Terms of Service

digest.news is a news reading service operated by Digest News, Inc. ("digest", "we", "us"). These terms are the agreement between you and us covering the digest.news website, the accounts you create on it, and everything we serve through it.

By creating an account or using digest, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, please do not use digest.

How we handle your personal information is covered separately by our Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement.

We have written this in plain language deliberately. Plain language does not make it any less binding, and we have tried not to hide anything in it.

• You need to be at least 13. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you need to be at least the age of digital consent where you live, which is between 13 and 16 depending on the country.
• You need to be able to enter into a contract. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use digest only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who accepts these terms with you.
• You cannot be barred from using it. Not by applicable law, and not because we previously closed your account for breaking these terms.
• Beta access is by invitation. While digest is in private beta, reaching the site requires an access password we give you. It is for you, not for redistribution. Please do not post it publicly or pass it on.

• How you sign up. With an email address and a password, or with Google. Your email address is your identity on digest.
• You are responsible for your account. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to your account. Activity that happens under your account is treated as yours.
• One account per person. Do not share, sell, rent, or transfer your account to anyone else.
• Keep your email address current. It is how we reach you about your account, and how you recover access if you are locked out.

This matters enough to say on its own. digest is early, unfinished software, and you should use it with that in mind:

• Things will change. Features may be added, altered, moved, or removed without notice. Parts of the product you rely on today may not exist in the same form later.
• Things will sometimes break. The service may be slow, interrupted, or unavailable. We do not offer an uptime commitment during beta.
• Beta data is not guaranteed. We may need to reset or migrate data as the product changes, and data can be lost. Please do not treat digest as the only record of anything you would be upset to lose, including your saved stories.
• It is free. digest costs nothing during beta, and we have no payment system. If we introduce paid features later, we will tell you before anything is charged, and we will not charge you without your agreement.

digest gathers published news from many sources, groups coverage of the same event into a single story, and produces summaries alongside links to the original articles. What that means in practice:

• Our summaries are generated automatically. They can be wrong, incomplete, out of date, or can misstate what a source actually said. Nobody reviews every one of them before you see it.
• The original article is the authority. Every story links to the sources it was built from. When accuracy matters to you, read the original rather than relying on the summary.
• We are not the publisher of the news. We do not write, commission, fact-check, or independently verify the reporting that digest indexes, and we are not responsible for its accuracy.
• Nothing on digest is professional advice. Not legal, financial, investment, medical, or safety advice. Please do not make a decision with real consequences on the strength of an automated summary.

The articles, headlines, images, and other material that digest surfaces belong to the publishers who created them, not to us. We show headlines, short excerpts, attribution, and images that a source makes available for that purpose, always alongside a link back to the original.

These terms give you no rights in publisher content. When you follow a link out of digest, you are on that publisher's site and subject to their terms, not ours.

If you are a publisher and you would like your content handled differently on digest or removed from it, write to legal@digest.news and we will act on it. We would much rather hear from you directly.

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use digest for your own reading. That is the whole of the grant, and it lasts as long as you comply with these terms.

You agree not to:

• Scrape or bulk-download. No crawling, scraping, harvesting, or automated access beyond ordinary use in a browser, and no extracting our feeds, summaries, clusters, or rankings in bulk.
• Resell or republish what digest produces. Our summaries, story clusters, and rankings are not yours to redistribute or to pass off as your own product.
• Work around our technical limits. Do not circumvent the beta access gate, rate limits, or any other restriction, and do not access an account, an API, or an administrative area you were not given.
• Reverse engineer the service. Except to the narrow extent applicable law says you may despite this restriction.
• Attack or disrupt it. No probing for vulnerabilities without our written permission, no malware, no overloading the service, and nothing that degrades it for anyone else.
• Train models on it or clone it. Do not use digest's output to train a machine-learning model or to build a competing product.
• Break the law with it. Including using digest in a way that puts us in breach of a publisher's terms.

We may rate-limit, throttle, or block traffic that appears automated or abusive, including traffic from your account.

Most of digest is read-only. The exception is our blog, where accounts we have explicitly granted publishing access can write posts.

