The agreement for using Earmio

1. Who may use Earmio

• You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract.
• You may hold one account, for yourself, for personal use. Accounts are not transferable and may not be shared.
• You may pair only watches that you own or that you are personally entitled to use, and only to your own account.
• You may not use Earmio if doing so is unlawful where you are, or if we have previously closed an account of yours for breaching these terms.

Earmio is provided by Corvidae Ltd, a New Zealand company (corvidae.co.nz), referred to here as Corvidae, we or us. Earmio means the website earmio.com, the preview at sample.earmio.com, the web app at app.earmio.com with its sign-in and data services, and the Earmio watch app.

2. What Earmio is at this stage

Earmio is a private memory for your day. In the current stage, the watch app records audio and location on your instruction and syncs them to your own archive, and the web app pairs the watch, shows its status and coverage, and plays back what was captured. Every other screen is a labelled placeholder: Coming soon with Sample data. We may change, add, suspend or remove features, and we will tell you in advance when a change affects data you already hold. No live assistance of any kind exists in this stage, and nothing in Earmio listens for anyone except you.

3. Your account

• Give us a working email address and keep it current. We use it for security notices and for notices about these documents.
• Keep your password and your signed-in devices secure. You are responsible for everything done through your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
• Tell us at support@earmio.com as soon as you suspect unauthorised access. We will help you secure the account and revoke paired watches.
• Pairing a watch grants that watch access to upload to your archive until you revoke it in the web app. Revoke a watch before you sell, give away or lose it.

4. Recording other people: the rules

A recording of your day will often contain other people. You are the person deciding to record, so you are the person responsible for doing it lawfully and decently. Corvidae stores what you capture on your instruction and does not supervise it. These rules are conditions of using Earmio, not advice, and none of them is a statement of what the law in your place requires; the law may require more.

You must

• Record only conversations you are taking part in. Earmio is for your own day. Capturing a conversation you are not part of is interception and is a crime in New Zealand and in most other countries.
• Know the law where you are, and follow it. Recording laws differ by country, and in Australia, the United States and Canada by state or province. Some places allow a participant to record without telling anyone, some require everyone present to agree, and some ban recording in particular settings outright. You are responsible for finding out which applies to you, each time you travel.
• Tell people you are recording whenever the law requires it, and whenever a reasonable person would expect to be told. Where the law requires their agreement, get it before you start, and stop if anyone withdraws it.
• Stop or pause when someone asks you to. The watch has a one-tap stop, a pause, and privacy presets so you can always do this at once.
• Keep recordings to yourself. Earmio stores them for you to remember your day. Do not publish, forward, or play them to others without the consent of the people in them where that consent is required, and never in a way that could harm them.
• Respect places and rules that forbid recording: courts, hospitals and clinics, schools, workplaces with a no-recording policy, changing rooms, bathrooms, private homes you are a guest in where the host objects, and any venue that has told you not to.
• Respect confidential and privileged conversations. Do not record legal, medical, counselling or financial consultations, or anything covered by a confidentiality agreement, unless the other party has agreed.

You must not

• Use Earmio to monitor, track or record another person: a partner, a former partner, a family member, a child, an employee, a tenant, a flatmate, or anyone else. Earmio is a memory of your own day, not a surveillance tool, and we will close accounts used this way.
• Hide the watch or disguise that it is recording in order to capture people who would otherwise object.
• Record where you are not a participant in the conversation, including leaving the watch running in a room you have left.
• Use any recording to harass, intimidate, blackmail, defame, discriminate against or stalk a person, or to gain an unfair advantage over them.
• Upload or store material you have no right to hold, including recordings made by someone else and recordings made in breach of these terms.
• Use Earmio on behalf of an employer, a business, a government body or any organisation to record staff, customers, members of the public or meetings. Personal accounts only.
• Attempt to bypass a stop, pause or privacy control, modify the watch app to remove the recording indicator or notification, or run Earmio on a device that is not yours.

Examples of how the law differs

These examples are illustrative only, were accurate when this version was written, and are not legal advice. Check the current law before you record.

• New Zealand: a participant may generally record a conversation they are part of, but intercepting a private conversation they are not part of is an offence under the Crimes Act 1961, and the Privacy Act 2020 still governs what you do with the recording.
• Australia: each state and territory has its own surveillance devices law. Several of them, including New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, restrict a participant recording a private conversation without the consent of everyone in it.
• United States: about a dozen states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington, require the consent of every party to a private conversation.
• Germany and several other European countries: recording the non-public spoken word of another person without their consent is a criminal offence even for a participant.
• United Kingdom and the European Economic Area: storing recordings of identifiable people is processing of their personal data, and the exemption for purely personal use is narrow.

If you break these rules

We may suspend or close your account, delete material that was captured in breach of these terms, refuse further service, and cooperate with lawful requests from the people affected and from authorities as described in the privacy policy. You are responsible for any claim, loss or penalty that results from your recording, and section 9 applies.

