Terms of Use

1. Acceptance and scope

These Terms of Use (the “Terms”) govern your access to and use of the socials.download service at socials.download (the “Service”). By using the Service you (the “Operator”) agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, DMCA Procedure, and Compliance Policy, each incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. Purpose and intended use

Today socials.download is a free downloader for saving public media to your own device. When paid plans launch it also becomes an evidence-preservation platform for legitimate investigative use. Supported use cases include:

• Journalism, source verification, and newsroom archival of source material.
• Open-source intelligence (OSINT) work for newsrooms, NGOs, government, or private practice.
• Litigation support, e-discovery, and preservation in advance of legal proceedings, conducted by or on behalf of counsel.
• Academic research into digital culture, public discourse, and platform behaviour.
• Corporate compliance, brand-protection, anti-fraud, and trust-and-safety investigations.
• Personal archival of an Operator’s own content or content the Operator otherwise has authorization to preserve.

However you use the Service, whether as a casual downloader today or under the paid operator framework once it ships, your obligations under these Terms are the same and are not altered by how you or anyone you share access with describe it.

3. Authorization attestation (paid plans)

When paid plans launch, each capture you submit will be preceded by an explicit attestation (the “Attestation”) that you have a lawful basis in your jurisdiction to access and preserve the artifact. Lawful bases will include, without limitation: you are the rights-holder; the artifact is part of the public record; the capture is journalistic work product; the capture is conducted under court-authorized discovery or preservation order; the capture is conducted on behalf of an authorized client investigation by counsel or a licensed investigator; or another lawful basis under applicable law. The free downloader available today does not include an Attestation gate.

Once live, the Attestation will be logged into the audit trail at the moment of submission, in UTC, and bound to your authenticated session. By submitting any capture under a paid plan you will represent and warrant that the Attestation is accurate, that you have authority to make it, and that any reliance on the artifact downstream (by you, by counsel, by a court, or by any other party) is your sole responsibility.

False Attestations will be a material breach of these Terms and may also constitute fraud, perjury, or other offences depending on the use the capture is put to.

4. Operator responsibilities and prohibited uses

You are solely responsible for what you capture, how you preserve it, how you store it, and how you use it. By using the Service or Extension you confirm:

• You will comply with the terms of service of each source platform. Use of socials.download does not grant you any rights you do not already have on those platforms.
• You will respect copyright, trademark, publicity, privacy, and data-protection rights, including any rights that arise under jurisdictions other than your own.
• You will not capture content from accounts that are private, friend-only, paywalled, log-in-walled, or otherwise restricted such that you do not have lawful access.
• You will not use the Service or Extension to harass, dox, surveil unlawfully, defame, blackmail, or otherwise harm any person, group, or entity.
• You will not use captured content for commercial exploitation or redistribution unless you hold the rights or have a fair-use / fair-dealing basis under the law that governs your use.
• You will not use the Service to capture, monitor, or analyse content involving minors except in clearly permissible contexts (such as your own children’s content, child-safety investigations conducted under proper authority, or court-authorized work).
• You will not abuse the Service: bulk capture outside the published quotas, automated sign-ups, account sharing, evading rate limits, attempting to circumvent any Attestation requirement that applies to paid plans, or reverse-engineering the Service are prohibited.
• You will not use the Service in violation of any applicable export-control, sanctions, or anti-terrorism law.

Liability for any breach of these obligations is yours alone. We are a tool provider; you are the actor.

5. What the Service does and does not do

Today the Service resolves the public artifact you direct it to and streams the file back to your browser. It retains nothing server-side on the free downloader. When paid plans launch, captures on those plans will additionally generate a SHA-256 hash and UTC capture timestamp, package a forensic metadata sidecar, and store the artifact and audit log entry for the published retention window of your plan. In all cases the Service does not:

• Bypass paywalls, log-in walls, friend-only privacy controls, or DRM.
• Provide opinion on whether a capture is admissible, lawful, or appropriate in your specific use.
• Provide legal advice. Sections of these Terms that reference statutes (e.g., 17 U.S.C. § 512) are descriptive of our procedure, not legal counsel.

6. No affiliation with platforms

socials.download is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X / Twitter, Meta / Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, VSCO, Reddit, Pinterest, Threads, Tumblr, Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitch, Vimeo, Bilibili, Rumble, Substack, or any other platform. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

7. Accounts and billing

The free tier available today does not require an account, and billing is not yet active. The terms in this section take effect when paid plans launch. At that point Pro and Studio plans will require a socials.download account and a valid payment method, and you agree to provide accurate billing information and keep it current.

Billing cycle. Monthly plans bill on the same calendar day each month from the date of first purchase. Annual plans bill once per year from the date of first purchase. All amounts are in U.S. dollars.

Plan changes. Upgrades take effect immediately and are pro-rated against the current period. Downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period.

Refunds. Refunds are available within 7 days of original purchase if the account is unused (zero captures processed against the paid plan). Reach us at the contact email at the bottom of this page with your account email and we will refund within 5 business days. Once a paid plan has been used to process a capture, fees are non-refundable except where required by applicable law.

