- Terms of service
- Privacy notice
- Your freedom matters
- talk to us:
- reddit
-
twitter
- piotr.wasik [at] gmail.com
Version 2 · Effective from 2026-09-06
Buboflash is a tool for learning from things you read. These terms say what we promise you, what you promise us, and — the part that matters most — who can see what you make.
They are written to be read. Where something is a real legal limit rather than a preference, it says so.
1.1 Buboflash (buboflash.eu, the web extension, and any downloadable programs — together
"the service") is written and run by Piotr Wasik, of 75 Wilmot Street, London E2 0BT,
United Kingdom (piotr.wasik@gmail.com). "We" and "us" mean Piotr Wasik and anyone working with
him.
1.2 Using the service means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use it.
1.3 You can stop at any time, without giving a reason or notice. So can we — though if we ever discontinue the service we will give you reasonable warning and a way to export your material and your learning history first.
1.4 You must be at least 13 to have an account.
1.5 Your account is yours to look after: keep your password to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else has been using it.
2.1 You own what you write. Cards, annotations, notes, articles — they are yours. We claim no ownership of them.
2.2 You own your learning history. Every repetition, every grade, every time you read something. We do not claim copyright in it, and you may export it and use it anywhere, for any purpose — including in a competing product, including commercially. There is no lock-in here and we do not want any.
2.3 We own the software, the scheduling model, the site design, and everything else that is not your content or your history. Nothing here gives you rights to it.
2.4 To run the service at all, you give us permission to store what you put on it, to process it as running the service requires — indexing it for search, rendering it, extracting text from documents, keeping backups — and to show it to the people you chose; for material that is public, to display it publicly. That permission lasts as long as the material is on the service and ends when it is erased (6.3). It is not exclusive, and it does not stop you doing anything else with your own work.
2.5 Making something public and sharing it with named people are different acts, and carry different permissions. What you make public is offered to everyone under a licence, and which licence depends on where the words came from. Material you wrote yourself goes out under CC BY-SA 4.0 — the same licence Wikipedia uses. Material cut from someone else's page goes out under that source's own licence, whatever it is — a card made from CC BY-SA text is CC BY-SA, a card made from a GFDL page is GFDL, each with the attribution its licence requires — because licences like these attach to adaptations, and we cannot swap one for another. Where the source is one we have not verified, publishing is your judgement under section 4 — you are saying the source permits it — and the card carries the source's terms, whatever they are: we name no licence for it, only where it came from. See Your Freedom Matters for why. Sharing with named people is not publication and grants no licence: it lets those people view and learn from the material within the service, and nothing more. They do not acquire the right to copy it out or pass it on, and you can withdraw the access you gave.
This is the section worth reading.
3.1 Documents you upload are private. A PDF you upload is visible to you alone until you choose otherwise. You can share it with named people — and that is the only choice there is: a document cannot be made public on Buboflash, and neither can the cards cut from it. Sharing is your decision and never happens on its own.
When you share a document with named people you can also choose to let them see the annotations and cards you made from it. Sharing a document never does that by itself — your notes on it stay yours until you say otherwise, and you can keep any individual note to yourself even then.
3.2 Cards and annotations you make from someone else's material are private by default. If you highlight a paragraph of a book or a webpage and turn it into a card, that card carries the author's words, so it stays between you and the service unless you deliberately change it.
3.3 Cards you write yourself follow your own setting. A question you wrote from your own head carries nobody else's expression, so it is treated as your work — because it is.
3.4 Material from openly-licensed sources we have verified is public by default, because the licence positively allows it. Where you annotate such a source — the article text of Wikipedia and its sister projects, to begin with — your card is public unless you keep it to yourself, and it carries the same licence and the attribution the licence requires. This is where Buboflash is meant to be collaborative.
