Terms of Use

1. Who you are dealing with

LifeSparks is run by one person: Christoph Lingg, C/ de Pena Santa 6, 2 C, 28034 Madrid, Spain. There is no company behind it.

In these terms, "I" means me and "you" means you. You can reach me through the contact page on the site.

2. What LifeSparks is

LifeSparks keeps good moments and brings them back to you. You save a moment as a Spark — photos, video, music, a voice recording, a few lines of text — and every few days one of your Sparks comes back to you.

Your Sparks are private. There is no sharing, no feed, no friends and no public profile. Nobody else sees what you keep here.

Today LifeSparks runs in a web browser and Sparks arrive by email. Apps and push notifications may follow. How often Sparks come back, and how they reach you, is always your choice in your settings.

3. Who can use it

You need to be at least 16 years old. That is the rule everywhere, so that nobody has to work out which national age limit applies to them.

LifeSparks is run from Spain under European law, and everyone gets the same protection under the GDPR, wherever they are. Use it from anywhere you like — only you can know whether that is allowed where you live.

4. Your account

You need an email address that works. It identifies your account, and it is how I reach you about it: a suspicious sign-in, a change to these terms, a warning before anything happens to an inactive account, notice that the service is ending. Sparks may reach you by other routes one day; these messages will not. Keep the address current — several of the commitments in this document depend on my being able to reach you.

The account is yours alone. Keep your sign-in details to yourself, and tell me if you think someone else has got into it. One account per person.

5. Your content

Everything you put into LifeSparks stays yours. I claim no ownership of it.

When you upload something, you confirm that you are allowed to use it privately in LifeSparks, and that keeping it here infringes nobody's rights.

To run the service I need a narrow permission from you: to store your content, to process it so that it can be shown and delivered, and to send it back to you. That includes automated processing of your own content for your own experience — organising your Sparks, or choosing which one comes back next. Nothing from it reaches anyone else. Your content is never published, never passed on, never analysed across users, and never used to train a model. The permission ends when you delete the content or your account.

Additional features, such as sharing a Spark with someone else, may be added later. If they are, they will be covered separately and will only apply once you switch them on.

6. What you may not upload or do

• Nothing illegal, and nothing that infringes someone else's rights.
• Nothing obtained against another person's will, such as intimate images of someone else.
• No attempts to break, overload or circumvent the service, and no automated bulk use.

If you break these rules, I may suspend or close your account. Section 12 says how.

7. When I look at your content

I do not read your Sparks. There is no routine review, no scanning and no analysis of what is in them.

I can technically reach what is stored. Your content is encrypted at rest, which is not the same as end-to-end encryption, and I have never claimed otherwise. I will look at an individual account's content in three cases only: when you ask me to, because a problem cannot be solved otherwise; when someone affected makes a specific report about it; or when the law requires it. In each case, only as far as dealing with it requires. The privacy policy explains this in full.

If something you have uploaded breaches section 6, I may remove or block that single piece of content rather than close the whole account. I will tell you when I do, unless the law prevents me.

8. Storage and file formats

Each account includes 10 GB of free storage. I may raise this limit, and I will never lower it below what an account already uses. Your settings show how much you are using.

To keep storage manageable, I may convert stored files into more space-efficient formats and reduce their size. Photos are kept at a long edge of at least 3,000 pixels, which is enough for any screen and for a good print. Video may be re-encoded, but never below 1080p. Audio may be re-encoded, but never below 192 kbps — anything already at or below that is left exactly as it is.

9. What it costs

LifeSparks is free. Three commitments go together here:

• The features you have today stay free. If you have an account now, you will never be asked to pay for what the service does today.
• New features that are expensive to run may cost something. They will be additions. I will not take something away from the free service and sell it back.
• New accounts may cost something in future. That is the lever I would pull if running costs grew, and it does not touch accounts that already exist.

There are no ads, and there never will be.

10. Availability

I do not promise that LifeSparks will be available at any particular moment. It is run by one person, and there will be interruptions.

I may change features or discontinue them. If a feature goes, it goes for everyone.

LifeSparks is not a backup service. Keep your own copies of anything you could not bear to lose — you can download everything at any time from your settings.

If something does go wrong — a failure, a mistake of mine, or a break-in — I will tell you what happened and what it means for your data, as soon as I know.

11. Inactive accounts

An account counts as abandoned when nobody has used LifeSparks on it for 18 months — the site or an app opened, or a link in an email followed — and no email sent to it has been interacted with either. A background connection from an app that is still signed in does not count as use.

In that case I write to the account twice by email, at least 30 days apart, and at least 30 days before anything happens. Each message carries a one-click link to keep the account and a link to download everything. Only if none of this is answered are the account and its content deleted.

12. Ending it

You can delete your account at any time, in your settings. Deletion is immediate and permanent: the account and everything in it are gone, and I cannot bring them back. Download your data first if you want to keep it.

I may suspend or close an account that breaks section 6. Where it is reasonable to do so, I will say why first and give you a chance to put it right.

If LifeSparks is ever discontinued, I will give at least 90 days' notice by email, and the export will stay available for that whole period.

13. Your data

Your Sparks are never sold, never analysed for advertising, and never used to train AI models. If automatic features such as organising your Sparks are added, they work on your content for you alone — nothing drawn from it improves anything that anyone else benefits from. Data is stored in the European Union and handled under the GDPR.

I do look at how LifeSparks is used, so that I can make it better: how often Sparks are created, whether a delivery email is opened, which settings people change. That is data about how the service is used — not about what is in your Sparks.

The privacy policy sets out what is collected, why, and for how long. Where it and these terms describe the same thing, they say the same thing.

14. Changes to these terms, and transfer

I may change these terms, for example when a new feature needs covering. I will tell you by email at least 30 days before a change that matters to you takes effect. If you do not agree with it, you can delete your account — nothing further is required of you.

I may transfer LifeSparks, including this agreement, to a company set up to run it. Your account, your content and the commitments in these terms are unaffected if that happens.

15. Liability

Some liability cannot be excluded, and is not excluded here: for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, and anything else the law makes mandatory.

Beyond that, LifeSparks is provided free of charge and I am liable only for intent and gross negligence. That includes data that is lost or damaged, which is why section 10 asks you to keep your own copies.

16. Law and courts

Spanish law applies, and the courts of Madrid have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, this takes nothing away from you. You keep the mandatory protections of the law where you live, and you can bring a claim before the courts of your own country.