5. Your content

• You own your recordings, locations, bookmarks, notes and everything derived from them. Corvidae claims no rights in them.
• You give Corvidae a limited licence to store, copy, transmit, encrypt and process your content only as needed to provide Earmio to you, to keep it secure, and to carry out your instructions. The licence ends when the content is deleted.
• We do not use your content to train models, to advertise, to profile you, or for any purpose of our own. We do not listen to it except as set out in the privacy policy.
• You confirm that you have the right to store every item you upload and that doing so does not break the law or these terms.

6. What Earmio does not promise

• Capture is not guaranteed. The watch can lose the microphone to a phone call, another app or a system setting; the battery can run out; storage can fill; Wear OS can stop a background service; the watch can reboot. Earmio records every such gap with a reason so that you know what was missed, but it cannot prevent the gap.
• Earmio is not an evidence service. Recordings are not certified, timestamps come from the watch clock, and audio can be incomplete. Do not rely on an Earmio recording as your only record of anything that matters legally, medically or financially.
• Earmio is not a safety device, an emergency service or a medical device. It does not call for help and must not be used to replace anything that does.
• Earmio shows honest states. Not connected, Pending, Not logged and Coming soon are real states. A stop sent from the web app shows as Pending until the watch confirms it, and capture may continue until then.
• Features marked Coming soon do not exist yet. Their presence on a screen is a design preview with sample data, not a promise that they will ship, when, or in which plan.

7. Fees

Earmio is free in this stage. There is no checkout, no trial and no card on file. If paid plans are introduced, you will see the price, the billing period and what is included before you pay anything, you will never be charged without an explicit purchase, and the free level will keep stop, pause, export, deletion and privacy settings in full. Prices may differ by country and include applicable taxes where the law requires.

8. Acceptable use of the service

• Do not probe, scan, overload or interfere with Earmio, its servers or its security measures, or access another person's account or data.
• Do not reverse engineer or modify the watch app or the web app except where the law gives you that right regardless of these terms.
• Do not use automated tools against the service other than through interfaces we document for that purpose.
• Security researchers acting in good faith may report findings to support@earmio.com. We do not take legal action over good-faith research that respects other users' privacy.

9. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Australian Consumer Law, or any other consumer law that applies to you and cannot be excluded. Nothing limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, Earmio is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, Corvidae is not liable for loss of recordings, loss of data, loss of profit, or any indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability to you in any 12 month period is limited to the amount you paid us for Earmio in that period, or NZD 100 if you paid nothing.

If a third party brings a claim against Corvidae because of something you recorded, stored or did in breach of section 4, you agree to cover the reasonable costs, damages and legal fees that result, to the extent the law allows.

10. Devices and third parties

Earmio is designed around Google Pixel Watch and Wear OS. Google Pixel Watch and Wear OS are trademarks of Google LLC, and Earmio is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Your watch, your Google account, your browser and your network are governed by their own terms. Until the watch app is distributed through an app store, you install it from a build we provide, and you are responsible for installing it only on a device you own. Signing in with Google or Microsoft is optional and subject to their terms.

11. Privacy

The privacy policy is part of these terms. It describes what Earmio collects, where it is stored, for how long, who processes it and how to get it deleted. Where the two documents differ, the privacy policy governs questions of personal information.

12. Ending the agreement

• You can stop using Earmio at any time, revoke your watches in the web app, and ask us to delete your account as described in the privacy policy. Deletion is permanent.
• We may suspend or close your account if you breach these terms, if the law requires it, or if you have not signed in for 24 months. Except where the law or the risk of harm prevents it, we give you notice and 30 days to take a copy of your data before it is deleted.
• If we discontinue Earmio, we give at least 60 days' notice, keep stop, playback and deletion working during that time, and provide a copy of your data on request before anything is deleted.
• Sections 4, 5, 6, 9 and 13 to 15 continue to apply after the agreement ends.

13. Changes to these terms

These terms carry a version date. When we change them in substance, we publish the new version here, email every account holder at least 14 days before it takes effect, and ask you to accept it at your next sign-in. If you do not accept, you can keep stopping, playing back, exporting and deleting your data, and ask us to close your account, but you cannot capture new data. Corrections of wording that do not change the meaning are published without a new version. Earlier versions are available on request.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of New Zealand, and the courts and tribunals of New Zealand have jurisdiction, including the Disputes Tribunal for small claims. If you live elsewhere and your local consumer law gives you the right to bring a claim in your own country or under your own law, nothing here takes that away. Before any formal step, write to us at support@earmio.com; most problems are resolved by a reply.

15. General

• These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and Corvidae about Earmio.
• If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• You may not transfer this agreement. Corvidae may transfer it to a successor that takes over Earmio and these obligations, and will tell you if that happens.
• Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to support@earmio.com.
• Our failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.

16. Contact

Corvidae Ltd, New Zealand. Support and legal notices: support@earmio.com. General enquiries: hello@earmio.com. Company details are at corvidae.co.nz.