Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and Northstar Keep Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17140276), registered office 49 High Street, Sutton Courtenay, Abingdon OX14 4AT.

By creating an account, or by contributing to a memorial, you agree to these terms.

What Northstar Keep is

Northstar Keep lets you create a memorial page and invite other people to add photographs, videos, voice recordings and written memories to it.

Most memorials are for a person who has died. You can also create one for yourself while you are alive, and you can create one for an animal. What you cannot do is create a memorial for another living person.

If you are creating a memorial for yourself, someone else can help you do it. The account should be in your name and use your email address, but there is no expectation that you do all the work yourself.

The person who creates a memorial is its steward. Stewards decide who can see the memorial and whether contributions appear straight away or wait for their approval.

Your account

You must be 18 or over to create an account.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself. Tell us at hello@northstarkeep.com if you think someone else has access to your account.

Give us accurate information when you register, and keep your email address up to date. It is how we reach you.

If you are a steward

When you create a memorial you take on some responsibility for what appears on it.

• –Only create a memorial for a person who has died, for an animal, or for yourself. Do not create one for another person who is alive, though you may help someone create their own
• –Where the memorial is for someone else, only create it if you have a genuine connection to them or the agreement of someone who does
• –Choose who to invite, and share the link carefully. Anyone with a link to a link-only memorial can see it and contribute to it
• –Review contributions where your memorial is set to hold them for approval
• –Remove anything that should not be there
• –Take care with information about living people, particularly children, and particularly anything about someone’s health, religion or personal life

You are not expected to police your memorial around the clock. But if you become aware of something on it that breaks these terms, remove it or tell us.

If you are a contributor

You do not need an account to contribute to a memorial. You do need to follow these terms.

By adding a photograph, video, recording or message to a memorial you confirm that:

• –You have the right to share it
• –It does not break any of the rules below
• –It does not show a living person in a private, intimate or distressing situation
• –Where a living person is identifiable in it, you have no reason to think they would object to it being shared with the people who can see this memorial

If you appear in something someone else has added to a memorial, you can ask for it to be taken down. Contact the steward, or email hello@northstarkeep.com.

What you may not do

You must not upload, post, share or link to anything that:

• –Is child sexual abuse material, or sexualises a child in any way
• –Encourages, assists or glorifies suicide or serious self-harm
• –Encourages or supports terrorism
• –Harasses, threatens, stalks or abuses any person, living or dead
• –Incites hatred against people on grounds of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender reassignment or any other protected characteristic
• –Is an intimate image of someone shared without their consent
• –Is extreme pornography, or is sexual content of any kind
• –Is fraudulent, or solicits money on a false basis
• –Breaches someone else’s copyright or other rights
• –Is otherwise unlawful

You must also not:

• –Use a memorial as general file storage. Northstar Keep is for remembering a person or an animal. Uploading content unrelated to that purpose is a breach of these terms, whatever the content is
• –Create a memorial for another living person. You may create one for yourself in advance, but not for anyone else who is alive
• –Create a memorial for a person you have invented, or present a living person as having died
• –Impersonate anyone
• –Attempt to access memorials you have not been invited to, including by guessing or altering share links
• –Attempt to break, overload, probe or circumvent the security of the service
• –Use automated tools to scrape, copy or bulk-download content
• –Resell or commercially exploit the service

Reporting something

Every memorial has a report control. Use it if you see something that breaks these terms. You do not need an account to report, and you do not need to explain yourself at length.

You can also email hello@northstarkeep.com.

We look at every report. We will not always be able to tell you the outcome, and there are situations where we are not permitted to.

What we do about content

We do not read private memorials. We do not browse them, and we do not use their contents for any purpose beyond showing them to the people you have shared them with.

We will access content on a memorial, whatever its privacy setting, where:

• –Someone has reported content on it
• –We have reasonable grounds to suspect the service is being used unlawfully or in breach of these terms
• –We are required to by law, or by a court, regulator or law enforcement body
• –It is unavoidable in order to fix a technical fault, in which case we look at as little as possible

Where we find content that breaks these terms, we may remove it, hide it, suspend the memorial, or suspend the account, without notice.