• You keep what you write. Publishing on digest does not transfer ownership of your work to us.
• You give us a license to publish it. A non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, display, reproduce, and distribute your content on digest and to promote digest with it. It lasts while your content is published, plus the short period it takes for caches and backups to clear after you take it down.
• You promise it is yours to publish. That you hold the rights to it, and that it is not unlawful, defamatory, infringing, or someone else's work presented as your own.
• We can take it down. We may edit, unpublish, or remove content, and withdraw publishing access, at our discretion.
• Feedback is free for us to use. If you send us ideas, suggestions, or bug reports, we can use them without restriction and without owing you anything for them.

The digest software, interface, and design, the digest name and logo, and the clustering, ranking, and summarization work behind the feeds are owned by us or licensed to us. These terms do not transfer any of it to you. Please do not copy the interface or use our name or branding to identify your own product or service without our written permission.

If you believe material on digest infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@digest.news that includes:

• Identification of the copyrighted work you say was infringed.
• Identification of the material on digest you want removed, with enough detail for us to find it.
• Your name, address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act for them.
• Your physical or electronic signature.

We will remove or disable access to material where it is appropriate to do so, and we will close the accounts of repeat infringers. If you believe your material was removed in error, you can send a counter-notice to the same address with the equivalent information.

What we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices you have are set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. In short: we collect your email address and what you read on digest, we use them to run your account and shape your feed, we do not sell your data, and we do not run advertising or analytics trackers.

• You can leave whenever you want. Delete your account from your profile settings. That removes your account and the personal information tied to it, as described in the privacy policy.
• We can suspend or close an account. If you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if leaving the account open puts the service or other people using it at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why first and give you a chance to put it right.
• We can discontinue digest. In whole or in part. If we shut the service down, we will give you notice and, where we can, a way to take your data with you.

Some things outlast the account: any license you granted us for content you published, our intellectual property rights, the disclaimers, the limits on liability, the indemnity, and the governing-law section all survive.

digest is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We specifically do not promise that:

• The service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free.
• Summaries, clusters, rankings, or any other output will be accurate, complete, or current.
• Defects will be corrected, on any particular timetable or at all.
• Content from third-party sources reached through digest is accurate or lawful.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, these exclusions apply only to the extent permitted, and you may have rights these terms cannot take away.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Digest News, Inc. nor its directors, employees, or suppliers will be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost goodwill, arising out of or relating to your use of digest.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred US dollars. digest is free during beta, so in practice that limit is one hundred US dollars.

These limits apply regardless of the legal theory the claim is brought under, and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, for gross negligence or willful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. If you are a consumer, you keep the rights your local law gives you that an agreement like this cannot override.

You agree to indemnify Digest News, Inc. and hold it harmless from claims, damages, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from your misuse of digest, your breach of these terms, your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights, or content you published on digest. We will notify you of any claim we are seeking indemnity for and let you control the defense, as long as you do not settle in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

• Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.
• Talk to us first. Before starting any formal proceeding, write to legal@digest.news describing the problem and what you would like us to do about it. Give us 30 days to work it out with you. Most things get resolved at this stage, and we would rather resolve them here.
• If that does not work. The state and federal courts located in Delaware have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute that survives the 30 days, and you and we each consent to their jurisdiction and venue.
• If you are a consumer in the EEA or the UK. None of this removes your right to rely on the mandatory consumer-protection law of the country you live in, or to bring proceedings in its courts.

Where the law permits a contractual limit, any claim relating to digest must be brought within one year of the date it arose.

We will update these terms as digest changes, and we will revise the date at the top of the page when we do. If a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will tell you before it takes effect, by email or in the app, and give you a fair chance to close your account if you do not want to accept it. Continuing to use digest after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

• Entire agreement. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and us about digest, and they replace anything said earlier about it.
• Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these terms. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, and we will tell you if we do.
• No third-party beneficiaries. This agreement is between you and us, and gives no one else a right to enforce it.
• Events outside our control. We are not liable for failures caused by things we cannot reasonably control, such as outages at our infrastructure providers, network failures, or natural events.
• Notices. We will reach you at the email address on your account or through the app. You can reach us at legal@digest.news.

For anything about these terms, including legal notices, copyright complaints, and publisher requests, email legal@digest.news. We read every message.

Digest News, Inc.