exported file but rounded to a low-precision grid (currently approximately one kilometer). This setting preserves general locality without disclosing your precise location.
• Precise. Full location coordinates are included in the exported file as they appear in the certified record. This setting discloses your location to the precision of GPS itself — typically within five to ten meters.

The default is Coarse. You may change the setting for any individual share, or change the default for future shares in the App's settings. Selecting Precise for any share requires an explicit confirmation each time.

8.3 You bear the consequences of your sharing choices

You are responsible for the location data you choose to include when you share or export a photograph. We strongly recommend leaving the default Coarse setting in place for any content you share publicly or to third-party platforms. Sharing a photograph with Precise location enabled may disclose the location of your home, workplace, or other sensitive places, and may disclose the location of people in or near the photograph.

If you choose Precise when sharing, you represent that you understand and accept these implications and that you have obtained any consents required from third parties identifiable through the location data, as further described in §10.6.

8.4 No warranty about third-party platforms' handling of location data

When you share a certified photograph to a third-party platform or service (for example, a social network, messaging app, or email recipient), the handling of any location data, content credentials, or other embedded metadata in the file is governed by that platform, not by us. Different platforms apply different processing to uploaded content, and that processing may change at any time without notice. We make no warranty about how any third-party platform will handle location data or other metadata in content you share to it, and you should assume that any data you include in an exported file may persist on that platform's systems or be accessible to other users of that platform.

For current information about how specific third-party platforms handle metadata, see our help center at https://certified.photos/help. That information is provided for guidance only and may be out of date. The reliable way to ensure no location data leaves your device is to use the None setting in §8.2.

8.5 Verification page

The public verification page for each certified photograph shows location information at a precision we determine, which may be coarser than the precision recorded in the underlying certification. We may show coarser precision on the public verification page than is present in your shared file, or vice versa. We may change the public-verification-page precision at any time without notice.

9. Your Content and the rights you grant us

9.1 Your Content

You retain all rights you have in the photographs and other content you create or upload through the Services ("Your Content"). We do not claim ownership of Your Content.

9.2 License to us

To operate the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, transmit, display, and process Your Content solely as necessary to provide the Services to you. This license includes the right to:

• Compute cryptographic fingerprints of Your Content;
• Embed and process provenance metadata in Your Content, including an invisible watermark in the pixel data of the photograph;
• Anchor cryptographic fingerprints of Your Content to the public ledger as described in §6;
• Generate thumbnails and other technical derivatives required to deliver the Services;
• Deliver Your Content to you and to parties you direct under §9.6 below.

9.3 What we will not do — and what you may not do — with respect to AI and machine learning

We will not use Your Content to develop or train any machine learning, generative AI, or similar automated system without your express prior consent. We do not permit our service providers to do so either, and we contractually require them to honor this restriction.

You, in turn, may not use the Services to capture, certify, store, share, or otherwise process any content that was generated, synthesized, fabricated, or substantially altered by any machine learning model, generative AI system, deepfake tool, image synthesis engine, or similar automated system. The Services exist to certify authentic human capture, and certifying AI- generated or AI-synthesized content directly undermines that purpose.

This prohibition does not cover routine device-level image processing applied during normal camera capture by your phone or camera — for example, automatic exposure, focus, white balance, noise reduction, HDR merging, or other computational photography features built into your device's operating system or camera hardware. Those are part of normal photographic capture and are permitted.

Our determination of AI use is final. CertifiedPhotos reserves the sole and absolute discretion to determine whether any photograph, capture session, or pattern of activity violates this §9.3, including borderline cases involving AI-assisted or AI- enhanced content.

Consequences of violation. Any attempt to use the Services to certify AI-generated or AI-synthesized content is a material breach of these Terms and is grounds for immediate suspension or termination of your account, in our sole discretion, and any associated certifications, in addition to any other remedies available to us under §16 (Indemnification), under these Terms, or at law.

9.4 Other things we will not do with Your Content

Subject only to §6 (which governs the ledger entries, kept in long-term storage, that consist solely of cryptographic fingerprints) and any specific direction you give us, we will not:

• Sublicense Your Content to third parties for their own purposes;
• Create derivative works of Your Content other than the technical derivatives described in §9.2 (cryptographic fingerprints, provenance metadata, invisible watermark, thumbnails, format conversions);
• Publicly display or distribute Your Content other than as you direct;
• Use Your Content for advertising, marketing, or promotional purposes;
• Sell, rent, or trade Your Content; or
• Transfer rights in Your Content other than as part of a corporate transaction described in §22 (Assignment).

