Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what this covers

Tambay (the service) is operated by Acqron, a business registered in the Philippines with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) (we, us). These terms are the agreement between you and us for using tambay's website and apps: text rooms, voice huts, Buddy chat, tambayans and everything around them.

By creating an account or using tambay you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. When you sign up we record that you agreed (the date and which version of these terms), and you agree again if we make an important change.

tambay is a platform where people talk to each other. We provide the place; the people in it, and the owners and moderators of each tambayan, decide what is said there. See "Our role and your responsibility" below.

2. Who can use tambay

You must be at least 13 years old. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up. It stays private (nobody else sees it), and it decides which safety settings apply to you. We do not allow anyone under 13 to have an account.

If you are 13 to 17 (or under the age of majority where you live), you may use tambay only with the permission of a parent or guardian, who accepts these terms for you and is responsible for your use of the service. By ticking the box when you sign up you confirm that you are 18 or older, or that you have that permission.

You promise that the date of birth you give is true. Giving a false one breaks these terms. If we learn, or have good reason to believe, that someone is under 13, or gave a false age, we may suspend or delete the account, ask for proof of age or a parent or guardian's confirmation, and remove what the account posted. We can only rely on what people tell us, so parents and guardians who want to keep a child off tambay should use the controls on the child's device and tell us if a child under 13 has an account.

People under 18 get extra safety settings. For example, adults and under-18s cannot search for each other or send each other buddy requests unless they already share a tambayan, and under-13s are never listed. We may add more protections for younger users over time.

You must have the legal capacity to agree to these terms (or have a parent or guardian agree for you), and you must not be barred from using the service by any law that applies to you. We may refuse or end an account if we have good reason to think these rules are not met.

3. Your account

Give us a real email address you control and keep your details accurate. You are responsible for your password and for everything done through your account. Tell us quickly if you think someone else has access to it.

One person, one account. Do not sell, share or transfer your account, and do not create accounts to get around a ban or a block.

4. Be decent: what is not allowed

tambay is a place to hang out. You agree not to use it to:

• harass, bully, threaten, stalk or target anyone, or encourage others to do so;
• post hate speech, or content that attacks people because of who they are;
• share sexual content involving minors (we report this to the authorities), groom or try to make sexual, romantic or private contact with a minor, or ask a minor for pictures, or other sexual, graphic or violent content that is not appropriate for a general audience;
• threaten violence, encourage or plan self-harm, or plan, coordinate or ask for help with a crime (for example selling illegal drugs or weapons, fraud, or hacking someone else's account);
• lie about your age, or use tambay to contact children in ways their parents or guardians would not accept;
• share other people's private information (doxxing) or impersonate someone;
• send spam, scams, phishing, malware, or unsolicited advertising;
• break the law, or help anyone else break the law;
• share content you do not have the right to share, including other people's copyrighted work;
• record other people's voice or chat and publish it without their consent;
• probe, attack, overload or try to get around the security or limits of the service, scrape it, or use bots or automation that we have not approved;
• use the service in a way that could damage it, us, or other people.

5. Your content

You keep ownership of what you post (messages, pictures, names). You are responsible for it, and for having the right to post it.

To run the service, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy, transmit, display and process your content, only as needed to operate, secure and improve tambay and to enforce these terms. This licence ends when your content is deleted, except for copies that are already shared with other people, backups that are deleted on their normal schedule, and evidence we must keep for safety or legal reasons (see the Privacy Policy).

Things you post in a tambayan or send to a Buddy can be seen by the people in that tambayan or chat, who can screenshot or copy them. Only post what you are comfortable with them having. We do not read your chats as a matter of routine (see the Privacy Policy for the limited cases).

We do not screen content before it appears and we are not responsible for what users post. Do not rely on tambay to keep something safe or to store it permanently.

6. Moderation, reports and enforcement

Each tambayan has an owner and may have admins and co-admins, who can remove messages and members from it under the rules of that tambayan and these terms. Tambayan owners and moderators are ordinary users, not us, and we are not responsible for their decisions.

Anyone can report a message or a person, and should for anything that looks unsafe. When someone reports a message, we save a copy of it in full together with the few messages just before and after it (with the names and times), so the people reviewing can tell whether it is really harmful or just people joking around, and so the evidence is still there if the message is deleted. That copy can be seen by our safety team and, for a report in a tambayan, by that tambayan's moderators. Reports about a Buddy chat go to our team only.

We may, at our discretion and with or without notice, remove content, limit features, suspend or permanently ban accounts, keep a copy of content as evidence, and pass information to the authorities when we believe it is needed to comply with the law, protect someone's safety, or enforce these terms. We try to be fair, but we are not obliged to give a reason for every decision.

If you think a decision was a mistake, tell us (use the feedback form in Settings, or reach us through acqron.com) and we will take another look.

7. Safety, reporting and emergencies

We take child safety and illegal activity seriously. Reports about a child's safety, or about illegal or dangerous behaviour (including threats of violence or self-harm), are marked urgent, sent to the top of our review queue, and we are told by email when one is filed. We aim to look at urgent reports as quickly as we can, but we cannot promise a response time, and we are a small team.

