Polvio Terms of Service

1. Introduction and Acceptance

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you and Polvio ("Polvio", "we", "us", or "our"), the operator of the Polvio mobile application and related services (collectively, the "Service"). By creating an account, signing in, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

These Terms incorporate our Privacy Policy by reference. Please read both carefully. Certain features (for example, premium subscriptions purchased through the Apple App Store) are also subject to the terms of the relevant app store and the device platform you use.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account and use the Service. By using the Service, you represent and warrant that you meet this age requirement and that you have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind that organization to these Terms.

3. Description of the Service

Polvio is a news application that brings together several features:

• News aggregation. Polvio collects and displays news articles from third-party RSS feeds published by external outlets, which are organized into source tiers. Coverage of the same event from multiple outlets may be grouped together so that a story appears once.
• AI-generated summaries. The Service uses large language models (currently provided by Google Gemini) to generate short summaries of news articles and daily or weekly agenda summaries. Where a model is unavailable or returns unusable output, the Service may fall back to a simple concatenation of article headlines.
• Trending Now. An automated system clusters recent articles using natural-language processing and engagement-based scoring to surface trending topics. These clusters are generated algorithmically, refreshed periodically, and are not editorially curated or reviewed by a human before display.
• Community. A social space where you can create a public profile, publish posts (optionally sharing a news story), reply to posts, like posts and replies, and follow other users.
• Political compass and matching. An optional feature in which you may provide your political interests and positions, used to personalize your news experience and to compute indicative match scores between you and politicians featured in the Service.

We may add, change, or remove features at any time. Some features are available only to premium subscribers, as described in Section 9.

4. Accounts

4.1 Creating an account

You can sign in using Google or Apple sign-in, or by registering with an email address and password. When you use Google or Apple sign-in, we receive and verify your email address from the identity provider.

4.2 Username and profile

Your account is identified internally by a permanent, immutable account identifier. Your username (@handle, up to 30 characters) is display-only and may be changed at any time; changing it does not affect or detach any of your data, follows, posts, bookmarks, or other relationships, which remain linked to your underlying account. You may also set a display name (up to 50 characters) and a bio (up to 160 characters).

4.3 Account security

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your sign-in credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account. You agree to notify us promptly at [email protected] if you suspect any unauthorized use of your account. We are not liable for losses arising from your failure to safeguard your credentials.

5. Community and User-Generated Content

5.1 Your content

"Your Content" means anything you create or submit through the Service, including posts (text up to 1,000 characters, with an optional shared news story), replies (text up to 1,000 characters), profile information (username, display name, bio), comments on news, and likes. You retain ownership of Your Content.

5.2 License you grant to Polvio

By submitting Your Content, you grant Polvio a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, and distribute Your Content for the purpose of operating, providing, and promoting the Service. This license exists so that we can technically deliver your posts and profile to the users entitled to see them. The license ends when Your Content is deleted, except that residual copies may persist for a limited period in backups, and aggregate engagement counts (such as view or like totals you contributed to) may remain after individual content is removed.

5.3 Content visibility and privacy settings

You control the visibility of your profile and posts through your account privacy setting:

• Public account: your posts, replies, and follower and following lists are visible to other signed-in users, and follow requests are accepted automatically.
• Private account: your posts, replies, and follower and following lists are visible only to you and to followers whose follow requests you have accepted. Requests to follow you remain pending until you approve them.

You are responsible for choosing the privacy setting appropriate to what you share. Likes are shown only as aggregate counts; the identities of individual users who liked a post or reply are not exposed by the Service.

6. Acceptable Use and Community Rules

You agree not to use the Service, and not to post Your Content, in any way that:

• Is unlawful, fraudulent, defamatory, obscene, or infringing of any third party's rights;
• Harasses, threatens, bullies, or incites violence against any person or group;
• Constitutes hate speech or discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics;
• Spreads spam, malware, or deliberately deceptive or manipulated content;
• Impersonates another person or misrepresents your identity or affiliation;
• Attempts to gain unauthorized access to the Service, other accounts, or our systems, or otherwise interferes with the security or integrity of the Service;
• Scrapes, harvests, or systematically extracts data from the Service except as expressly permitted; or
• Violates any applicable law or regulation.

You are solely responsible for Your Content and for your interactions with other users. Polvio does not endorse and is not responsible for content posted by users.

7. Moderation, Reporting, and Consequences

7.1 Content removal and account action

You may delete your own posts and replies at any time; deleted posts and replies are removed from the Service's feeds and views. Our administrators may also remove any post that violates these Terms. We may, where we consider it necessary, remove content, restrict features, or suspend or terminate accounts that breach these Terms or applicable law.

7.2 Reporting

The Service currently provides a reporting tool for comments on news articles, allowing you to flag a news comment as spam, harassment, hate speech, misinformation, or for another reason. At present, the Service does not provide an in-app tool to report community posts, replies, or user profiles, and it does not provide a feature to block other users. If you encounter content you believe violates these Terms, you may contact us at [email protected].

We do not pre-screen or guarantee review of user content before it appears, and we are under no obligation to monitor user content. We reserve the right, but assume no duty, to review and remove content at our discretion.

8. News and AI Disclaimer

The news content in the Service originates from third-party publishers. Polvio does not author this content, does not control it, and does not guarantee its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or reliability. Responsibility for the accuracy of news rests with the original publishers.

AI-generated summaries, agenda summaries, and "Trending Now" clusters are produced automatically by large language models and clustering algorithms. They may be incomplete, may contain errors or omissions, may misclassify topics, and may occasionally generate inaccurate statements. Summaries may be merged from multiple articles algorithmically and are not fact-checked or reviewed by a human before display. Where a model cannot complete a summary, a basic headline-based fallback may be shown instead.