9.5 Feedback

If you send us suggestions, ideas, or other feedback about the Services, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use that feedback for any purpose, without obligation to you.

9.6 License to other users

When you share a certification or Your Content with another party through the Services or through a third party (such as a social network), you grant that party only the rights you choose to grant. We are not responsible for what recipients do with content you share.

9.7 Termination of license

The license you grant us in this §9 ends when you delete the relevant content from the Services, except that (a) it survives in backups and logs for a reasonable period as described in our Privacy Policy, and (b) cryptographic fingerprints already recorded to the public ledger cannot be removed as described in §6.

10. Your representations and warranties about Your Content

Each time you capture, certify, or share a photograph through the Services, you represent and warrant the following:

10.1 Original capture through the App

You captured the photograph through the App's own camera capture pipeline. To the best of your knowledge after reasonable inquiry, the image was not fed into the App from another source (such as another camera, a screenshot, a screen recording, or a photograph of a photograph), and the subject of the photograph was not generated, synthesized, fabricated, or substantially altered by any machine learning, generative AI, or similar automated system before capture. See §9.3 for the full AI prohibition and its consequences.

Routine device-level image processing applied during normal camera capture (such as exposure adjustment, focus, white balance, noise reduction, HDR merging, or other computational photography features built into your phone or camera) is not a violation of this representation.

10.2 Ownership and right to capture

You are the owner of the photograph, or you have all rights, licenses, consents, and permissions necessary (i) to capture the photograph and (ii) to grant the license described in §9.2.

10.3 No third-party right violations

The photograph and its capture do not infringe or violate any third party's rights, including any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, right of publicity, right of privacy, contractual right, or any other intellectual property or proprietary right.

10.4 No falsity, defamation, or deception

The photograph is not false, intentionally misleading, deceptive, or defamatory. You are not using the Services to manufacture evidence, fabricate provenance for content captured elsewhere, or otherwise misrepresent events.

10.5 No unlawful content

The photograph does not depict, promote, or facilitate any conduct that is unlawful under U.S. federal, state, or local law applicable to you or to us. The photograph does not contain child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, or any other content prohibited by law.

10.6 Consent of identifiable third parties

Where the photograph identifies, or could reasonably be used to identify, a third party (whether by face, biometric features, distinctive surroundings, location coordinates embedded in the file, or any other means), you have obtained any consents required by applicable law for the capture, storage, processing, and intended use of that information. This representation extends specifically to any third party identifiable through location data included in a file you share — see §8 (Location data in certifications and shared content).

10.7 Survival; remedies

The representations and warranties in this §10 are made anew each time you capture, certify, or share a photograph through the Services. They survive termination of these Terms and your use of the Services. Your breach of any representation or warranty in this §10 is a material breach of these Terms, supports our right to refuse or revoke certifications under §4.3, supports suspension or termination of your account, and supports our indemnification rights under §16.

11. Acceptable use

You agree that you will not, and will not encourage or enable others to:

• Use the Services to certify, share, or otherwise process content that was generated, synthesized, fabricated, or substantially altered by any machine learning, generative AI, deepfake, or similar automated system, as further described in §9.3. This is grounds for immediate suspension or termination of your account, in our sole discretion.
• Use the Services to capture or certify content that depicts child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, or any other content prohibited by law;
• Use the Services to capture, certify, or share sexually explicit content of any kind (sexual content is not permitted at any current tier of the Services);
• Use the Services to capture or certify content that infringes any third party's intellectual property, privacy, publicity, or other rights;
• Use the Services to harass, threaten, defame, or otherwise harm any person;
• Misrepresent the source, time, or context of a photograph, including by attempting to defeat or manipulate the certification process;
• Use a non-result from any CertifiedPhotos verification capability (whether by-ID verification, watermark-based verification, or any other) to assert that a photograph is fabricated, fake, or otherwise inauthentic, when in fact the non-result reflects only that we could not verify the photograph through that capability. (See §5.1.)
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble the App or any component of the Services, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law;
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Services or breach any security or authentication measure;
• Use any automated means (scrapers, bots, etc.) to access the Services without our prior written consent;
• Use the Services in violation of any applicable law, regulation, or platform policy (including the policies of Apple's App Store and Google Play);
• Use the Services to develop or train any machine learning model or competing product.