We do not read or monitor private chats as a matter of routine, so we usually learn about a problem only when someone tells us. Please report. Reports must be made in good faith; deliberately false or abusive reports may lead to action against the person who made them.

Where the law requires it, or where a child or someone else may be in danger, we report to and cooperate with the authorities, and we keep the evidence we have.

tambay is not an emergency service and nobody is watching it in real time. If someone is in danger right now, contact your local emergency number (911 in the Philippines) or the police first.

8. Working with the law

We respond to valid legal process: a court order, a subpoena, or another lawful request from a competent authority in the Philippines (or elsewhere, where it is legally binding on us). Please send it in writing to us (use the feedback form in Settings, or reach us through acqron.com) and tell us what you need and the legal basis. We give only what the request lawfully covers, we may ask for it to be narrowed, and we keep a record of the request.

On a lawful request, or when we think it may be needed for a criminal investigation, we may keep (preserve) an account's information and evidence for a reasonable period beyond our normal retention while the request is dealt with.

Unless the law or a court stops us, or telling them could put someone at risk, we may tell the person whose information was requested. In an emergency involving a risk of death or serious harm to someone (especially a child), we may share what is needed with the authorities without waiting for a court order.

We do not give anyone, including the authorities, a way to watch chats in real time or browse them in bulk. What we can share is limited to what we actually hold (see the Privacy Policy).

9. Notice to parents and guardians

If your child is 13 to 17 and uses tambay with your permission, you are responsible for their use of it and for these terms. You can ask us to show you what account information we hold about your child, to correct it, or to delete their account, by contacting us (use the feedback form in Settings, or reach us through acqron.com) and telling us the email address of the account. We may ask for proof that you are the parent or guardian before we act.

Talk with your child about who they chat with, and about not sharing private information. Adults and under-18s cannot find or add each other outside a tambayan they share, and any member can report something or block a person. If you are worried about something on tambay, tell us.

10. Our role and your responsibility

tambay provides the place where people talk. It does not write, choose or check what users say, and we do not promise that any user, tambayan or content is safe, accurate or lawful. What you say and do on tambay is your own responsibility, and tambayan owners and moderators are responsible for how they run their tambayan.

Because we do not review content in advance, we act on what we learn: from reports, or from our own review when we see a problem. We do not have to monitor or investigate, and not acting at once does not mean we approve of something. If you believe something on tambay is unlawful, report it and, if you are a rights holder or a government body, contact us (use the feedback form in Settings, or reach us through acqron.com).

11. Voice and Buddy chat

Voice huts carry live audio between the people in them. We do not record or store that audio. Other people in a hut can, though, so tell people before you record or share what was said.

Buddy chat is for people who agree to be buddies. You can block anyone at any time; a block stops them from contacting you. Do not use Buddy to bypass a block or a ban. If someone reports a message from a Buddy chat, our team can read that message and the ones around it, as explained above.

12. Our service and its limits

tambay is provided as it is and as it is available. We are a small team and the service is still growing, so it may have bugs, be slow, change, or be unavailable at times. We may add, change or remove features, and we may stop the service, and we will try to give notice when we reasonably can.

The service uses third-party providers (such as hosting, database, authentication and voice). We are not responsible for failures of services we do not control.

tambay is not designed for emergencies, for storing important records, or for sharing sensitive information such as passwords, government IDs or financial details. Do not use it for those things.

13. Our property

The tambay name, logo, mascot (the cat), designs and software belong to us or our licensors. You may use the service as intended, but you may not copy, sell, or reuse our branding or software without written permission.

If you send us feedback or ideas, you agree we may use them freely, without payment or credit, to improve the service.

If you believe something on tambay infringes your copyright, tell us through acqron.com with a description of the work, where it appears, and your contact details, and we will review it and remove it where appropriate.

14. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, we give no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or fit for a particular purpose, or that content posted by other users is accurate or safe.

Some places do not allow certain disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing in these terms removes rights that the law says cannot be removed.

15. Limit of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we and the people who work with us are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits, or goodwill, or for anything another user says or does, arising from your use of tambay.

If we are found liable to you despite this, our total liability for all claims is limited to the greater of (a) what you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the claim (tambay is currently free, so that may be nothing) and (b) 1,000 Philippine pesos.

You agree to pay for, and to protect us from, claims, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) that come from your breach of these terms or your unlawful use of the service, or from content you post.

16. Ending things

You can stop using tambay at any time. To close your account and have your data deleted, ask us as explained in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or end your access at any time if you break these terms, if the law requires it, if we have to protect the service or other people, or if we stop running the service. Sections that by their nature should survive (such as content licences we still need, disclaimers, liability limits and the governing law) survive the end of your account.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as tambay grows or the law changes. When we make an important change, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect where we reasonably can. If you keep using tambay after a change takes effect, you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the service.

18. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of the Philippines, without regard to conflict of law rules. Before starting any formal dispute, please contact us and give us a fair chance to sort it out informally.

If we cannot, the courts of the Philippines have jurisdiction, except that nothing here takes away any consumer protections you have under the law of the place where you live, and either of us may seek urgent court orders to protect rights or safety.

19. General

If part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. Our not enforcing a rule right away does not mean we give it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours as part of a business change. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about tambay.

Questions about these terms: use the feedback form in Settings, or reach us through acqron.com.