Terms and Conditions
Last updated: 29 August 2026
Welcome to Ceylon Chat. By creating an account or using ceylonchat.com and its related apps (the "Service"), you agree to these Terms and Conditions. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.
1. Eligibility
You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age required in your country) to use the Service. By using the Service, you confirm that you meet this requirement.
2. Your Account
You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and password, and for all activity that occurs under your account. Notify us immediately of any unauthorized use of your account.
3. Your Content and Intellectual Property
You keep ownership of everything you post on Ceylon Chat. We do not claim it, we do not sell it, and we do not licence it to anyone else. By posting, you grant Ceylon Chat a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy, display, adapt for formatting and thumbnails, and distribute that content for the sole purpose of operating and promoting the Service. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except that copies may remain in backups for a limited period, and copies another user has already downloaded or re-shared are outside our control.
When you post anything on Ceylon Chat, you promise us that:
- You own the content, or you have the permission of whoever does.
- Posting it does not infringe anyone's copyright, trade mark, database right, moral right, right of privacy or right of publicity.
- You have the consent of anyone identifiable in a photograph or video where consent is required.
- You have the right to grant Ceylon Chat the licence described above.
- The content does not breach these Terms, our Community Guidelines, or any law that applies to you.
Please read this part carefully, because it is where most people get into trouble without meaning to. A photograph belongs to the person who took it, not to the person in it and not to the person who found it. Images taken from Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp groups, news websites, stock libraries, film or television, music artwork, or another business's website are owned by someone, and posting them here without permission is copyright infringement even if you found them freely available, even if you credit the source, even if you are not making money from it, and even if you delete them afterwards. The same applies to song recordings, video clips, articles, designs and logos. If you did not make it and you do not have permission, do not upload it.
Businesses: photographs taken for you by a photographer usually still belong to the photographer unless your contract says otherwise. Product images supplied by a manufacturer or distributor usually come with limits on how they may be used. Check before you upload them to your business page.
Content posted by other people on Ceylon Chat belongs to them. You may not copy, download, re-publish, scrape or reuse it outside the Service without their permission. The Ceylon Chat name, logo, page designs, software and database are owned by Ceylon Chat and may not be copied or used without our written permission.
4. Our Role: We Host, We Do Not Publish
Ceylon Chat is a platform. The posts, comments, photographs, videos, listings, business pages, reviews and messages on it are created and published by the people who post them, not by Ceylon Chat. We do not write them, we do not commission them, we do not review them before they appear, and we do not adopt them as our own. Responsibility for a piece of content, and any legal liability attaching to it, rests with the person who posted it.
We do not monitor everything that is posted, and we are not obliged to. What we do instead is act: we operate reporting tools throughout the Service, a dedicated copyright notice process, and a complaints route for reviews, and we deal with what is reported to us. When we are told that specific content is unlawful or infringing, we look at it and, where the report is justified, we remove or restrict it promptly.
We want to be straightforward about why this matters rather than simply disclaiming responsibility. The protections that hosting providers have in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States are conditional: they apply to a host that does not have actual knowledge of unlawful content and that acts expeditiously to remove it once it does. A platform that ignores notices loses that protection. This is why our notice and takedown process is a real, staffed process and not a formality, and why we ask you to report anything you believe is infringing rather than assume we have seen it.
Removing content is not an admission that it was unlawful, and leaving content up is not a statement that we endorse it or that we have verified it.
5. Acceptable Use and Community Standards
You agree not to use the Service to post unlawful, harassing, hateful, or sexually explicit content involving minors, to impersonate others, to spam or scam other users, to upload malware, or to attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or other users' accounts. We may remove content or suspend accounts that violate these Terms or our Community Guidelines, which set out the detailed rules for posts, comments, Marketplace, and advertiser content.
6. Marketplace
Marketplace lets users list items for other users to buy and sell directly with each other. Ceylon Chat is not a party to any transaction between a buyer and seller, does not process payments for Marketplace transactions on-platform, and does not guarantee the condition, safety, legality, or delivery of any listed item. Buyers and sellers are each responsible for exercising their own judgment, agreeing on payment and delivery outside the Service, and complying with applicable law.