Preserving content. Where content is the subject of a report, an investigation, or a legal obligation, we may retain it rather than delete it, and may retain it after a memorial or account has been suspended or closed. We do this so that evidence is not destroyed. Anything retained is kept securely, is not accessible to any user, and is kept only for as long as required.

Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close an account, or remove a memorial, where these terms have been broken.

For most breaches we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to put it right.

For serious breaches we will act immediately and without notice. Serious breaches include anything involving child sexual abuse material, content encouraging suicide or serious self-harm, terrorism, threats of violence, or any other illegal content. In these cases there is no notice period, no opportunity to remedy, and no refund of any amount paid.

Where we are required to report content to law enforcement or to the Internet Watch Foundation, we will do so, and we will not tell you where doing so would prejudice an investigation.

You can close your account at any time from your account settings, or by emailing us. We will delete your personal data in line with our Privacy policy. Closing your account may also remove memorials you administer, so download your content first, and hand a memorial over to someone else if you want it to continue.

Content you upload

You keep ownership of everything you upload: photos, video, recordings, text and anything else you add. We do not claim it, sell it, licence it to anyone else, or use it to train anything.

You give us a limited licence to store your content, display it to the people entitled to see it, make backup copies of it, and otherwise process it as needed to provide the service. We use it for nothing else.

That licence lasts while your content is on the service and ends when it is deleted, subject to backup copies expiring on their normal schedule and to the preservation provisions above.

You are responsible for making sure you have the right to upload and share what you add. Please do not upload content belonging to someone else without their permission.

Paid plans

Creating a memorial is free. We also offer paid plans:

• –Keep, a subscription billed monthly or yearly, which unlocks more storage and additional features.
• –Keep Forever, a single one-off payment for permanent access to those features, with no recurring billing.

What each plan includes and costs is shown at the point of purchase.

Payments are handled by Paddle (Paddle.com Market Limited), who act as merchant of record and seller. Your purchase is also subject to Paddle's buyer terms. Paddle processes the payment and issues your receipt. We do not see or store your card details.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account settings or by emailing us, and we will email you before a renewal is taken.

If a subscription lapses. We will not delete anything. After a 30-day grace period, new uploads to affected memorials are blocked. Everything already there stays, stays visible to the people it was visible to, and can be exported. Restart the subscription and uploads resume.

Refunds. Our refund policy explains when you can get your money back: see Refunds. We do not refund where an account has been closed for a serious breach of these terms.

Keep Forever. This is a one-off payment for a single memorial, and our commitment is to keep that memorial available for as long as Northstar Keep operates. We cannot promise the company will exist forever, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What we commit to is this: if Northstar Keep ever ceases to operate, we will give Keep Forever holders as much notice as we are able, and a full export of everything on their memorial in a usable format.

What happens to a memorial over time

A memorial outlasts the person who set it up. If a steward dies, or can no longer manage a memorial, it can be handed to someone else rather than lost. Contact us and we will help.

Privacy

How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Our responsibility to you

We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill.

We may update or change features over time. We will try to give reasonable notice of significant changes that affect how you use the service.

We aim to keep the service available and running well, but we cannot guarantee uninterrupted access. There may be periods of maintenance or unexpected downtime. We will keep disruption to a minimum and tell you about planned outages where we can.

We take backups, but you should keep your own copies of anything irreplaceable. The export tools are there for that.

We are not responsible for content uploaded by users. Where content breaches these terms, our responsibility is to act on it once we know about it, which is what the reporting and moderation provisions above are for.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, our total liability to you in connection with the service is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or £100.

If you are a consumer, you have statutory rights that these terms do not affect.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The date at the top shows the most recent version. Where a change is significant we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

Law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your local courts.

Contact

hello@northstarkeep.com

Northstar Keep Ltd, 49 High Street, Sutton Courtenay, Abingdon OX14 4AT.