SourceTrace Terms of Use

Who this covers

These terms apply to the SourceTrace iOS app and the SourceTrace web app. Throughout, "we" means the individual developer who operates SourceTrace, "the service" means the app together with the backend server it talks to, and "you" means the person using it. Using the service means you accept these terms. If you don't accept them, don't use it.

How the service handles your data is covered separately by the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

What SourceTrace does — and what it does not

You photograph a page, or share text to the app. An AI model reads it and identifies the factual claims on it. For each claim, the service searches the web and scores the results it finds for how relevant they are and whether they appear to support or dispute the claim.

The verdict on a claim describes the evidence the service happened to find. It is not a finding about whether the claim is true. A claim marked well-supported may still be false, and a claim marked contradicted may still be correct — the service may have searched badly, found the wrong pages, read a source incorrectly, or missed the source that settles it. Several specific limits are worth stating plainly:

• Claims are AI-extracted. The model may misread the page, merge two claims, or attribute something to the author that the author was quoting or disputing.
• Sources are auto-scored. Relevance and stance are a model's judgement about a short extract, not a reading of the whole source.
• The publication may be misidentified. The service guesses what work a page came from and is frequently wrong. You can correct it in the app; nothing downstream depends on it being right.
• Absence of sources means nothing. Many true claims rest on the author's own reporting, an interview, or a document no search will surface.

SourceTrace is a research aid. It is not a fact-checking service, not professional advice of any kind, and not a substitute for reading the sources yourself. Do not use it as the sole basis for a decision that matters, for a publication, or for an academic citation.

Using the service responsibly

You agree not to:

• submit pages or text you have no right to photograph, copy, or upload;
• use the service to build a substitute for it, to resell its output, or to bulk-extract content from the books and articles you feed it;
• access it by any automated means, or work around the rate limits, access keys, or per-analysis budgets that keep its running costs survivable;
• attempt to interfere with the service, its hosting, or the third-party APIs it depends on, or to gain access to parts of it not meant for you;
• use it for anything unlawful, or to harass, defame, or mislead anyone — including by presenting its output as a verified finding when it isn't.

The service is not directed to children under 13, consistent with the Privacy Policy.

Your content

The pages you photograph and the text you share remain yours, and we claim no ownership of them. You give us only the permission needed to run the analysis you asked for: to transmit the image or text to our backend and its AI and search providers, process it, and return the result to you.

That permission is as narrow as the operation. As the Privacy Policy describes, the service has no database: your image exists in the backend's memory for the length of the request and is discarded when the analysis returns. It is never written to disk, never attached to a profile, and never used to train an AI model. Your analysis history is stored on your device, not ours.

You are responsible for having the right to submit what you submit. Most personal use of a photographed page for research falls comfortably within ordinary copyright exceptions, but that judgement is yours to make about your own use, and we make no representation about it.

Sources and third-party content

The sources SourceTrace returns are pages published by other people. We don't host them, control them, or endorse them, and their accuracy, availability, and terms are their publishers' business, not ours. Titles and short extracts are shown so you can judge whether a source is worth opening; the copyright in that material stays with whoever owns it. Following a link takes you off the service and onto someone else's terms.

Where a claim leads to a Wikipedia article, the service will normally cite the underlying source Wikipedia's own footnote uses rather than Wikipedia itself. That footnote is selected automatically and may be the wrong one for your claim.

Our intellectual property

SourceTrace — the apps, the backend, the design, and the name — is © 2026 Armen Changelian, and these terms grant you no rights in it beyond using the service as intended. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or reverse-engineer it, except where that restriction is unenforceable under the law that applies to you.

The apps include open-source software licensed by its authors on their own terms, which prevail over this section for those components. The full notices are reproduced in the app under About → Acknowledgements.

Results you generate are yours to use. The exports the app produces are built for that purpose, and they record only what was actually retrieved — no author, publisher, or date is invented to fill out a citation.

Availability, changes, and ending access

SourceTrace is provided free, by one person, and depends on paid third-party APIs. We may change, limit, suspend, or discontinue any part of it — including the free tier and any specific feature — at any time and without notice. There is no service level, no uptime commitment, and no obligation to preserve anything. Your history lives on your device, so it survives anything that happens to the service; nothing else will.

We may restrict or withdraw your access if you use the service in a way these terms prohibit, or in a way that threatens its cost or stability.

No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", with all faults and without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we do not warrant that the claims extracted from a page are accurate, that the sources returned are relevant, authoritative, or correctly characterised as supporting or disputing anything, that any publication is correctly identified, or that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, reputation, or goodwill, arising out of or relating to your use of the service — including any reliance you place on a claim, a verdict, a source, or an export it produced. This applies whatever the theory of liability, and even if we have been advised that such damages are possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for it in the twelve months before the claim arose, or twenty US dollars.

Some jurisdictions don't allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that's true of yours, the exclusions and limits above apply only to the extent permitted, and nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from content you submit to the service or from your use of it in breach of these terms.

The iOS app and Apple

These terms are between you and us, not between you and Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content, and has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for it. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price, if any; to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app. Apple is not responsible for addressing any claim relating to the app, including product liability claims, any claim that it fails to conform to a legal requirement, and claims under consumer protection or similar legislation. Apple is not responsible for investigating, defending, settling, or discharging any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual property rights. You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as terrorist-supporting, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and, on your acceptance, will have the right to enforce them against you.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts will have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your own country of residence.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the revised terms. If a change is one you don't accept, stop using the service.

Severability

If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, that part is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force. Our not enforcing a provision isn't a waiver of it.

Contact

Questions about these terms: armen.changelian@gmail.com