The following items may never be listed on Marketplace:
- Weapons, firearms, ammunition, or explosives
- Illegal drugs or controlled substances
- Counterfeit or replica goods
- Stolen property
- Live animals
- Adult content
Listings that violate these rules may be removed, and repeat violations may result in loss of Marketplace access or account suspension. See our Community Guidelines for the full enforcement process.
7. Business Profiles and Advertising
Ceylon Chat offers business profiles and a self-serve advertising system where advertisers fund and run their own campaigns on the Service. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring their content complies with these Terms, our Community Guidelines, and applicable law. Ads may not target users based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or other protected characteristics in a discriminatory way, and may not advertise illegal goods, weapons, controlled substances, deceptive or misleading claims, or adult content. We reserve the right to reject or remove any advertisement, and to suspend an advertiser account, at our discretion.
8. Reviews and Ratings
Anyone with a Ceylon Chat account may review a published business page, one review per account per business. A review must describe your own genuine experience of that business. You may edit or withdraw your own review at any time.
The following are not permitted, and a review may be removed for any of them: reviewing a business you have no genuine experience of; reviewing your own business, or one you own, work for, or are connected to; reviewing a competitor; accepting or offering payment, goods, discounts or any other incentive in exchange for leaving, changing or withdrawing a review; abuse, threats, hate speech or harassment; publishing another person's private information; content that is not about the goods or service; advertising, links or spam; and demanding anything from a business in return for changing or removing a review.
Business owners: you may reply publicly to any review of your page, and that reply is shown beneath it. You cannot edit, hide or delete a review of your business, and Ceylon Chat will not remove one on request. You may appeal a review on one of the specific grounds listed in our Reviews Help article — for example that the reviewer was never a customer, that it states something provably untrue, that it is abusive, or that someone demanded something to remove it. An appeal is decided by a person against those grounds, and you will be told the outcome and the reason for it either way.
What will not be removed: a review that describes a real experience and is simply negative, blunt, one-sided, or damaging to your business. That is not a gap in the policy. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which came into force on 6 April 2025, suppressing or concealing genuine consumer reviews is a banned unfair commercial practice in the United Kingdom, and the Competition and Markets Authority can fine a business up to 10% of its global turnover for it. Ceylon Chat will not do it, and businesses that pressure customers to remove honest reviews may have their page taken down.
The star rating shown to search engines is calculated only from reviews visible on the page, and is only published once a business has at least three of them. We do not sell rating improvements, we do not offer removal as a paid service, and paying for advertising on Ceylon Chat has no effect on your reviews, your rating, or the outcome of an appeal.
9. Verification Badges
Some accounts carry a badge beside the name. There are three, and they do not mean the same thing.
- A blue tick means Ceylon Chat has checked that the account belongs to the real person named on it.
- A gold tick means Ceylon Chat has checked that the account speaks for the business or organisation named on it.
- A purple star means the account holds a paid Ceylon Chat subscription. Nothing about the account holder has been checked. It is drawn as a star rather than a tick on purpose, so that a mark somebody has paid for is never mistaken for one that means we verified who they are.
Blue and gold are free and are not for sale. They cannot be bought, and buying advertising, a subscription or anything else on Ceylon Chat has no effect on whether you receive one. Anyone may apply from Settings; a person reads every application and you are told the outcome and the reason for it either way. A badge is granted at our discretion and may be removed if the basis for it turns out to be false, if it was obtained by misrepresentation, or if the account is suspended.
The purple star is not on sale as at the date above, and no part of it can be purchased today. If and when it is offered, it will be sold on its own terms with the cancellation and refund rights that consumer law gives you, and this section will be updated before that happens.