3.5 Images and audio cannot be made public, wherever they come from — including from an openly-licensed page — unless a source states a licence for the files themselves, a freely-licensed sound collection say, in which case 3.4 applies to those files. Everything else about images and audio works as it does for any private material: your cards are yours, and you can share them with named people. (You may still see a picture on a public card cut from a webpage: your browser fetches it from the website it came from, not from a copy of ours.)
3.6 Most of this section describes defaults, and defaults you can change: share a document, open up a card, take one back. We will not ask you to decide any of that card by card while you are trying to learn. Two of its lines are rules, not defaults: a document and the cards cut from it cannot become public (3.1), and neither can an image or audio clip whose own licence we do not know (3.5). There is no setting that changes those.
4.1 You are responsible for the material you bring in. Upload what you have the right to upload, and share only what you have the right to share.
4.2 Collaborative public study from known open-licence content providers like Wikipedia, public study of material you author yourself, and private study of everything else are the safest things you can do here. Private study is safe unconditionally; the other two are safe because the source's licence, or your own authorship, covers what you publish. The questions this document discusses arise when you make private study material visible to other people. They can still be answered positively — but only by you: we cannot give you an unambiguous answer that fits everything you may want to learn and make visible to other people.
4.3 The licence's conditions come with openly-licensed material (3.4) — normally attribution to the original author and a link to the licence, and sometimes a requirement that anything built on it carries the same licence. We record where the material came from at the moment you make an annotation, and the licence follows from the source; if the source was not captured then, the material cannot be shared compliantly afterwards.
4.4 A few things you must not do here, whatever the visibility settings: post material that is unlawful, post other people's private information, or deliberately disrupt or overload the service.
5.1 We do not and cannot review everything users create. If material on Buboflash infringes your copyright, tell us and we will remove it promptly.
5.2 Contact: piotr.wasik@gmail.com, or by post to the address in 1.1. We read both.
5.3 Please include: what the material is and where it is on Buboflash, what work it infringes, your contact details, and a statement that you are the rights holder or acting for them.
5.4 When we remove material on a copyright complaint we delete it, rather than hiding it. We will tell the user who posted it what was removed — and if you believe we removed your material in error, reply and a person will look at it again.
5.5 We may also remove anything we find unlawful or seriously objectionable, at our discretion. Accounts that repeatedly post infringing material can be closed.
6.1 Running the service means holding your account details, what you make, what you upload and your learning history. What we hold, why, who else sees it and for how long is set out in the Privacy Notice, which is written to be read on its own.
6.2 You can get your material and your learning history out, in a form you can use elsewhere — including in a competing product. Ask us and we will provide it; where we offer a way to do it yourself, that is the faster route.
6.3 You can have your account and your material deleted. Deleting something yourself, in the app, takes it out of your view — like moving a file to the recycle bin — and does not by itself erase it from the service. To have material, or your whole account, erased, ask us and we will do it, within a month at the outside. Deletion means deletion, not hiding; copies in our routine backups are never used for anything except recovering from failures — yours or ours — and fall away on the schedule in the Privacy Notice (§ 8), within three years at the outside. The one thing we will tell you first is if removing something would take it away from other people who are learning from it. Someone who has kept a version of their own keeps it either way, so they are not counted.
6.4 We do not sell your data.
6.5 The browser extension has its own privacy page: what it sends us while it is switched on and you are logged in — the address of every page you open, so that it can show you your annotations — and what it does not. When you are not logged in or the extension is switched off, it does not send us anything.
7.1 We give you the service as it is. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will suit your purposes, or that everything on it is accurate.
7.2 We may change, limit or discontinue any part of it. See 1.3 for what we owe you if we discontinue it altogether.
7.3 We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, or for damage arising from material other users post.
7.4 Nothing here removes rights you have by law. If you are a consumer, you have rights that cannot be signed away, and these terms do not attempt it. In particular we do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
8.1 These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes go to its courts.
8.2 If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country's mandatory law.
9.1 If we change these terms materially — especially anything in section 3 — we will tell you before they apply to you, and link to what changed.
See also: Your Freedom Matters, which explains what we are trying to build and why the licensing works the way it does.