Home Ward Terms of Service
1. Who you are agreeing with
Home Ward is operated by ASTON VENTURES L.L.C., 354 N 360 E, Vineyard, Utah 84059. In these Terms, "Home Ward", "we" and "us" mean that company. "You" means the person who holds the account.
These Terms govern the Home Ward service: your account, what you post, how we moderate it, and disputes between us. Apple's standard licence agreement for apps from the App Store governs the app itself on your device.
Home Ward is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or any of its entities, and it uses none of the Church's trademarks. The ward names and places in Home Ward are added by members or confirmed one at a time; we do not copy the Church's directory.
Home Ward is available in the United States only.
2. You must be 18 or over
Home Ward is an adult community. You may only create an account if you are 18 or over, and we ask for your date of birth at sign-up in order to decide that. Your date of birth is your own statement — we do not check it against any identity document or identity-verification service. If your device shares the age range your App Store account reports, we record it as well; it never decides on its own whether you can join.
If we learn an account holder is under 18, we ban the account. If they are under 13, we also delete it, as the Privacy Policy describes.
3. Your account
- Keep your sign-in details to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
- Your public @handle is assigned at random when you create your account. It is not taken from your name, and it cannot be changed.
- You may change your display name at any time. We remove invisible and control characters from it, and we refuse a name that uses certain reserved words, such as "Home Ward", "admin" or "moderator". ⚠️ When name review is on, a new name may be held for review before others see it, how often you can change it is limited, and you need the third-party-AI permission (section 6) to set a custom name.
- A person at Home Ward may reset your display name to a neutral one if it breaks the Community Guidelines. A reset is not a penalty on your account, and we do not promise to tell you when it happens.
- You may change or clear your answer to the church-membership question at any time. You can clear a bio you wrote earlier, but you can't add a new one.
- ⚠️ If Home Ward requires profile verification, your profile photo must be a photo of you, and a person compares a selfie you take with it, by eye. Until your profile is verified you can still read, block, report, contact us and delete your account, but you can't post, reply, like, send or accept friend requests, or appear in member search. Verification needs the third-party-AI permission.
- You may delete your account from inside the app, whatever its state — suspended or banned included. It closes at once on every device and cannot be undone. Some records survive that deletion; the Privacy Policy says which, why, and how long deletion takes.
4. Your content stays yours
You keep ownership of what you post. To operate the service, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and adapt your content (for example, resizing an image, or writing a text description of a photo for screen-reader users), to display it to Home Ward members, to serve your photos from public web addresses, and to send it to the safety providers named in the Privacy Policy. This licence exists so we can run the product; it does not let us sell your content or license it onward for someone else's advertising.
⚠️ Once a post is published, any signed-in Home Ward member can see it, except a member you have blocked or who has blocked you; while your account is banned, it is hidden from other members. There is no setting that limits a post to some members. Choosing your ward or your friends changes what you see, not who can see you.
⚠️ Please read this carefully: photos that pass review are served from a public web address that anyone holding the link can open without signing in. The address is not signed or time-limited. Do not post a photo you would not want reachable by anyone who is given its link.
5. Community Guidelines and copyright policy
The Community Guidelines, version 2, and our copyright policy in section 9, are part of these Terms and are incorporated by reference. Accepting these Terms means accepting them too.
6. Automated safety review
Posts, replies and photos are checked automatically before other members see them, by our own systems and by third-party providers. ⚠️ When name review is on, display names are checked too. Some of that review happens outside our cloud provider, at Anthropic. Because this involves sharing your content with a third party, we ask for that permission separately — it is not part of accepting these Terms, and you can decline it.
If you decline, your account is still created and you can read Home Ward, block and report other members, contact us, and delete your account. You will not be able to publish posts or replies, attach photos, or set a profile photo — or, when name review is on, choose a custom display name — because those all require the safety review. You can change your mind later in Settings.
If you withdraw the permission later, we stop sending anything you submit afterwards. A post, reply or photo you submitted before you withdrew may still be sent and reviewed, and withdrawing does not delete what has already been reviewed or stored.
Automated systems can publish, hold or remove content without a person looking at it. ⚠️ When matching against known child sexual abuse material is on, a photo that matches is blocked, the account may be suspended automatically, and a person reports it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. What we send, to whom, and what we do with the result is described in the Privacy Policy.
7. What we may do about content and accounts
We may block content before it is published, remove content automatically or by a person's decision, reset a display name, and suspend or ban an account, when the Community Guidelines are broken or when we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect members or to comply with the law. What we do is meant to be proportionate to what happened: some content is removed or blocked automatically, and borderline content is held for a person to look at.
A suspension or ban lasts until a person at Home Ward lifts it; neither ends automatically. Whatever the restriction, you can still block and report other members, contact us, and delete your account.
⚠️ Things we want to be straight about, because it would be easy to imply otherwise:
- We do not promise to warn you first. There is no warning step in the product — a measure can be applied without any prior notice to you.
- We do not promise to tell you each time we remove your content, or why. You can ask a person to look at a decision about your content or your account again by writing to support@home-ward.com. We promise no particular outcome or timeframe, and some automated photo removals cannot be reversed.
- Removing content stops it appearing to other members in Home Ward. It does not reach copies someone else has already saved, and a photo removed by a person's decision may stay reachable at its web address.
8. Things you agree not to do
- Break the Community Guidelines.
- Use another person's account, or let someone else use yours.
- Try to break, overload, or get around the security of the service.
- Scrape or bulk-collect other members' information.
- Post content, or share information or images about another person — including someone in the background of a photo — that you do not have the right to share.
- Copy the Church's directory of wards or members into Home Ward in bulk.
9. Copyright
We respond to copyright notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Our designated agent's details are at home-ward.com/dmca. We handle copyright notices by hand. When a notice meets the law's requirements, we act on it promptly, usually by removing the material from Home Ward; a removed photo may stay reachable at its web address. If the person who posted it sends a valid counter-notice, we forward it to the person who complained, and after 10 to 14 business days we put the material back where we can, unless they tell us they have filed a court action. In appropriate circumstances we may end the access of a member whose repeated infringement has been substantiated — never on an untested accusation alone.
Intimate images shared without consent. If an intimate image of you has been posted without your consent, report it in the app, or write to legal@home-ward.com — you do not need a Home Ward account to do that. Whether an image was shared with consent is a person's decision; no automated system makes it.
10. The service will change, and may be unavailable
Home Ward is early software operated by one person. Features will change and the service will sometimes be unavailable. We do not promise a particular level of availability, and we do not currently offer any paid plan.
11. No warranties
Home Ward is provided as is and as available. We do not promise that the service will always be available, that other members are who they say they are, that what they post is accurate, or that moderation will always get it right. This section does not take away any right that the law does not allow to be given up.
12. Limits on our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for all claims about Home Ward is limited to the greater of $100 or the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. This limit does not apply to liability for fraud, gross negligence or willful misconduct, or to anything the law does not allow to be limited, and it does not take away any right that the law does not allow to be given up.
13. Changes to these Terms
When we change these Terms we publish a new version with a new effective date; we do not edit a version that has been published. If a change is material, we will ask you to accept the new version before you carry on using Home Ward. While that request is waiting for you, you can still delete your account, withdraw the third-party-AI permission, block and report other members, and contact us.
14. Resolving disputes: individual arbitration and class-action waiver
Talk to us first. Before starting an arbitration or a small-claims case, send us a written description of the dispute and what you want, at legal@home-ward.com or by post to the address in section 1, with the email address of your account. We will do the same if we have a dispute with you. Neither of us may start a case until 30 days after that notice, so that we can try to resolve it.
Arbitration. If it is not resolved, any dispute between you and Home Ward about these Terms or the service will be decided by a single neutral arbitrator in an individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, and not by a judge or jury. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. You may choose to have the hearing on documents only, by phone or video, or in person at a reasonably convenient place, where the rules allow it. The arbitrator may award you any individual relief a court could award.
Small claims. Either of us may instead bring an individual case in a small-claims court that has jurisdiction over it.
Costs. You will not pay more to arbitrate than the filing fee you would pay to start a comparable case in court. We pay the rest of the American Arbitration Association's fees and the arbitrator's compensation, unless a rule or law requires a split even more favourable to you. If the American Arbitration Association will not administer the arbitration, we will agree on a comparable consumer arbitration provider, or the dispute may go to court under section 15, so you are never left without a forum.
No class actions. To the fullest extent the law permits, you and Home Ward may bring claims only individually, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, coordinated, mass or representative action. If the law does not allow a particular claim for public injunctive relief or representative relief to be waived, that claim is separated and decided in court after the individual claims, and only to the extent the law requires. If any part of this paragraph cannot be enforced in a particular case, the rest of these Terms still applies.
You and Home Ward each give up the right to a jury trial for disputes this section covers.
Opting out. You can opt out of this section by writing to legal@home-ward.com, or by post to the address in section 1, within 30 days after you first accept a version of these Terms that contains it. Include your name, the email address of your account, and a clear statement that you opt out of arbitration. Opting out does not affect anything else in these Terms.
15. Governing law and courts
The Federal Arbitration Act governs section 14. Otherwise, these Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, to the extent the law allows. A dispute that is not decided in arbitration or small-claims court will be heard in the state or federal courts serving Salt Lake County, Utah, unless a law that cannot be waived requires a different court. Nothing in these Terms takes away a right you have that the law does not allow to be given up.
16. Contact
Write to us at support@home-ward.com or legal@home-ward.com, or by post at ASTON VENTURES L.L.C., 354 N 360 E, Vineyard, Utah 84059.