What a badge is not: it is not a recommendation, a guarantee of anything the account posts, or a statement that the person or business is trustworthy, solvent or good at what they do. It answers one narrow question — are they who they say they are — and nothing else. Treat a badged account with the same ordinary caution you would treat any other.
10. Contacting People Through WhatsApp
A member or a business may choose to publish a WhatsApp number, and pages carry buttons to message that number or to share the page. Using one of those buttons takes you out of Ceylon Chat and into WhatsApp, which is operated by Meta under its own terms.
That has consequences worth stating plainly. We do not send the message, we cannot see it, and we hold no record of the conversation. Our reporting, blocking and moderation tools do not reach into WhatsApp: if somebody troubles you there, you must block or report them inside WhatsApp as well as here. Publishing a number is optional, is never required, and can be undone at any time. A number published on Ceylon Chat is for contacting that person or business about what they are here for — using one to send marketing, to add somebody to a group without their agreement, to harass them, or to pass their number on to anybody else, is a breach of these Terms and of our Community Guidelines, and we will act on it here even though the conduct happened elsewhere.
Accounts belonging to under-eighteens cannot publish a phone number, a WhatsApp number or a personal website, whatever privacy setting is chosen. This is enforced by the Service and is not something a member can switch off.
11. Points and Referral Program
Ceylon Chat offers a points and referral program as a promotional feature: you earn points for actions such as joining the Service or referring new users. Points have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money, goods, or services — as of the date above, there is no redemption mechanism, and points exist solely to track your activity and standing within the program. We may introduce redemption options, change how points are earned, or modify or discontinue the program entirely at any time and at our discretion.
12. Third-Party Services
The Service allows you to sign in using third-party providers such as Google and Facebook, to receive verification codes via WhatsApp or SMS through Twilio, and to send or receive payments related to creator payouts and advertiser billing through Stripe and Stripe Connect. Your use of those third-party services is subject to their own terms and privacy policies.
13. Copyright: Reporting Infringement and What We Remove
If you own copyright in something and it has been posted on Ceylon Chat without your permission, you can tell us and we will deal with it. You do not need a Ceylon Chat account to file a notice. The form is on our Copyright Policy page and asks for the things a valid notice has to contain: who you are and how to contact you, what the work is, a link to exactly where it appears on Ceylon Chat, a statement made in good faith that the use is not authorised, a statement that the information is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them, and your signature.
When a notice is upheld, we remove only what the notice identifies. Specifically:
- If one photograph in a post of several is infringing, we remove that photograph. The rest of the post, and its comments and reactions, stay up.
- We remove a whole post only where the post itself is the infringement — for example every image in it is infringing, or the text is copied.
- A profile picture or cover photo is cleared on its own. Removing one does not touch the rest of the account.
- We do not remove or disable an entire profile because of a single upheld notice. An account is only suspended under the repeat infringer rule below.
Repeat infringers. A member whose content is removed on an upheld copyright notice receives a strike. At three strikes the account is suspended. This is a real policy that we apply, not a statement of intent — under section 512(i) of the US Copyright Act, a service that does not adopt and reasonably implement a repeat infringer policy loses its protection entirely.
Counter-notices. If your content was removed and you believe that was wrong — you own it, you had a licence, or the use was permitted by law, for example fair dealing for criticism, review, quotation, news reporting, parody or pastiche — you can file a counter-notice on the same page. We pass it to the person who complained. If they do not tell us within fourteen days that they have begun legal proceedings, we may restore the content.
Misuse of the process. The statements in a notice are made under penalty of perjury. Knowingly claiming rights you do not hold, or misrepresenting that material is infringing, can make you liable to the uploader and to Ceylon Chat for the resulting damages and legal costs. We keep a record of every notice, every counter-notice and every decision, including the reason.
File a copyright notice or counter-notice
14. Termination
We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms, engage in fraudulent or harmful activity, accumulate three upheld copyright strikes, or where we are required to by law. You may delete your account at any time from Settings.
15. Backups, Data Loss and Keeping Your Own Copies
We would rather tell you exactly what we do with your content than leave you to guess, so this section says it plainly.