Failed payments. If a charge fails we will retry up to three times over 7 days, then downgrade the account to Free. Captures performed during a failed-payment grace period remain available via the retention window of the plan you were on at the time.

8. Quotas, capacity, and abuse mitigation

Free users get three captures every six hours. There are currently no accounts: the live Service is anonymous free-tier usage only. Pro and Studio are described here as planned tiers and are not yet available — they are not billing, and their quotas (including any higher or unmetered capture allowance, Pro automated subject-monitoring, and Studio bulk profile archival of up to 5 full-account pulls per calendar month) will take effect only if and when those tiers launch. We may rate-limit, queue, or temporarily suspend usage that exceeds published quotas, that exhibit abusive patterns (rapid-fire requests, scripted multi-account evasion, attempts to bypass the Attestation gate), or that we reasonably believe are attempting to capture content outside their lawful authorization.

9. Service availability and changes

The Service and Extension are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis without warranty of any kind. Source platforms change their internal APIs at will and individual platform support may break without notice. When this happens we will (a) attempt to restore support within a reasonable period and (b) not bill new monthly cycles for a feature that has been broken for more than 14 consecutive days unless you are notified and elect to continue.

We reserve the right, at any time and without prior notice, to remove specific artifacts, suspend specific captures, or terminate access to the Service in response to lawful process, suspected violation of these Terms, or platform policy violations.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operators of socials.download will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, lost data, lost recordings, lost profits, lost business, or lost goodwill arising out of or in connection with the Service. Our aggregate liability for any claim arising out of these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid socials.download in the 12 months preceding the claim or (b) USD $50.

11. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the operators of socials.download, and our directors, officers, employees, and agents, from and against any claim, demand, loss, damage, expense, or liability (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or related to:

• Your use of the Service or Extension;
• Any artifact you capture, retain, derive from, share, publish, or otherwise use;
• Any Attestation you submit;
• Your violation of these Terms, the Privacy Policy, the DMCA Procedure, the Compliance Policy, or any law or third-party right (including any source platform’s terms of service);
• Any claim that content you captured infringes the intellectual property, privacy, publicity, or other rights of a third party.

We reserve the right to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate with our defense.

12. Copyright and DMCA

socials.download responds to lawful copyright takedown notices under 17 U.S.C. § 512. We review complete notices promptly; timing depends on the notice and the circumstances, and we do not publish a guaranteed response window. Full procedure and the counter-notification workflow are documented at /legal/dmca. The live Service has no accounts, so there is no account to suspend or terminate; if and when accounts launch, a repeat-infringer policy will be published with them.

13. Lawful process and law enforcement

We respond to subpoenas, search warrants, and other lawful process under the procedure documented in our Compliance Policy. Direct service to the contact email at the bottom of this page. We may notify the affected Operator of any request unless prohibited by law or court order. We will challenge requests we reasonably believe to be unlawful, overbroad, or improperly served.

14. Audit logs and chain of custody (paid plans)

When paid plans launch, the Service will maintain a tamper-evident audit log of every capture, re-download, and removal action against your account, plus the Attestation submitted at capture time. That audit log will be available to you in your account dashboard, to lawful counsel under documented process, and for our own internal compliance use, and we will not modify historical audit-log entries; corrections will be made by appending new entries. The free downloader available today retains nothing server-side and so produces no audit log or chain-of-custody record.

15. Privacy

Personal-data handling is covered by our Privacy Policy. Short version: we collect the minimum needed to deliver the Service. The free downloader available today retains no captured artifacts server-side once the file has streamed to your browser. When paid plans launch we will not retain captured artifacts past the published retention window of your plan (Pro: 30 days; Studio: 90 days). We do not sell, share, or derive commercial use from content you capture.

16. Termination

When paid plans launch, you will be able to cancel a paid plan from your account settings at any time.

We may suspend or terminate access (and, once accounts exist, accounts) that (a) violate these Terms, (b) submit false Attestations, (c) abuse the Service, (d) submit false billing information, (e) initiate a payment chargeback without first contacting us, or (f) are subject to a valid lawful order requiring such action. For paid plans, upon termination your case archive will be deleted within 24 hours and the audit log will be retained as required by applicable record-keeping obligations.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when we materially change how the Service or Extension works or when applicable law requires it. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the current version. For changes that affect pricing, retention, attestations, or material rights we will email paid Operators at least 14 days before the change takes effect. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

18. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, USA, excluding its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Fulton County, Georgia, and you consent to the jurisdiction of those courts. If you are a consumer in the EU/UK, mandatory consumer-protection laws of your country of residence may grant you additional rights that this clause does not displace.

19. Severability and entire agreement

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force. These Terms together with the Privacy Policy, DMCA Procedure, and Compliance Policy constitute the entire agreement between you and the operators of socials.download with respect to the Service and supersede any prior agreements.

20. Contact

All correspondence (general questions, legal notices, subpoenas, preservation requests, DMCA takedowns and counter-notifications, privacy and data-rights requests): contact@socials.download.