The QCOS Online · Effective September 3, 2026 · Last updated September 3, 2026
The short version: The QCOS Online is an invite-only application for adults. You need an invitation and a Google Account to use it. Your desk is yours and you moderate it absolutely; the invitation that brought you here traces back to someone who vouched for you. Rooms are end-to-end encrypted, so we cannot police what happens inside them — but files you upload to our servers are not encrypted, and those we can and will remove when they break the rules or the law. Credits and stickers are a licence to use features, not property or currency, and are not redeemable for cash.
1. The agreement
These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Quarantine Collective ("we", "us", "our"), the operator of The QCOS Online (the "Service"). By redeeming an invitation, signing in, or using the Service in any way, you accept these Terms and the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.
We may update these Terms. Material changes will be posted here with a new date and notified to account holders by email or in the App at least 14 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the revised Terms; if you do not, you may delete your account.
2. What the Service is
The QCOS Online is a desktop application, with an accompanying viewer web client and supporting servers, in which one member ("broadcaster") works at a virtual desk — reading, annotating, taking notes, speaking — while a small invited audience watches and interacts lightly. Speech is transcribed to text on the speaker's own device and re-synthesised as an audibly synthetic voice on each listener's device. No microphone audio, video, or screen capture is transmitted at any point.
The Service is deliberately small: rooms hold a few dozen participants, interactions are rate-budgeted, and there is no open signup or public directory. The Service is currently in a closed alpha and is provided as such.
3. Eligibility
You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction if that is higher, and you must hold a valid invitation. You must not be barred from using the Service under the laws applying to you, and you must not have been previously removed from the Service. Accounts are personal: you may not share, sell, or transfer your account, and you are responsible for everything done through it.
4. Accounts and sign-in
Sign-in is through Google Sign-In. You are responsible for the security of the Google Account you use and must notify us promptly at b@arhizo.me if you believe your account has been compromised. You may revoke the Service's access to your Google Account at any time; doing so ends your ability to sign in. You may delete your account at any time as described in the Privacy Policy.
The information we receive from Google, and how it is used, is described in section 3 of the Privacy Policy. We request only basic profile and email scopes and cannot access your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, or Contacts.
5. Invitations and roles
Access is invite-only. Each invitation carries a role — broadcaster, guest, or viewer — and each is traceable to the member who issued it. Issuing an invitation is a form of vouching: if the person you invite abuses the Service, it may affect your own standing, up to and including loss of your ability to invite others or removal from the Service. Invitations may carry expiry dates and use limits, may not be sold, and may be revoked if obtained or used in breach of these Terms.
Roles determine what you can do. Broadcasters own and control a desk. Guests may read open books, highlight, place notes in a desk's inbox, and place stickers in designated margins. Viewers may watch, point, and interact within the limits the desk owner sets. Nobody may move a desk owner's objects, open their drawers, or exceed the interaction budget.
6. Acceptable use
This acceptable use policy is short because the Service is small and its rules are enforced socially. You agree not to:
Harass, threaten, stalk, defame, or incite violence against anyone, in a room or through any Service feature.
Upload, share, or distribute material that is illegal where you or we are located, including child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, and content promoting terrorism. Any such material will be removed and reported to the appropriate authorities.
Upload or distribute material you do not have the right to distribute. See section 7.
Impersonate another person or misrepresent your affiliation with anyone.
Circumvent, disable, or attempt to defeat the invitation system, the interaction budget, rate limits, encryption, the transparency log, or any other technical protection.
Probe, scan, overload, or interfere with the relay servers, the blob store, or the infrastructure of any other member.
Use automation, scraping, or bulk-download tools against the Service, or operate an unauthorised bot participant in a room. Agent participants are permitted only where a desk owner has admitted them.
Sell, trade, or transfer accounts, invitations, or interaction budget, or use the Service to advertise, solicit, or spam.
Record, republish, or redistribute another member's room, notebooks, speech, or desk contents outside the room without that member's consent.
Use the Service for any unlawful purpose, or to help anyone else do any of the above.
Desk owners may set additional rules for their own desks. Those rules are binding on the people in that room.
7. Your content, copyright, and takedowns
7.1 Ownership
You keep all rights in what you create: your notebooks, annotations, desk arrangements, uploads, and speech. We claim no ownership over any of it.
7.2 The licence you give us
You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, transmit, cache, and display your content only so far as is necessary to operate the Service for you and the members of your rooms. This licence exists for that operational purpose alone, and ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to the retention periods in the Privacy Policy. We do not use your content to train models, and we could not use encrypted room content for anything even if we wished to.
7.3 Copyright: what you may upload and read aloud
Two distinct restrictions apply, and they are real limits on the product rather than boilerplate:
Distribution of files. Sending a copyrighted file to the members of a room is distribution. You may upload and share only material that is in the public domain, that you own or are licensed to distribute, or that you may lawfully share in the amount shared. For everything else the Service transmits only your reading position and highlight ranges — your audience follows along in their own copy, and the file itself does not leave your machine.
Reading aloud. Reading a copyrighted work aloud to an audience is a public performance. Confine it to public-domain works, works you are licensed to perform, or excerpts of a length permitted by fair dealing or fair use where you are.