The political compass matching feature produces indicative scores based on the information you provide and on automated processing; these scores are for personalization and general interest only and do not represent a factual or endorsed assessment of any politician or of you.

Nothing in the Service constitutes professional advice. The Service does not provide financial, legal, investment, medical, or professional advice, and it is not voting advice or an endorsement of any candidate, party, or position. You should not rely on the Service as a sole source of information and should independently verify anything on which you intend to act.

9. Premium Subscriptions

9.1 Free and premium tiers

The Service offers a free tier and a paid "Polvio Pro" tier. The free tier includes the core news feed and community features and displays advertisements. Polvio Pro unlocks additional features, including AI agenda summaries, social signals on politician profiles, an ad-free experience, the personalized "For You" feed, and enhanced notifications. The specific features included may change over time.

9.2 Billing through the Apple App Store

Premium subscriptions are sold as in-app purchases. On Apple devices, purchases are processed and billed by Apple through the App Store. We offer auto-renewing monthly and yearly subscriptions, as well as a one-time lifetime purchase. Applicable prices, including any per-month equivalents and any free-trial terms, are shown to you in the app before you purchase.

9.3 Auto-renewal, cancellation, and restore

• Auto-renewal: monthly and yearly subscriptions automatically renew until you cancel them. The lifetime option is a one-time purchase and does not renew.
• Cancellation: you can manage or cancel a subscription only through your App Store account settings; cancellation is not handled inside Polvio. Your subscription will continue to renew until you cancel it in the App Store.
• Restore: you can restore previously purchased entitlements (for example, on a new device) using the "Restore" option in the app.

9.4 Payment information

Polvio does not collect, process, or store your payment card details. All payment processing is handled by Apple (and, where applicable, the relevant app store and our subscription management provider, RevenueCat). We receive only confirmation of your purchase and entitlement status, not your card or financial details.

9.5 Refunds

Because billing is handled by Apple, refund requests are subject to Apple's policies and are processed through Apple. We do not control and are not responsible for Apple's refund decisions, except as required by applicable law.

10. Advertising

The free tier of the Service displays advertisements, including ads served through Google AdMob. Where required, we request your consent for personalized advertising and tracking (for example, through the Apple App Tracking Transparency prompt and, in applicable regions, a consent flow for advertising). Polvio Pro removes these advertisements. Advertisements may be served by third parties whose practices are governed by their own terms and policies.

11. Intellectual Property

The Service, including its software, design, branding, logos, and all content we create (such as the "Polvio AI" presentation of summaries), is owned by Polvio or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property laws. Except for the limited rights expressly granted to you under these Terms, we grant you no rights in the Service.

We grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service for your own non-commercial purposes in accordance with these Terms. You may not copy, modify, distribute, reverse-engineer, or create derivative works from the Service except as permitted by law.

Third-party news content remains the property of its respective publishers and is made available to you subject to their rights.

12. Third-Party Services

The Service relies on, links to, or integrates with third-party services and content, including news publishers, identity providers (Google and Apple), app store and subscription processing (Apple and RevenueCat), advertising (Google AdMob), AI providers, push notification and email delivery providers, and infrastructure providers (a precise list of which is set out in our Privacy Policy: Google (Google Sign-In; the Gemini API for AI summaries; AdMob advertising; Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications; Google Play billing), Apple (Sign in with Apple; App Store billing), RevenueCat (subscription management), Resend (transactional email), and Sentry (error reporting) — with the application and database hosted on servers located in Europe). We are not responsible for the content, policies, or practices of third parties, and your use of their services may be subject to their own terms.

13. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that news or AI-generated content will be accurate or complete, or that defects will be corrected. Any reliance you place on the Service is at your own risk. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so some of the above exclusions may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, POLVIO AND ITS OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND PARTNERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, GOODWILL, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF (OR INABILITY TO USE) THE SERVICE, INCLUDING ANY RELIANCE ON NEWS OR AI-GENERATED CONTENT.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID TO US (IF ANY) FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE LIABILITY, OR (B) A NOMINAL AMOUNT TO BE SPECIFIED BY US. NOTHING IN THESE TERMS EXCLUDES OR LIMITS LIABILITY THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

15. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Polvio and its officers, employees, and partners from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) Your Content; (b) your use of the Service; (c) your violation of these Terms; or (d) your violation of any law or the rights of any third party. This obligation survives termination of these Terms.

16. Termination and Account Deletion

You may stop using the Service at any time. You may delete your account from within the app, in the Settings screen, by confirming the deletion as prompted. Account deletion is permanent: it carries out a hard deletion that removes your user record and cascades to your associated data, including your follows, bookmarks, push tokens, notification preferences, blocked sources, click history, political profile, interest profile, and news comments. This action cannot be undone, and your data cannot be recovered after deletion.

Certain records may persist after deletion: aggregate engagement counters (such as politician and article view or like totals) are pre-computed summaries that are not recalculated when an account is deleted, and anonymous profile-view records that are no longer linked to your account are retained. Residual copies may also remain in backups for up to 90 days.

You may request an export of your personal data from within the app ("Download data"), subject to rate limits. We will email you a single-use, expiring download link, which is valid for 24 hours and which purges the export after download or expiry.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time if you violate these Terms, if required by law, or to protect the Service or other users. Provisions that by their nature should survive termination (including ownership, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and indemnification) will survive.

17. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Turkey, with the courts of Istanbul having jurisdiction, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. You and Polvio agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Istanbul, Turkey to resolve any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, except where mandatory consumer-protection law grants you the right to bring proceedings in another forum.

18. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, provide additional notice through the Service. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree to the changes, you should stop using the Service and may delete your account.

19. Contact

If you have questions about these Terms or the Service, please contact us at [email protected].