We may remove content that violates these rules and may suspend or terminate accounts of users who violate them.

12. Intellectual property

Our IP. The Services, the App, the CertifiedPhotos name and logo, and all related software, designs, text, graphics, and other materials are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non- transferable license to use the App and the Services solely as permitted by these Terms.

Copyright complaints. If you believe that content on the Services infringes your copyright, please send a notice that complies with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) to our designated agent:

• By email: dmca@cert.photos
• By mail: DMCA Agent, Platform Technology Ventures LLC, One Broadway, 14th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA

We will respond to valid notices and, in appropriate cases, will terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

13. Termination

By you. You may stop using the Services at any time. You may delete your account through the in-app deletion flow (Settings → Account → Delete Account) or through the web form at https://certified.photos/delete-account. Deletion is governed by our Privacy Policy and by §6 of these Terms (regarding public timestamp records).

By us. We may suspend or terminate your account or your access to the Services at any time, with or without notice, if we believe you have violated these Terms (including the AI prohibition in §9.3), violated applicable law, or created a risk of legal liability for us or our users.

Effect of termination. Sections 6, 7, 8, 9 (with respect to content already processed), 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 22 survive termination.

14. Disclaimers

THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON- INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

We do not warrant that:

• The Services will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free;
• The cryptographic verification provided by the Services will be accepted as evidence by any court, agency, publisher, insurer, or other party;
• Any verification capability will recover provenance from a given photograph; verification depends on the survival of cryptographic credentials, watermarks, or other technical artifacts that can be removed or degraded by image processing, re-encoding, or other transformations;
• The Services will be free from loss, corruption, attack, viruses, interference, hacking, or other security intrusion;
• Any third-party platform or service to which you share a certified photograph will handle the photograph, its metadata, its location data, its provenance information, or any other associated information in any particular way (see §8.4);
• Any feature described in these Terms or in marketing materials is available to all tiers — features are tier-specific as described in §5.

You are responsible for keeping backups of Your Content. We are not a backup service.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the disclaimer of certain warranties, so some of the above disclaimers may not apply to you.

15. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL WE OR OUR AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, USE, GOODWILL, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICES, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT, STATUTE, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, AND WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICES IN ANY 12-MONTH PERIOD WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

The limitations in this §15 apply even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow the limitation or exclusion of certain damages, so some of these limits may not apply to you.

16. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Platform Technology Ventures LLC and its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, agents, and licensors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or in any way connected with:

• Your use of the Services;
• Your violation of these Terms, including any breach of a representation or warranty you make in §10 and any violation of the AI prohibition in §9.3;
• Your choice to include location data in any photograph you share or export (see §8), and any disclosure of location information that results from that choice;
• Your use of any verification capability of the Services to make claims about the authenticity or inauthenticity of any photograph in a manner inconsistent with §5.1 and §11;
• Your violation of any law or the rights of any third party; or
• Your Content.

17. Dispute resolution; binding arbitration; class action waiver; mass arbitration batching

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights. It requires you to resolve most disputes with us through binding individual arbitration rather than in court, waives your right to participate in class actions, and establishes batching protocols for coordinated arbitration campaigns.

17.1 Informal resolution first

Before starting an arbitration, you agree to try to resolve any dispute informally by contacting us at legal@cert.photos. We will try to resolve the dispute through good-faith negotiations for at least 60 days after we receive your notice.

17.2 Binding individual arbitration

If we cannot resolve a dispute informally, any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services will be resolved exclusively through binding individual arbitration, except as set out in §17.4.

Arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. The arbitration will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, or, if you prefer, by telephone or video conference. The arbitrator's decision will be final and binding, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

17.3 Class action waiver

YOU AND WE EACH AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE WILL BE RESOLVED ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, COLLECTIVE, OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE THE CLAIMS OF MULTIPLE PERSONS AND MAY NOT PRESIDE OVER ANY FORM OF REPRESENTATIVE OR CLASS PROCEEDING.

17.4 Exceptions

The following claims are not subject to arbitration:

• Small claims court actions, if the claim qualifies;
• Claims for injunctive or other equitable relief relating to intellectual property, account security, violation of §9.3 (AI prohibition), violation of §10 (Representations), or violation of §11 (Acceptable Use);
• Any dispute that cannot lawfully be subject to arbitration.