You are responsible for your compliance with these restrictions and you represent that you have the rights necessary for what you upload and perform.
7.4 Takedowns
Files uploaded to our servers are stored unencrypted so that they can be shared, and are the one place where we can act on infringing or illegal content. If you believe material on our servers infringes your copyright, send a notice to b@arhizo.me identifying yourself, the work, the material complained of and where it can be found, a statement of your good-faith belief that the use is unauthorised, and a statement that your notice is accurate. We operate under Canada's notice-and-notice regime and will forward valid notices to the member concerned; we also honour notices in the form required by the United States DMCA, including counter-notices. We remove material that is illegal or clearly infringing, we may scan uploads by hash against known illegal material, and we maintain an upload allowlist. Repeat infringers lose their accounts.
8. Moderation and encryption
Rooms are end-to-end encrypted and our relay server cannot decrypt them. The consequence is stated openly rather than buried: we cannot see inside a room we host, and platform-level moderation of room contents is impossible by design. This is a choice, and moderation is arranged around it:
Desk owners have absolute authority in their own rooms — kick, ban, mute, hide any object, close the desk — instantly and without appeal.
Invitations carry responsibility upward. Every member traces to whoever vouched for them, and bad behaviour costs the voucher standing.
The interaction budget rate-limits spam by construction, not by policy.
We retain one platform-level lever over rooms: a desk can be delisted from any directory, though never read.
We can and do act on the unencrypted blob store, where uploaded files live, as described in section 7.4.
If you are harmed by another member's conduct, contact the desk owner first; contact us at b@arhizo.me where the matter concerns uploaded files, invitation abuse, or conduct that warrants removing an account entirely.
9. Credits, stickers, and payments
Credits are a limited licence, not property or currency. They have no monetary value outside the Service, cannot be exchanged for cash, and are not a deposit, stored-value instrument, or money transmission of any kind. They flow one way: you may buy them and spend them; you may not cash them out.
Stickers are a licence to display an item within the Service. Some may be traded or gifted between members where the Service supports it; a sticker's provenance record proves when it was placed and by whom, but confers no ownership of any artwork. Trading is between members and we take no cut of secondary trades.
Interaction budget is never for sale. Attention in a room cannot be purchased, and we will not build a mechanism to sell it.
Payments are processed by Stripe, with us as merchant of record. Prices are shown before purchase and are exclusive of taxes unless stated. You authorise us and Stripe to charge your chosen payment method.
Refunds. Credit purchases are refundable within 14 days of purchase to the extent the credits are unspent, and we will honour refunds required by consumer protection law where you live. Spent credits, and stickers you have placed or traded, are not refundable. Request a refund at b@arhizo.me.
If your account is terminated for breach of these Terms, unspent credits are forfeited. If we discontinue the Service, we will give notice and refund unspent credits.
Chargebacks. Initiating a chargeback rather than contacting us first may result in suspension while the matter is resolved.
10. Creators and payouts
If you make and sell sticker packs or receive patronage, payouts are handled through Stripe Connect, and you must complete Stripe's onboarding, including identity and tax verification. You are responsible for your own taxes; payouts may trigger tax reporting (T4A in Canada, 1099-K in the United States). You warrant that you own or are licensed to sell what you sell, and you grant us a licence to display and distribute it within the Service. We take a stated cut of primary sales and nothing from secondary trades. We may remove items that breach these Terms or the law.
11. Our intellectual property
The Service — its software, design, artwork, and name — belongs to us and our licensors. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the App for its intended purpose. You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, decompile, resell, or create derivative works of the Service except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits it despite this restriction, or where a component is distributed under an open-source licence whose terms then govern that component.
12. Availability and changes
The Service is operated by a small independent group and is in closed alpha. We do not promise uptime, and we may change, suspend, or discontinue features at any time. Where we discontinue the Service entirely, we will give reasonable notice, provide a way to export your desk and notebooks, and refund unspent credits.
13. Suspension and termination
You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your account, immediately and without refund of spent amounts, if you breach these Terms, if your conduct exposes us or other members to legal risk, if the invitation that brought you here was obtained improperly, or if required by law. Where circumstances allow, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond. On termination, your right to use the Service ends; sections 7.1, 7.4, 11, and 14 through 18 survive.
14. Disclaimers
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that speech transcription or synthesis will be accurate, or that any content will be preserved. Speech in the Service is transcribed and re-synthesised by machine: what listeners hear is a reconstruction and may differ from what a speaker said. Do not rely on it as a record of anyone's words.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
15. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, data, goodwill, or content, arising out of or relating to the Service. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or fifty Canadian dollars. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
16. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising out of content you upload or perform, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of the law or of anyone's rights through the Service.
17. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Québec and the federal laws of Canada applicable there, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The courts of the judicial district of Montréal, Québec have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer you may also bring proceedings in the courts of your place of residence, and nothing here deprives you of the protection of mandatory consumer law where you live. Please contact us first at b@arhizo.me; most disputes can be settled that way.
Les parties ont demandé que ces conditions soient rédigées en anglais. The parties have requested that these Terms be drawn up in English.
18. General terms
These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in force. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor operator on notice to you. Neither party is liable for failures caused by events beyond its reasonable control.