Terms of service

Who we are

Vewn is operated by Sebastian Deisinger, an individual trader based at Doktor-Renner-Straße 1, 4210 Gallneukirchen, Austria. In these terms “we” and “us” mean Vewn, and “you” means you.

Who can use Vewn

You must be 18 or over to have a Vewn account. This is a higher bar than the law sets for consenting to an online service on your own account, which is 14 in Austria and between 13 and 16 elsewhere in the EU. We set it at 18 because everything on Vewn is written by the people using it and none of it is read by us before it appears, and because the App Store rates the iOS app 18+. One account belongs to one person. Keep your sign-in to yourself; anything done from your account is treated as done by you.

An account we believe belongs to someone under 18 is closed. If that happens to you and we have it wrong, write to support@vewn.app.

What you write stays yours

You own everything you post. Nothing here transfers that, and we make no claim to it.

You give us the permission we need to run the product and nothing beyond it: to store what you write, show it to the people you meant to show it to, and include it in feeds, search results and the app itself. That permission lasts as long as your writing is on Vewn and ends when you delete it, apart from copies in routine backups, which age out on their own schedule.

You are telling us that what you post is yours to post, and that publishing it does not break someone else’s rights.

What you may not do

• Post anything unlawful, or anything that harasses, threatens or incites violence against a person or a group.
• Post sexual content involving children, or sexual content of anyone who has not agreed to it being posted.
• Impersonate someone else, or pretend to be connected to a person or organisation you are not.
• Post someone else’s private information, or use Vewn to organise abuse of a person on or off it.
• Post spam, run automated accounts that flood the service, or scrape it at a scale that degrades it for other people.
• Break, probe or work around the limits and permissions in the product, including the ones protecting other people’s private posts and drafts.

Anonymous letters

A letter goes to one reader picked at random. You do not choose who, and there is no way to make the product choose for you: the recipient is decided by our servers precisely so that this cannot become a way to send anonymous messages to a particular person.

Anonymity is from other users, not from us and not from the law. We record who sent each letter so that a letter reported as abusive can be acted on. Using letters to harass, threaten or abuse anyone will cost you your account, and turning letters off stops you sending as well as receiving.

A letter you receive is yours to keep, throw away, or share. Sharing one publishes it as a public post under your name. It appears in the feeds and anyone can reply to it, and you are answerable for it being public. The writer stays anonymous, and the post says so.

Direct messages

You can write privately to one other person. Who is allowed to start a conversation with you is your choice in Settings: nobody, people you follow, only people you have approved, or anyone. The default is people you follow. That setting governs opening a conversation, not the one you are already in: unfollowing somebody later does not cut off a conversation in progress. Either side can close a conversation permanently, and closing it stops both sides writing.

There are two limits on writing to somebody who has not answered you, and they are limits rather than guidance. You get three messages into a conversation nobody has replied to, after which it closes itself, and you may open at most ten conversations a day. Working around either of these is the same breach as working around any other limit in the product.

What you may not do above applies inside a conversation exactly as it does in public, and a private audience is not a defence. Using messages to harass, threaten or abuse anyone will cost you your account.

Messages are not end-to-end encrypted, and we are not going to tell you that we could not read them. What we will tell you is that nothing we have built can: there is no page, no report and no tool in Vewn that opens a conversation. The one exception is a message somebody reports, which copies that message and the two before it out of the conversation so the report can be judged. The app says so before you report rather than after.

Moderation

We have no tolerance for objectionable content or for abusive users. That is not a posture: it is the sentence the rest of this section describes the enforcement of.

You can report a post, a comment, a person, a letter or a message, and you can block anyone, which takes everything they have written out of your feeds at once, hides your writing from them, and stops either of you opening a conversation with the other. Anything you wrote yourself you can unpublish or delete outright, from either app, and it leaves the feeds immediately. There is nothing to wait for and nobody to ask.

Some content is refused before it is ever posted. We screen what you write against a list of terms that have no acceptable use here, and a post, comment, message, letter or profile containing one is not accepted. The list is narrow on purpose: it is a floor under the reporting, not a substitute for it.

Every report reaches a person. We review each one within 24 hours of it being filed. We remove content that breaks these terms and we suspend or remove the account that posted it. Repeat or serious offenders lose the account permanently.

Where we can, we will tell you what happened and why, and you can reply to us at support@vewn.app. We act immediately on serious cases, anything involving a risk to someone’s safety or anything illegal, and may report them to the authorities.

Premium

Premium is an optional subscription that unlocks extra styling for your profile and the app. Everything needed to write and read on Vewn is free and stays free.

It renews automatically until you cancel. Cancel any time: subscriptions bought on the web are managed in Settings, and subscriptions bought in the iOS or Android app are managed in your App Store or Google Play settings, because those stores own them. Cancelling stops the next payment and leaves you with Premium until the period you have already paid for runs out.

Prices are in euros and include VAT where it applies. If a price changes we will tell you before it affects you, and you can cancel rather than accept it. Outside the withdrawal right described next, we do not refund part-used periods. That does not affect any refund you are entitled to by law, or under the App Store and Google Play refund policies for subscriptions bought there.

Your right to change your mind

If you are a consumer in the EU, you have fourteen days from buying a subscription to withdraw from it, without giving a reason. Write to support@vewn.app, or use any clear statement. There is no form to find and no hoop to jump through. We refund within fourteen days of being told, by the same means you paid.

The exception is the one the law itself makes. If you ask us to start Premium immediately and confirm that you understand this ends your right to withdraw, then it does. That is what the box you tick before paying is for. If you did not confirm it, the fourteen days stand whether or not you have used Premium in the meantime.

Subscriptions bought inside the iOS or Android app are refunded by Apple or Google under their own policies, because the purchase is with them and not with us.

Ending it

You can delete your account at any time, from Settings in either app. It is immediate and cannot be undone. A Premium subscription bought on the web is cancelled as part of it; one bought in the iOS or Android app is the store’s and you must cancel it there yourself. What deletion removes and what survives is set out at vewn.app/delete-account and in the privacy policy.

We can close an account that breaks these terms. If we close yours other than for breaking them, for example if we stop running Vewn, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to get your writing out first.

What we do not promise

We work to keep Vewn running and your writing safe, but the service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, free of bugs, or that it will never lose data, and we recommend keeping your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose.

We are not responsible for what other people post. Content on Vewn comes from its users. The screening described under Moderation refuses a narrow set of terms outright, and beyond that nothing is read by us before it appears, so a post you find objectionable is something to report, and reporting it is what puts it in front of a person.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Your statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected.

Beyond that, and except where we act with intent or gross negligence, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue or goodwill. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to whatever you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or €100 if you paid us nothing.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change matters to you we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and continuing to use Vewn afterwards means you accept it. If you do not, delete your account.

Governing law

These terms are governed by Austrian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice never takes away the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and you can bring proceedings in your own courts, and we will only sue a consumer in theirs.

Contact

support@vewn.app for anything about these terms or your account. privacy@vewn.app for anything about your data.