Terms of Service
Effective Date: October 2026 • Last Updated: October 2026
Pepperwater strictly enforces a ZERO-TOLERANCE policy for objectionable content, hate speech, defamation, racial or ethnic slurs, harassment, stalking, bullying, obscene materials, and abusive behavior. Users may report any offensive content (posts, recipes, comments, profiles, direct messages, or genealogical attributions) directly within the application. Reported content is evaluated by Pepperwater moderation personnel within 24 hours. Content found in violation of these Terms will be removed immediately, and offending user accounts may be suspended or permanently terminated without prior notice. Members have the unhindered ability to block any other user instantly to prevent all further communications and hide their content from view.
Key Principles at a Glance
Your family photos, heirloom recipes, and ancestral memories belong to you. You grant us permission only to display, host, and index them.
Real identities safeguard our diaspora family tree. We prohibit fake profiles, impersonation, scraping, and harmful conduct.
Direct message safety protections, 5-minute edit safeguards, and the complete right to permanently delete your account anytime.
1. Welcome to Pepperwater & The Services We Provide
Pepperwater is a digital sanctuary, oral history repository, genealogical network, and cultural parlour dedicated to the Anglo-Indian community and its descendants worldwide. Our mission is to bridge geographic dispersion, connect long-lost relatives, preserve living heritage, and document generational memory.
Subject to these Terms, Pepperwater provides you with access to our web and mobile applications, including:
- The Diaspora Social Wall (Feed): Sharing life updates, ancestral photos, historical inquiries, and community discussions.
- Kinship & Family Trees: Attributing verified genealogical relations, mapping lineage, and discovering living relatives.
- Private & Verified Messaging: Direct, end-user messaging with built-in safety quarantine for unconnected requests.
- Heirloom Archive & Recipe Box: Archiving authentic community cuisine, historical photographs, and railway colony memoirs.
- Original Media Productions: Audio episodes of The Tea Shop podcast and editorial pieces from The Pepperwater Dispatch.
2. Your Commitments to Pepperwater & Fellow Members
In exchange for our service, we ask that you commit to the following standards of authenticity and integrity:
A. Authentic Identity & Eligibility
Because Pepperwater relies on genealogical honesty, you must register using the name and identity you use in everyday life and provide accurate biographical details. You may only hold one individual personal account. You must be at least 13 years old (or the legal minimum age in your jurisdiction) to use Pepperwater. You may not register if you are a convicted sex offender or if your account was previously terminated for Terms violations.
B. Account Security & Credentials
You are responsible for safeguarding your login credentials. You may not share your password, grant unauthorized access to your account, or transfer your account to another person or organization.
C. Prohibited Conduct & Automated Access
You agree not to engage in unlawful, misleading, fraudulent, or abusive activities. You must not introduce viruses, malicious scripts, or malicious code. You expressly agree not to scrape, crawl, harvest, or extract personal data, family trees, or photographic archives from Pepperwater using automated tools, bots, or unauthorized APIs.
3. The Permissions You Grant Us (Content & IP Licensing)
Our intellectual property model is transparent: you own your content. Nothing in these Terms deprives you of the ownership rights you have in your personal photographs, recipes, stories, and family archive submissions.
A. Scope of License Granted to Pepperwater
When you post, upload, or share content covered by intellectual property rights on Pepperwater, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to host, store, use, distribute, modify (for formatting and display optimization), run, copy, publicly display, and translate your content, strictly in connection with operating, providing, and improving Pepperwater and consistent with your privacy and visibility settings.
B. Termination of Content License & Dictionary Living Archive
You can terminate this license at any time by deleting your content or by deleting your account entirely. When you delete content, it will no longer be visible to other members. For entries in the Anglo-Indian Dictionary, words, colloquial definitions, and usage examples cannot be deleted once published, as they form part of a permanent community cultural archive. If an author deletes their Pepperwater account, their dictionary contributions will remain part of the living archive and will be attributed to Pepperwater. Members may contact moderation at any time to request removal of personal attribution from their published contributions.
C. Permission to Use Your Public Name & Profile Metadata
You permit Pepperwater to display your display name, username, avatar, and relationship attribution in connection with platform activities (such as kinship trees, likes, comments, follows, and genealogical links) to other verified members without monetary compensation.
D. Software and System Updates
To ensure uninterrupted service and security, you permit us to automatically download and install updates, upgrades, and caching data on your device when accessing our applications.
