Terms of Service

Effective date: 2026-07-31

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are an agreement between you and Soval ("we", "us"), operated by its Founder from Brossard, Québec, Canada. Soval operates the website at sovalsocial.com, the Soval web application, and the Soval browser extension (together, the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and acknowledge our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. Three kinds of content

Everything on Soval falls into one of three categories, and your rights and ours differ for each.

"User Content" means anything you submit: claim text and questions, images and screenshots, URLs, comments, direct messages, and profile information.

"Soval Output" means what our systems produce: evidence states, evidence summaries, reasoning, source assessments, and the displays built from them. We call a single assessment an "Evidence Check."

"Evidence Sources" means the third-party publications our systems consult and link to. We do not create or control them.

2. What an Evidence Check is — and what it is not

An Evidence Check is an automated, probabilistic assessment of publicly available sources at a point in time. Our systems assign one of five evidence states: Consensus (published evidence consistently supports the claim), Debunked (published evidence consistently contradicts it), Contested (credible sources genuinely disagree), Emerging (the situation is developing and evidence is still forming), and Insufficient Evidence (not enough quality evidence to assess).

You agree and understand that an Evidence Check:

(a) is not a statement or assertion of fact by Soval about any person, organization, or event — it is a summary of what identified third-party sources published, with links to those sources;

(b) is not advice of any kind — legal, medical, financial, professional, or otherwise — and must not be relied on as such;

(c) can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date, because it is produced by automated systems working from imperfect sources;

(d) can change as evidence changes — an evidence state is dated, not permanent;

(e) reflects deliberate design limits: we do not display internal confidence scores, and we apply stricter evidence requirements before assessing claims that identify a specific person or business.

3. Who can use Soval

You must be at least 14 years old to use the Service. You must provide accurate account information, and you may not use the Service if we have previously terminated your account for breach of these Terms.

4. Your account

You are responsible for your account and for keeping your credentials confidential. Accounts are personal: one person per account, no sharing of credentials, no automated or shared accounts without our written permission. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us promptly at info [at] sovalsocial [dot] com.

5. Your content: ownership and the licences you give us

5.1 Ownership. You retain all rights you hold in your User Content.

5.2 Service licence. By submitting User Content, you grant Soval a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence — sublicensable to the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy — to host, store, reproduce, display, communicate to the public, translate, format, and adapt your User Content for the purposes of operating the Service, producing Evidence Checks, moderating content, and maintaining the integrity and security of the platform. This licence lasts as long as your User Content remains on the Service, subject to §5.4.

5.3 De-Identified Records. Separately from §5.2, you grant Soval a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to create, retain, use, and commercialize de-identified records derived from your User Content and associated Evidence Checks — records from which information identifying you as the submitter has been removed — including after you delete content or your account. Records containing personal information are excluded from commercial datasets as described in our Privacy Policy; records that could identify you as the submitter are included only with the separate consent described there.

5.4 What deletion does. Deleting content or your account works as described in the Privacy Policy. In short: information identifying you is removed or de-identified; de-identified records are retained under §5.3.

5.5 Your warranties. You confirm that you have the rights needed to submit your User Content and grant these licences, and that your submissions do not violate §6.

5.6 Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without obligation to you.

6. Acceptable use

You may not submit, post, or transmit content that:

(a) is unlawful, or promotes or facilitates unlawful activity;

(b) sexualizes, endangers, or exploits minors in any way;

(d) violates another person's privacy — including posting private information about an identifiable person or submitting claims that concern the private matters of a private individual who is not a public figure and whose conduct is not a matter of legitimate public interest;

(e) impersonates any person or entity, or misrepresents your affiliation;

(f) infringes intellectual property or other rights of any person;

(g) is spam, or contains malware or malicious code.

You also may not:

(h) manipulate or attempt to manipulate verification or community signals — including coordinated boosting, vote manipulation, operating multiple accounts to amplify content, or submitting claims designed to trick the verification systems;

(i) access the Service by automated means (scraping, bulk collection, bots) without our prior written consent, or probe, disable, or circumvent security or moderation features;

(j) reverse engineer the Service except to the extent applicable law permits notwithstanding this restriction;

(k) use the Service to develop a competing dataset or verification product without a written agreement with us.

7. Moderation, enforcement, and automated measures

7.1 Our rights. We may — but except where the law requires, do not undertake a duty to — review, refuse, hide, remove, restrict, or decline to act on any content, and may suspend or terminate accounts, to enforce these Terms, comply with law, or protect users, claim subjects, or the Service.

