ESSENCE Acceptable Use Policy

Why this exists

ESSENCE creates a synthetic model of your voice. A convincing voice is a powerful thing, and it can be used to hurt people. This policy sets the line. It is short on purpose, so there is no confusion about what is not allowed.

1. The voice must be yours

You may only create a voice model from your own voice.

You may not:

• Record, imitate, or submit the voice of any other person, living or deceased, including a family member, a public figure, a celebrity, or a fictional or synthetic voice belonging to someone else.
• Play a recording of another person's voice into your microphone, or submit audio captured from a call, a video, a broadcast, a podcast, or any other source.
• Attempt to defeat, work around, or test our controls in order to clone a voice that is not yours.

Our systems do not perform speaker verification, so they will accept audio you are not permitted to submit. The absence of a technical block is not permission. Doing this may violate biometric privacy laws, right-of-publicity laws, and criminal impersonation and fraud statutes, and you are solely responsible if it does.

2. No impersonation or deception

You may not use ESSENCE, or any audio created with it, to:

• Impersonate any person or organization, or misrepresent who is speaking.
• Create audio intended to be mistaken for a genuine recording of a real event, statement, or conversation.
• Deceive a person, a business, a financial institution, or a government body.
• Defeat or attempt to defeat any voice authentication, identity verification, or biometric security system. This includes your own. ESSENCE audio is not an identity credential and must never be used as one.

3. No harm to others

You may not create, store, or share content that:

• Threatens, harasses, stalks, intimidates, bullies, or targets a person for abuse.
• Incites, promotes, or provides instructions for violence, self-harm, or illegal activity.
• Attacks or degrades a person or group based on a protected characteristic.
• Is sexually explicit, sexualizes a minor in any way, or constitutes non-consensual intimate content.
• Defames a person, or discloses another person's private information without their consent.
• Constitutes fraud, extortion, blackmail, a scam, or a phishing attempt.

4. Respect other people's rights

You may not record or submit content that infringes anyone's intellectual property or other rights, including copyrighted song lyrics, published text, speeches, scripts, audiobook or film dialogue, or trademarked material. Read the prompts in your own words.

5. Do not misuse the Service

You may not:

• Break, probe, or circumvent security, authentication, rate limits, or usage caps.
• Access another user's account or content.
• Scrape, crawl, reverse engineer, or automate access to the Service.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to third parties as a voice-cloning service.
• Use the Service to build a competing product or to train any machine learning model.
• Upload malware, or use the Service to distribute spam or unsolicited messages.

6. Do not use ESSENCE for things it is not

ESSENCE is a private voice keepsake vault. It is not a will, a trust, an estate service, a medical or legal record, a crisis service, or a delivery service. Nothing you store in ESSENCE is sent to anyone, and nothing you store in it has legal effect. Do not use it as the only place you keep instructions, credentials, or information that someone will need to find.

7. Reporting a violation

If you believe someone has used ESSENCE to impersonate you, clone your voice without permission, or otherwise violate this policy, email help@essencevault.app with:

• What happened, and any audio, links, or screenshots you have.
• The identity of the person or account, if you know it.
• Your contact information so we can follow up.

If you believe your voice has been cloned without your consent, say so in the subject line and we will prioritize it. We aim to acknowledge reports within 3 business days.

Because all content in ESSENCE is private to its creator and nothing is delivered or published, we may not be able to independently locate content described in a report. We will do what we reasonably can, including suspending an account while we look into it.

8. What we do about violations

Depending on what happened, we may: contact you for an explanation, remove content, disable a voice model, restrict features, suspend the account, terminate the account permanently, or report the matter to law enforcement or affected parties.

We may act without prior notice where we believe there is a risk to a person's safety, a legal obligation, or a risk to the Service. We are not obligated to monitor content, and we do not screen it proactively. Enforcement is manual and complaint-driven.

Where we can do so, we will tell you what happened and why, and give you a way to respond at help@essencevault.app.

9. Changes

We may update this policy. Material changes will be notified as described in the Terms of Service.