Terms of Service — Ghost Protocol

1. What you are agreeing to

By installing or using Ghost Protocol, or by sending or receiving messages through the Ghost Protocol relay service (accessible via the app), you are agreeing to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not install the app and do not use the relay.

These Terms work together with our Privacy Policy.

2. The license

Ghost Protocol is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later). In plain language:

You can use it for any purpose, including commercial use.
You can study, modify, and share it — but modifications must also be AGPL-3.0.
If you operate a modified relay as a network service, you must offer your modified source code to the users of that service. This exists specifically to prevent privacy-focused server software from being secretly forked.

3. Acceptable use

Do not use Ghost Protocol for:

Illegal activity that has identifiable victims: CSAM, doxxing, real-world stalking, commissioning violence against specific people.
Spam or commercial unsolicited messaging.
Attacks on the relay infrastructure or attempts to read other users' data.
Bots that impersonate human users at scale.

We do not monitor message content — the architecture makes this impossible. We can, in rare cases, refuse to relay messages from a specific public key. We never read the messages.

4. No warranty

Ghost Protocol is in active development and has not yet completed an external security audit. It implements modern cryptography correctly to the best of our ability, but has not been formally verified and almost certainly contains bugs. Do not use it as your sole security layer for life-threatening situations until after an external audit is published.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the software and service are provided without any warranty, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, reliability, or availability.

5. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, CSB Group and its operators, contributors, and affiliates will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from use of Ghost Protocol. For any direct damages, cumulative liability will not exceed USD $100.

6. Account and service

Ghost Protocol does not have user accounts in the traditional sense. Your identity is a cryptographic public key derived from a 24-word seed phrase that lives only on your device. We cannot terminate your account because there is no account to terminate.

We are a small project. The relay may go offline temporarily for maintenance, or permanently. We will give as much notice as we can. If we shut down permanently: the app continues to work over Tor/I2P for users who have exchanged contacts, the source code remains public, and we will publish the reason before turning off.

7. Modifications to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Changes are published in the public GitHub repository with the updated date at the top. Continued use after a change is published constitutes acceptance.

8. Contact

Questions about these Terms: see security.txt.