Terms of Service

1. Scope and who we are

These terms govern your use of the douce scroll app and website, operated by K. Ryder Digmon, Stuttgart, Germany (we, us). Full contact details are in the Imprint.

By creating an account you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. Our Privacy Policy and AI Transparency Statement form part of this agreement.

2. Who may use douce scroll

You must be at least 16 years old. There is no exception for parental consent — we have deliberately not built the service for children. By signing up you confirm you meet the age requirement.

You must also not be barred from using the service under any applicable sanctions or export control law.

3. Your account

• One account per person. Keep your password to yourself.
• Give a real email address — it is the only way we can reach you about your account.
• Tell us promptly at hallo@douce.live if you think someone else is using your account.
• A display name is optional. If you choose one, it must not impersonate anyone, infringe a trade mark, or be offensive. We may reclaim names that do.

4. What the service is — and isn't

douce scroll is a self-directed language-learning app. It gives you a feed of short cards, exercises and games at an estimated CEFR level from A1 to C2.

We do not guarantee that using the app will produce any particular learning outcome.

5. AI-generated content

The majority of learning content — cards, exercises, example sentences, explanations — is generated by artificial intelligence and checked by automated verification before publication. Spoken audio is synthesised, not recorded by a human speaker. Content is labelled in the app accordingly.

AI output can be wrong, out of date, regionally inaccurate, or subtly unidiomatic despite our checks. You accept that you use it as a study aid and apply your own judgement. Every card carries a flag control; please use it when something is wrong, and we will review and correct or remove the card.

Full detail on which systems we use, what we label and how, is in the AI Transparency Statement.

6. Content you post

You keep ownership of everything you post — your phrases, notes, photos and comments.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, display and distribute your content solely in order to operate the service: showing it to other learners, generating previews, and backing it up. The licence lasts as long as you keep the content on the service, and ends when you delete it or your account — except for copies in routine backups, which roll off within 30 days, and for material we must retain to comply with a legal obligation.

We will not sell your content, use it in advertising, or use it to train AI models.

You confirm that you hold the rights to what you post — in particular that any photo is yours, or that you have permission, and that people identifiable in it agreed to it being published.

7. Community rules

Do not post, share or link to content that:

• is illegal under German or EU law, or the law where you are;
• incites hatred or violence against people on the basis of origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, or any comparable characteristic;
• sexualises minors in any way, or depicts sexual content, gratuitous violence or cruelty;
• harasses, bullies, threatens or doxxes another person;
• infringes copyright, trade marks or someone's personality rights, including posting photos of identifiable people without their agreement;
• is spam, advertising, a scam, malware, or an attempt to drive traffic elsewhere;
• impersonates another person or organisation;
• discloses another person's personal data without their consent.

Do not misuse the service technically, in particular do not:

• scrape, bulk-download or systematically extract content, or use automated means to access the service beyond ordinary use;
• attempt to bypass rate limits, access another account, or probe our infrastructure without written permission;
• use the AI features to try to generate illegal content, or to extract our prompts or model instructions;
• resell or commercially exploit the service or its content.

Security researchers: responsible disclosure to security@douce.live is welcome and we will not pursue good-faith testing that respects other users' data.

8. Moderation, and how we decide

This section is our statement under Art. 14 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act.

How content is checked. AI-generated learning content passes an automated verification step before publication. Posts you publish — the text, and any photo you attach — pass an automated safety check before they appear. Comments do not: those, and everything already published, we act on after the fact, on reports and on our own checks.

Automated tools. We use automated filtering on prompts submitted to the AI features, which refuses categories of request such as illegal activity or requests for medical, legal or financial advice. The same kind of filtering runs on a post and its photo before publication, and refusing means the post is not written at all — you are told, and you can change it and try again. Nothing is removed by an automated tool once it is published: taking down something already visible is a decision a person makes.

What we may do. Where content breaks these terms or the law, and proportionate to the seriousness and to whether it is repeated, we may: remove or restrict visibility of the content; issue a warning; suspend your ability to post; or suspend or terminate your account. Where the law requires it, we may also be obliged to pass information to a competent authority.

You will be told. If we remove or restrict something of yours, we will give you a statement of reasons under Art. 17 DSA: what was removed, on what legal or contractual ground, whether automated means were used, and how to appeal. We will not do this where the law forbids it, for example where it would prejudice a criminal investigation.