Ceylon Chat is backed up. The database holding your account, posts, comments and messages is backed up daily, and we can restore it to an earlier moment in time covering up to the previous four weeks. Photographs and other uploads are backed up on their own schedule, daily, with weekly copies kept for a month. We test that a restore actually works and produces real data, rather than assuming that it would, because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope and not a safeguard.
What we cannot promise is perfection, and no online service honestly can. Hardware fails, providers have outages, software has bugs, and a mistake made in good faith can still delete something. Backups reduce how much is lost and how long it takes to come back; they do not make loss impossible. There may be a gap between your most recent action and the most recent backup, and something created or changed inside that gap may not be recoverable.
So, plainly: Ceylon Chat is a good place to share things and a poor place to keep the only copy of something you could not bear to lose. Keep your own copies of photographs and anything else that matters to you. You can download a copy of your account data at any time from Settings, and we would encourage you to do it occasionally rather than only when you need it.
Deleting is meant to work. If you delete a post, or your account, we act on that: the content goes, and uploaded files that belong to it are removed from our storage as well. That is deliberate and it is not reversible. Copies may persist in backups for a limited period until those backups age out, and copies that another member has already downloaded or re-shared are outside our control.
If content of yours disappears and you think that is our doing, tell us. We will look into it, we will tell you what we find, and where we can restore it we will. If we ever lose data in a way that affects you, you will hear it from us, including what happened and what we were able to recover. We will not quietly hope you do not notice.
Where loss or corruption of your content is caused by our failure to use reasonable care and skill, we are responsible for it and section 18 applies. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for content that cannot be recovered from a backup, for loss caused by your own deletion of content or of your account, or for loss caused by a failure of a third-party provider we rely on to host the Service.
Nothing in this section reduces our obligations under data protection law, including our duty to keep your personal information secure and to be able to restore access to it in good time after an incident. If you use the Service as a consumer, your legal rights are unaffected.
16. Disclaimers
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We do not guarantee that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that content posted by other users is accurate, lawful or safe, or that any business, seller, advertiser or member you deal with through the Service is who they say they are. Any dealing you have with another user — a Marketplace sale, a booking, a payment, a job, a meeting — is between you and them.
17. Your Indemnity to Ceylon Chat
You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Ceylon Chat, its owners, operators, employees, contractors and agents from and against any claim, demand, investigation, loss, liability, damage, fine, settlement, or reasonable legal cost and expense that arises out of or in connection with:
- Content you post, upload, send or share through the Service, including any allegation that it infringes copyright, trade mark, design right, database right, moral rights, privacy, confidence or any other right;
- Your breach of these Terms, our Community Guidelines, or any other policy that forms part of them;
- Your breach of any law or regulation that applies to you, including consumer, advertising, data protection and product safety law;
- Any transaction, dealing or dispute between you and another user, buyer, seller, advertiser or business on the Service;
- Any misuse by you of the copyright notice or counter-notice process, or of our reporting and appeals tools.
We will tell you promptly about any claim covered by this section, and you agree not to settle a claim in a way that imposes any obligation or admission on Ceylon Chat without our written agreement. This obligation continues after your account is closed.
So that this is clear rather than merely comforting: an indemnity is a promise between you and us. It does not stop a rights holder or anyone else from bringing a claim against Ceylon Chat, and it is worth only what the person who gave it is able to pay. It means that where a claim against us is caused by what you posted, we can look to you for the cost of it. It is not a substitute for you having the right to post what you post.
18. Limitation of Liability
Ceylon Chat is not liable for content created by its users, or for loss or damage arising from your dealings with other users, from content you relied on, or from your inability to access the Service. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, data or anticipated savings, however caused. Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you in connection with the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred pounds sterling.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If you use the Service as a consumer, you keep all the rights the law gives you, and nothing here affects them.
19. Related Policies
20. Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.
21. Contact Us
If you have questions about these Terms, contact us at legal@ceylonchat.com.