Pastpond — Terms of Service
Last updated: 2026-06-11. Provisional v0.2.
This is the binding agreement between you and Pastpond (operating entity TBD) when you use the service at pastpond.com.
1. What Pastpond is
Pastpond is a software service that lets you store personal memories — photos, videos, audio, documents, written messages — encrypted, replicated across cloud infrastructure, and released to people you designate under conditions you set.
2. Your account
You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. One account per person. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in email and your encryption passphrase safe.
3. The passphrase. Critical.
Your data is encrypted on your device using a key derived from your passphrase. We do not store your passphrase. We cannot recover it. If you lose it, your data is permanently unreadable.
We strongly recommend you write down your passphrase and store it physically with a person you trust or in a locked container.
4. What we can and cannot see
We can see your email address, account metadata, the size and type of items you upload, and the beneficiary email addresses and release conditions you set.
We cannot see the contents of your uploaded files, your AI-generated descriptions and transcripts (both are encrypted on your device before storage), your passphrase, or any key derived from it.
How AI processing works: when your capsule organizes a photo, your device decrypts it and sends it, via our server (held in memory only, never written to disk), to our AI provider Anthropic, which returns a description. Anthropic retains API data for at most 7 days and never uses it to train models. The description is encrypted on your device before it is stored — we hold only ciphertext. Voice and video transcription runs entirely inside your browser; recordings are never sent to us or to any AI provider for transcription.
5. Storage duration plans
You may purchase storage as a monthly subscription or for a fixed prepaid duration: 1 year, 20, 50, 100, or 200 years. Prepaid plans are non-refundable after 14 days, except where local law requires otherwise.
Lifetime plans are not sold to the public.
If your storage duration expires and is not renewed, we will attempt to contact you for 90 days, then your capsule enters a 12-month escrow, then it is permanently deleted unless you have set a different succession plan.
6. Beneficiaries and succession
You may designate one or more beneficiaries and configure release conditions. The default succession behavior is a 12-month escrow window after a passing is verified or a missed-check-in trigger fires, during which heirs may claim or contest, after which the configured releases execute. If no plan is configured, the default is anonymized donation to a public archive, not erasure. You may change this default at any time.
7. Service availability
We make our best effort to maintain durability and availability of your capsule across redundant infrastructure providers and jurisdictions. We do not promise uninterrupted access. We do not promise that any single provider, jurisdiction, or technology underlying the service will exist for the full duration you have prepaid.
8. Acceptable use
You may not upload material that is illegal under applicable law, depicts the sexual abuse of minors, is intended to threaten or harass a specific person, or contains malware.
We do not screen capsule contents (encryption — see Section 4). If we receive a verified report of illegal content under applicable law, we will act per applicable law.
9. Succession and disclosure
If we receive a verified report of your passing from a designated beneficiary or appropriate authority, we begin the succession process you configured. We do not voluntarily disclose your capsule's existence or contents to anyone other than your designated beneficiaries, except under lawful legal compulsion.
10. Termination
You may close your account at any time. On account closure with no succession plan, your encrypted data is deleted within 30 days from active storage and within 90 days from cold backups.
11. Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Pastpond's total liability to you for any claim arising from the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months prior to the claim.
12. Changes to these terms
Material changes will be communicated to you by email at least 30 days in advance. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.
13. Governing law
To be specified once the operating entity is incorporated.