4. Limits on Using Pepperwater Intellectual Property
We retain all intellectual property rights in and to the Pepperwater service, including our trade name, logos, brand assets, site architecture, software code, and original media productions. This includes exclusive rights to all episodes, interviews, and audio recordings of The Tea Shop podcast and editorial pieces published in The Pepperwater Dispatch.
You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of our platform or software, nor reverse engineer or attempt to extract source code, except where authorized under written license or permissible open-source terms.
5. Genealogical, Kinship & Historical Disclaimers
Pepperwater is an oral history community and crowd-sourced genealogical platform, not an official civil registry, ecclesiastical archive, or court of probate.
- User-Generated Genealogy: Family lineage, kinship links, and ancestral claims are provided by individual users based on family oral tradition, documents, and memories. Pepperwater does not independently verify civil birth, marriage, baptism, or burial records.
- No Adjudication of Family Disputes: Pepperwater does not mediate, adjudicate, or arbitrate private family disputes, inheritance claims, disputed parentage, or contested family records. Relatives are encouraged to resolve genealogical variances respectfully.
- Historical Accuracy: Historical colony recollections, railway anecdotes, and oral histories reflect subjective personal and generational memories and do not constitute certified historical or academic facts.
6. Direct Messaging, Privacy & Content Moderation
To keep diaspora interactions respectful and safe:
- Safety Requests Drawer: Messages from unconnected community members are isolated in a quarantined Requests drawer until you explicitly accept them. Unconnected members can only send one initial message request.
- Edit Window & Message Deletion: Sent messages may only be edited within a strict 5-minute window to preserve conversation authenticity. You have the right to permanently delete your messages or wipe entire conversations at any time.
- Enforcement & Moderation: We reserve the right to review reported conversations or automated abuse signals to combat harassment, fraud, and violations of our Community Guidelines.
7. Account Suspension, Termination & Voluntary Erasure
We strive to provide a welcoming community, but we may suspend or permanently terminate your account if you breach these Terms, violate our Zero-Tolerance UGC policy, infringe intellectual property rights, or create legal liability or security risks for Pepperwater or other members.
Your Right to Voluntary Erasure: You can permanently delete your account and all associated personal data at any time directly through Settings > Danger Zone > Delete Account & All Data. Upon execution, your personal profile, credentials, and private direct messages are permanently purged from active production databases. Contributed terms, definitions, and usage examples in the Anglo-Indian Dictionary cannot be deleted once live and will remain preserved in the living dictionary to safeguard collective community heritage, with attribution transferred to Pepperwater (members may request removal of personal attribution at any time).
8. Disclaimers of Warranties & Limitation of Liability
Legal Disclaimers (Read Carefully)
WE WORK DILIGENTLY TO PROVIDE A SECURE AND RELIABLE COMMUNITY PLATFORM, BUT OUR SERVICES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT PEPPERWATER WILL ALWAYS BE SAFE, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT IT WILL FUNCTION WITHOUT DELAYS, DISRUPTIONS, OR IMPERFECTIONS. WE DO NOT CONTROL AND ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT USERS DO OR SAY, AND WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS OR CONDUCT (WHETHER ONLINE OR OFFLINE) OR ANY CONTENT THEY SHARE (INCLUDING DEFAMATORY, OFFENSIVE, OBSCENE, OR INACCURATE CONTENT).
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL PEPPERWATER, ITS FOUNDERS, DIRECTORS, OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, OR ANY CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, INDIRECT, OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THESE TERMS OR YOUR USE OF PEPPERWATER.
9. Amendments & Updates to These Terms
As Pepperwater evolves to introduce new cultural features, genealogical capabilities, or regulatory compliances, we may update these Terms. When substantial changes are made, we will notify you through an in-app notice, banner, or email before the revisions take effect. If you do not agree to the revised Terms, you may delete your account prior to their effective date. Continued use of Pepperwater after the effective date constitutes your acceptance.
10. General Legal Terms & Contact Information
These Terms constitute the entire agreement between you and Pepperwater regarding your use of our services, superseding any prior agreements. If any portion of these Terms is deemed unenforceable, the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect. Our failure to enforce any provision shall not be construed as a waiver of our rights.
Questions or Content Reports?
Our Trust, Safety, and Community Help is available at [email protected]