9. Reporting illegal content

Anyone — you do not need an account — may report content they consider illegal. This is our notice-and-action mechanism under Art. 16 DSA.

• In the app: the flag control on any card or post is the fastest route.
• By email: report@douce.live
• Web form: douce.live/content-report

To let us act properly, please include:

• why you believe the content is illegal;
• the exact location — a link, or the card or post identifier;
• your name and email, unless the report concerns child sexual abuse material or certain other offences, where you may report anonymously;
• a statement that you believe, in good faith, that the report is accurate and complete.

We will confirm receipt without undue delay, decide diligently and without arbitrary judgement, tell you the outcome and how to challenge it. A complete report of this kind may give us actual knowledge under Art. 6 DSA.

10. Appeals

If we removed your content, restricted your account, or declined to act on your report, you may object within six months by writing to appeal@douce.live. Say what the decision was and why you think it was wrong. A human — not an automated system — will look at it again and reply with reasons.

As a micro enterprise we are exempt under Art. 19 DSA from operating a formal internal complaint-handling system and from out-of-court dispute settlement under Art. 20 and 21 DSA. We handle appeals anyway, because it is the right thing to do. Your right to go to court is untouched.

11. Points of contact

Under Art. 11 and 12 DSA we designate the following single points of contact. Both accept communications in German or English, by electronic means.

We are established in Germany, so no legal representative under Art. 13 DSA is required. Our Digital Services Coordinator is the Bundesnetzagentur.

12. Beta status and availability

douce scroll is in beta and free of charge. It may be incomplete, may change without notice, and may be unavailable at times. Features can be added, altered or withdrawn.

We do not promise any level of availability and give no uptime guarantee for a free beta service. We do not guarantee that content, progress or posts survive a beta migration, although we will make reasonable efforts and warn you before anything destructive.

If we ever introduce paid features, existing free functionality will not be put behind a paywall without notice and, where the law requires it, your agreement.

13. Intellectual property

The douce scroll name, design, interface, code and the arrangement of its content belong to us. Learning content generated by the service is provided for your personal study; you may not republish it in bulk or use it to build a competing dataset or service.

Third-party material shown in the app — news extracts, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons material, and public posts from Mastodon, Lemmy, Bluesky and Stack Exchange — remains with its rights holders and is shown under the applicable licence or under the right of quotation, with attribution and a link to the source.

If you believe your rights are infringed by material in the app, write to report@douce.live with details of the work and the location of the material, and we will act promptly.

14. Ending the agreement

You may delete your account at any time in Settings → Privacy, with no notice period and no reason required. Deletion is immediate and permanent.

We may terminate with 14 days' notice by email for any reason, or immediately for serious or repeated breach of section 7, for unlawful use, or where we are legally required to. Where we terminate immediately we will tell you why, unless the law prevents us. Your right to export your data before deletion will be preserved wherever possible.

15. Liability

We are liable without limitation for damage arising from injury to life, body or health, for intent and gross negligence, under the German Product Liability Act, and to the extent we have given a guarantee.

For slight negligence we are liable only where we breach a material contractual obligation — one whose fulfilment makes proper performance possible and on which you may reasonably rely — and then only for foreseeable damage typical of this kind of contract.

All further liability is excluded. This reflects that the service is free of charge.

We are not liable for content posted by other users, or for material on external sites we link to. As a hosting provider we rely on the liability exemption in Art. 6 DSA: we do not have general knowledge of what users store, and we act expeditiously once we do.

Nothing here limits your mandatory statutory rights as a consumer.

16. Right of withdrawal

Model withdrawal form — complete and return only if you wish to withdraw:

Practically, you can achieve the same result faster by deleting your account in Settings → Privacy.

17. Disputes

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board within the meaning of §36 of the German Consumer Dispute Resolution Act (VSBG). If something goes wrong, please write to hallo@douce.live first — for a project this size, that usually settles it.

The European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform was discontinued on 20 July 2025 and is therefore no longer available.

18. Governing law

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your own country. If you are not a consumer, the place of jurisdiction is Stuttgart, Germany.

19. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms where there is a valid reason — a change in the law, a new feature, or a security need. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or in the app before a change that disadvantages you takes effect.

If you do not accept a change, you may delete your account before it takes effect; continuing to use the service after that counts as acceptance. We will point this out to you in the notice, as Art. 14(2) DSA requires.

Should any provision be or become invalid, the rest remains in force and the invalid provision is replaced by the statutory rule.