7.2 Declining or withdrawing Evidence Checks. We may decline to produce an Evidence Check for any submission (for example, where a claim is not checkable, or where our safeguards for claims naming a person or business are not met), and may revise or withdraw an Evidence Check at any time as evidence or review warrants.

7.3 Automated enforcement. Some measures are automated. In particular, content that receives three community violation flags is automatically hidden pending review. If your content is hidden this way, you will be notified and may request human review through the dispute channel in §8.

7.4 User Content posture. For User Content, Soval acts as an intermediary that hosts content submitted by users; we do not undertake general monitoring of User Content. This does not limit §7.1–7.3 or our production of Soval Output.

8. Disputing an Evidence Check; corrections

8.1 Disputes by users. You may dispute an Evidence Check through the in-product dispute feature on the claim page. We will review disputes and respond within a reasonable time.

8.2 Disputes by people named in claims. If a claim or Evidence Check concerns you or your business and you are not a Soval user, you may contest it by contacting info [at] sovalsocial [dot] com.

8.3 Corrections. Where we materially revise or withdraw an Evidence Check, we will note the change on the claim page.

9. Intellectual property

9.1 Our property. The Service, Soval Output, evidence records and their history, aggregate datasets, and Soval's names, logos, and branding are owned by Soval or its licensors and are protected by law. Except as stated in §9.2, no rights in them are granted to you.

9.2 Your licence to share. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, revocable licence to view the Service and to share Evidence Checks using the sharing, link, and embed tools we provide, provided attribution, disclosures, and links to sources remain intact. You may not remove or obscure notices, extract Soval Output in bulk, or use it to train models or build datasets without a written agreement with us.

9.3 Copyright complaints. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, contact info [at] sovalsocial [dot] com with enough detail for us to locate and assess the content.

10. Evidence Sources and third-party links

Evidence Checks link to third-party sources. We do not control Evidence Sources, linking to them is not endorsement, and we are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices. Our characterization of a source in a summary is Soval Output under these Terms; the source itself is not.

11. The browser extension

The Soval extension lets you check text or images you explicitly select or submit from a page you are viewing. The extension:

(a) transmits only what you explicitly select or submit — it performs no passive reading of pages and contains no telemetry;

(b) keeps your extension checks private by default — they are visible to you in your history and are not published to public feeds;

We may update the extension, and may disable versions that pose security or compatibility risks.

12. Disclaimers

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Service and all Soval Output are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, reliability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Evidence Checks may contain errors; evidence states are point-in-time assessments; nothing on the Service is advice.

Some jurisdictions, including Québec, grant warranties and rights that cannot be excluded or limited by contract. Where the Consumer Protection Act (Québec), the Civil Code of Québec, or other applicable law grants you such rights, they apply notwithstanding this section, and this section excludes warranties only to the extent the law permits.

13. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by applicable law, Soval's total liability for claims arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim and CAD $100.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, Soval is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of profits, data, or goodwill.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, including liability for bodily or moral injury, for intentional or gross fault (art. 1474 C.c.Q.), or rights under the Consumer Protection Act (Québec) that cannot be waived.

14. Indemnity

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you will indemnify and hold harmless Soval against third-party claims arising from your User Content or your breach of these Terms.

15. Suspension, termination, and your data on exit

We may suspend or terminate your access for breach of these Terms, for legal compliance, or to protect the Service and its users, with notice where practicable. You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account in settings. What happens to your information on deletion is set out in the Privacy Policy. The licence in §5.3 survives per its terms. Sections that by their nature survive termination (including §§5.3, 9, 12–14, 17) survive.

16. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

We may change the Service over time. If we amend these Terms, we will give you written notice at least 30 days before the amendment takes effect, setting out the new clause and, where a clause is amended, the former version. Where required by the Consumer Protection Act (Québec), you may refuse the amendment and terminate the agreement without penalty before it takes effect by contacting us.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Québec and the federal laws of Canada applicable in it. Subject to the next sentence, disputes will be brought before the courts of Québec, district of Longueuil. If you are a consumer, nothing in these Terms deprives you of the right to bring or defend proceedings before the courts of your place of residence where the law gives you that right. These Terms contain no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver.

18. General

If part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any consents you have given separately are the entire agreement between us regarding the Service. We may assign this agreement in connection with a reorganization, merger, or sale; you may not assign it. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver.

Contact

Soval · Brossard, Québec, Canada · info [at] sovalsocial [dot] com