Terms of Service

1. What Bharat OS is

Bharat OS is an AI-native operating layer for India. It accepts intents in any of the 22 official Indian languages, routes them through a policy-checked planning engine, and either completes regulated actions through India Stack APIs or hands you off to the appropriate app. It is operated by [Operating entity, to be inserted at registration] ("we", "us").

2. You must be 18+

You must be at least 18 years old to use Bharat OS. We do not knowingly accept users under 18; if we discover you are under 18, your account will be erased.

3. Your identity is yours

Bharat OS does not own your identity. The Ed25519 key pair we generate is yours, controlled by your 12-word recovery phrase. Your identity persists across devices via §7c device pairing — the phone is replaceable; you are not.

If you lose your recovery phrase, we cannot recover your account. That's not a limitation we apologise for — it's how a sovereign identity has to work.

4. What you can and can't do

You can:

• Use Bharat OS in any supported Indian language.
• Mint Trust Passport attestations and share them with verifiers.
• Earn UPI credits by sharing spare compute / storage with the mesh.
• Participate (opt-in, per round) in federated training rounds.
• Move your identity to a new phone any time.
• Delete your account permanently any time.
• Download a complete export of your data any time.

You can't:

• Use Bharat OS for any unlawful purpose under Indian law.
• Create attestations that are false or that you do not have the right to make.
• File §9A reports in bad faith. Bharat OS reserves the right to review reports and to sanction users who abuse the report system.
• Probe, reverse-engineer, or attempt to break the cryptographic protocols. Security research with prior written consent is welcome (security@bharat-os.in).
• Resell, scrape, or commercialise Bharat OS data without our written agreement. The §15 binding "monetize businesses, never the citizen" cuts both ways — businesses do not get to monetize us either.

5. The §15 bindings

These are commitments Bharat OS makes to you, in plain language:

• You never pay to access work, services, or Bharat OS itself.
• We do not sell your data. Ever.
• We do not train models on your data without your explicit per-round consent.
• Aadhaar is optional, never mandatory.
• Identity is the person, not the device.
• Servers see pointers, not payloads. Your raw data stays on your device.
• Our revenue comes from businesses, developers, and infrastructure spread. Never from you.

6. Mesh participation

If you enable mesh contribution, your phone shares spare compute and storage with other Bharat OS users while it is charging on WiFi. You earn UPI credits per contribution. You can stop earning any time. Earnings paid as real fiat UPI credits settled to a bank account you control — never as tokens or cryptocurrency.

You are responsible for the tax treatment of mesh earnings under Indian law. We provide an annual statement; you are responsible for filing.

7. Federated training rounds

You may choose, per round, to contribute a noisy gradient summary to improve a global model. The raw data your phone trained on never leaves the device. Each round records the differential privacy budget consumed. We refuse contributions that would exceed your monthly privacy budget (default ε ≤ 8 across 30 days).

8. Service availability

Bharat OS is provided "as is" while it is in early production. We run a best-effort SLA but we do not guarantee continuous availability. We will publish maintenance windows in advance.

9. Limitation of liability

Bharat OS plans and routes actions on your behalf, but every regulated action requires your explicit consent before execution. We are liable for failures inside our planning + audit layer, but we are not liable for the underlying third-party services (UPI, DigiLocker, ABHA, Account Aggregator) when they reject or mis-handle a request you authorised. Your remedy in that case is against the third party.

Our total liability in any given matter is capped at the lower of ₹50,000 or the revenue we earned from your activity in the prior 12 months. (Citizens / workers pay us nothing, so for end users this cap is effectively ₹0 — which is also the right number; the right outcome for a citizen-facing platform that wrongs you is erasure of the harm, not money.)

10. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of India. Any dispute is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of [City, to be inserted at registration]. Before filing a court case you must first attempt grievance redressal via our Data Protection Officer (see Privacy Policy §7).

11. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms. Material amendments will be notified to you in-app. Continued use of Bharat OS after a notified change constitutes acceptance of the amended Terms. If you do not accept, you may exercise your Right to Erasure at any time.