17.5 Your right to opt out

You may opt out of this arbitration agreement (including the class action waiver and the mass arbitration batching protocol in §17.6) within 30 days after you first accept these Terms. To opt out, send a written notice to legal@cert.photos with the subject line "Arbitration Opt-Out" that includes your name, email address, and account identifier (if any). Opting out will not affect your ability to use the Services.

17.6 Mass arbitration batching

If twenty-five (25) or more arbitration demands are filed against CertifiedPhotos by the same counsel, the same coordinating group, or counsel coordinated with one another, and the demands assert substantially similar claims or legal theories, the demands shall be batched into groups of no more than fifty (50) demands at a time for purposes of AAA administration. AAA shall appoint a single arbitrator per batch and resolve each batch sequentially. AAA administrative filing fees shall be staged accordingly across the batches to minimize fee compounding.

This batching protocol does not affect the substantive merits of any demand; it governs only the procedural management of coordinated arbitration campaigns. If AAA's rules or applicable law require a different procedural approach, that approach controls.

17.7 Survival; severability

This §17 survives termination of these Terms and your relationship with us. If the class action waiver in §17.3 is found unenforceable as to a particular claim or remedy, that claim or remedy will be severed and pursued in court, while the remainder of this §17 will continue to apply. If the batching protocol in §17.6 is found unenforceable in whole or in part, the remainder of this §17 (including the class action waiver) continues to apply.

18. Governing law

These Terms and any dispute between you and us are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to §17, the exclusive venue for any permitted court actions is the state or federal courts located in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

The U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply to these Terms.

19. Apple App Store additional terms

If you obtained the App from Apple's App Store, the following additional terms apply. To the extent they conflict with any other provision of these Terms, they control with respect to your use of the App obtained from Apple's App Store.

• These Terms are between you and Platform Technology Ventures LLC. Apple is not a party to these Terms and is not responsible for the App or its contents.
• Your license to use the App is limited to a non-transferable license to use the App on any Apple-branded device that you own or control, subject to the Apple Media Services Terms.
• Maintenance and support of the App is our responsibility, not Apple's. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for the App.
• Warranty. To the extent any warranty is not effectively disclaimed under §14 of these Terms, Apple, upon your request, will refund the purchase price of the App (if any) to you. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the App, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, or expenses attributable to any failure to conform to any warranty will be our responsibility, not Apple's.
• Product claims. We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claims by you or any third party relating to the App, including (a) product liability claims, (b) claims that the App fails to conform to any applicable legal or regulatory requirement, and (c) claims arising under consumer protection, privacy, or similar legislation.
• Intellectual property. In the event of any third-party claim that the App or your possession and use of the App infringes that third party's intellectual property rights, we, not Apple, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of that claim.
• Legal compliance. You represent and warrant that (a) you are not located in a country that is subject to a U.S. government embargo or has been designated by the U.S. government as a "terrorist supporting" country, and (b) you are not listed on any U.S. government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Third-party beneficiary. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms with respect to the App, and upon your acceptance of these Terms, Apple will have the right (and will be deemed to have accepted the right) to enforce these Terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.

20. Google Play additional terms

If you obtained the App from Google Play, the following additional terms apply.

• Google is not a party to these Terms and is not responsible for the App or its contents.
• Your use of the App from Google Play is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service.
• We, not Google, are responsible for the App, its contents, maintenance, support, and any warranty obligations to you.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you through the App, by email, or by other appropriate means before the changes take effect. Your continued use of the Services after the effective date of the new Terms constitutes your acceptance of them. If you do not agree to the new Terms, you must stop using the Services and may delete your account.

22. General provisions

• Entire agreement. These Terms (together with the Privacy Policy and any other documents incorporated by reference) are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Services.
• No waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision of these Terms is not a waiver of that provision.
• Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, the rest of these Terms will remain in effect.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, sale of assets, or by operation of law.
• No agency. Nothing in these Terms creates any agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship between you and us.
• Notices. We may give you notice through the App, by email to the address associated with your account, or by posting on https://certified.photos. You may give us notice at legal@cert.photos or by mail to the address in §23.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for failures or delays caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

23. Contact us

• General support: support@cert.photos
• Legal notices: legal@cert.photos
• Privacy questions: privacy@cert.photos
• DMCA notices: dmca@cert.photos
• Mail: Platform Technology Ventures LLC, One Broadway, 14th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA