Terms of Service

Who provides the service

EvidenceGather (evidencegather.com) is provided by Steleo Publishing Limited, Company Number 11891029, registered at 167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF ("we", "us", "our"). By creating an account you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and have legal capacity to agree to these terms, and you agree to be bound by them.

What the service is — and is not

EvidenceGather stores what you send to your private address, seals its arrival details, and organises it on a calendar. It is a record-keeping service.

It is not legal advice, and we are not a law firm. We make no promises about how any court, tribunal, or other body will treat your records; what weight they carry is always for others to decide. If your situation is serious, speak to a qualified adviser.

Saying this does not reduce our statutory duty to provide the service itself with reasonable care and skill.

Your account and your private address

Sign-in is by secure email link; you are responsible for keeping access to your email account secure. Your account is strictly personal to you. You must not sell, transfer, assign, or share your account or your private evidence address with any third party.

Your private evidence address works like a key: anything sent to it is filed in your record, so keep it to yourself. If it is ever exposed, contact support@evidencegather.com and we will issue a new one.

Plans, limits, and payment

The free plan includes a limited number of items and storage. Paid plans (Capture and Case) are billed monthly or yearly through Stripe at the prices shown on our pricing page. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice; changes take effect from the start of your next billing period.

You can cancel your subscription at any time by emailing support@evidencegather.com; cancellation stops future charges and your account will subsequently continue as described in the "If you stop paying" section below. Statutory consumer rights are unaffected.

Charges appear on bank statements and payment approval screens as STELEO PUBLISHING — our publisher's name, not the product's. This is deliberate: your statement remains entirely discreet.

Your 14-day right to cancel

If you take out a paid plan, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of subscribing, for any reason, and receive a refund — this right is separate from, and in addition to, your right to cancel at any time as described above.

A paid plan gives you immediate access to storage and to the automated sealing of anything you send. By subscribing and starting to use the platform within these 14 days, you explicitly ask us to begin the service straight away and you accept that if you then cancel within the 14-day period, we may keep a proportionate part of the fee for the time you actually had access to the service — which is usually a small amount.

To cancel within the 14 days, email support@evidencegather.com — a plain statement that you want to cancel is sufficient; you do not have to give a reason. We will refund you within 14 days of being told, using the same payment method. Nothing here affects your other statutory rights.

If you stop paying

If your subscription ends, your record is not deleted overnight. Your account retains read-only access to everything already filed for a grace period of four months, during which we will send you clear reminder emails. At any point in that period, you can export your record, delete it yourself, or resubscribe and carry on exactly where you left off.

When the grace period ends, your record is permanently deleted. This protects you from indefinite storage of sensitive material you no longer want held, and it applies to lawful records only. Where we reasonably believe material is unlawful, it is handled under "Acceptable use and enforcement", and may be preserved rather than deleted despite this grace period.

When we permanently delete a record, we keep only one anonymous detail about each file — its digital fingerprint and the time it arrived — so that you can later ask us to confirm that a file you still hold matches an entry from that time. That detail cannot be turned back into the file and cannot identify anyone; our Privacy Policy explains it in full.

If you are on the free plan and your account becomes inactive for 12 months, we will email you clear reminders and, if it stays inactive, we may delete the record after a further 30 days. This keeps us from holding sensitive material indefinitely when it is no longer wanted. We will always give you notice and a chance to keep your account active first.

Purpose of the platform

EvidenceGather is a neutral personal record. It is yours, to use for any lawful purpose you choose — what you do with your record is entirely up to you, and we make no claim about what it can achieve. It must never be used to conceal material from, or to evade, a court, regulator, or other authority to which you are required to disclose it, or for any unlawful end. Using the platform to do so is a serious breach of these terms.

Acceptable use and enforcement

You may only send us material you have the lawful right to hold, and only for a lawful purpose. When you send something to your private address, you confirm that you have the legal right to hold it and that you obtained it by lawful means. You are solely responsible for how you came by anything you send us.

We do not check, verify, or endorse how any item was obtained or whether it is lawful. Filing something in your record is not a judgement by us that it was lawfully obtained or that it is lawful to hold.

You must never send us material obtained by unlawful means. Examples — this is not an exhaustive list — include: gaining access to someone's device, account, or credentials without authority, or beyond the authority you were given (Computer Misuse Act 1990); unlawful interception, wiretapping, or recording, or the deployment of hidden recording devices, spyware, or keyloggers (Investigatory Powers Act 2016; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000); material that was stolen or obtained by deception (Theft Act 1968; Fraud Act 2006); and material taken in breach of confidence, in breach of a confidentiality or non-disclosure obligation, or containing another person's personal data obtained unlawfully (UK GDPR; Data Protection Act 2018).

You must also never use the service to store or share unlawful content of any kind — including indecent images of children, terrorist material, or intimate images held or shared without consent — to harass, surveil, or intimidate anyone, or to conceal material from a court or authority to which you are required to disclose it.

Your record is private to you. We do not read, screen, or routinely monitor it, and we are under no general obligation to do so. However, this platform is not a shelter for unlawful use: where we obtain knowledge of, or a credible report about, unlawful material in an account, we may act as set out below.

Where we have reasonable grounds to believe an account is being used unlawfully, we may, to the extent the law allows: suspend or restrict access to the account; preserve the relevant material rather than delete it; examine only what is necessary to understand and report the issue; and report and disclose the relevant material and account details to the appropriate United Kingdom authorities — including the police, the National Crime Agency, the Information Commissioner's Office, and the Internet Watch Foundation where applicable. We will cooperate with lawful requests from those authorities. For suspected indecent images of children we follow the mandatory reporting route operated by the Internet Watch Foundation and the National Crime Agency.

We will tell you if we take these steps, unless the law prevents us or doing so would prejudice an investigation. Where an account is suspended for reasons other than suspected serious criminality, we will, where lawful, give you a reasonable opportunity to export your lawful records.

Where we disclose material or account details to an authority, we do so relying on a legal obligation to disclose or, where disclosure is not compelled, on the substantial public interest in preventing or detecting unlawful acts, as permitted by United Kingdom data protection law. We disclose no more than is reasonably necessary.

Where we reasonably believe material is unlawful, our commitments to keep and later delete your record — and any request you make to delete it — do not require us to destroy that material. We may preserve it, and withhold access to it, for as long as is necessary to comply with the law and to report to or assist an authority. Our retention commitment protects lawful records; it is never a shelter for unlawful ones.

Your content

Your record belongs to you. You grant us only the limited, non-exclusive licence needed to store, process, and display it back to you via the platform — nothing more. We claim no other rights over it. This licence does not limit any step we may take, or are required by law to take, under "Acceptable use and enforcement".

Your responsibilities and our costs

You are responsible for using EvidenceGather lawfully and for the content you send to it.

Data Protection Roles: You and we acknowledge that for the purposes of United Kingdom data protection law, both parties act as independent Data Controllers in relation to the personal data processed on the platform. You operate as an independent controller for the purpose of keeping your own personal backup of what you send — for example, so you still have it if you lose your phone — and you remain entirely responsible for ensuring you possess a valid lawful basis under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 to collect, process, and upload any third-party data. We act as an independent controller for the separate purposes of operating the platform securely, applying automated verification and time-sealing, managing corporate data retention schedules, and independently enforcing our rights and statutory obligations under the "Acceptable use and enforcement" section of these terms.

You confirm that you have a lawful basis to hold what you upload, including any personal data about other people, and that you will not use the service for any purpose prohibited under "Acceptable use and enforcement".

If a third party brings a claim against us that arises solely and directly from your unlawful use of the service, or from content you had no lawful right to hold, you agree to be responsible for the reasonable, properly-incurred losses and costs we suffer as a direct result. This does not apply to anything caused or contributed to by us, it does not extend to any fine or penalty imposed on us by a regulator (including any administrative fine or penalty imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office), and it is limited to reasonable costs actually incurred — never to costs on a full-indemnity or punitive basis.

Nothing in this section requires you to pay a disproportionate amount or affects your rights as a consumer, which remain fully protected.

Service availability

We work to keep the service available and your record intact, and we describe our platform protections honestly, but no online service can promise uninterrupted availability. We will give reasonable notice of planned maintenance or disruption where possible.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for our core duty to provide the service with reasonable care and skill, or your statutory rights as a consumer.

Subject to that, and except where we have failed to use reasonable care and skill, our total liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of the amounts you actually paid us in that specific period and £100. This financial floor means that even users on a free plan are never left without a legal remedy.

Ending the agreement

You may close your account at any time. We may end or suspend your service where you are in serious or repeated breach of these terms. Except where we reasonably need to act immediately — for example to comply with a statutory law enforcement obligation, to protect other users, or where content is, or we reasonably believe it to be, unlawful — we will give you reasonable notice and, where it is appropriate and safe to do so, a chance to rectify the situation first.

Where we act without prior notice, we will inform you afterwards unless the law requires or permits us not to. We will not delete lawful records except in line with the terms outlined in "If you stop paying"; unlawful material is handled under "Acceptable use and enforcement". The commitments protecting your lawful record survive the termination of this agreement.

Rights of third parties

No one other than you and Steleo Publishing Limited has any right to enforce these terms, and the provisions of the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 are excluded. This does not affect any right or remedy a person has otherwise than under that Act, and it does not affect your statutory rights as a consumer.

Changes, governing law, and jurisdiction

We may update these terms; meaningful changes will be notified by email and take effect no sooner than 14 days later.

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and you and Steleo Publishing Limited agree that the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction to settle any dispute. Nothing in this clause affects your mandatory rights as a consumer: if you live elsewhere in the United Kingdom, such as Scotland or Northern Ireland, you keep the right to bring proceedings in, and may only be sued in, the courts of the part of the United Kingdom where you live.