Introduction
Sahara ("Sahara," "we," "us," or "our") is an independently operated networking service. It allows eligible users to create profiles, discover people, send pings, form mutual connections ("Nodes"), and exchange time-limited messages.
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Sahara. By creating an account, accessing, or using Sahara, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
1. Eligibility and Account Creation
You must be at least 18 years old to create or use a Sahara account.
During the current launch period, Sahara may require a valid email address from a supported domain, including an @iu.edu address. Requiring control of that inbox does not mean Sahara verifies current enrollment, academic standing, campus, identity, or any official relationship with Indiana University or any other institution.
You agree to provide accurate information, maintain only accounts you are authorized to use, and keep your credentials secure. You are responsible for activity occurring through your account.
Sahara may modify eligibility requirements, supported domains, regions, or access rules at any time.
2. Independent Service — No University Affiliation
Sahara is not an Indiana University application, website, program, or official service. Sahara is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, funded by, operated by, or approved by Indiana University or any other college, university, school, athletic department, or educational institution.
Nothing on Sahara — including the use of @iu.edu for signup, references to Bloomington, campus, major, year, or “IU students” as a user audience — creates a partnership, agency, joint venture, or official relationship with Indiana University or any other institution.
University names, logos, trademarks, and other marks belong to their owners. Sahara does not claim them and does not use them as a claim of official status.
3. How Sahara Works
Sahara may allow users to discover other users, send pings, accept or decline pings, create mutual Nodes, and send messages between eligible Nodes.
Certain interactions are designed to be time-limited. A Ping is generally actionable for about 24 hours, and certain messaging experiences may also be limited by time or connection status. Sahara may change these product windows as the service evolves and does not guarantee that any ping, message, notification, or connection will be delivered, viewed, answered, retained, or available for a particular period.
When content expires or disappears from the interface, that means it is no longer available through the ordinary active product experience. It does not necessarily mean every associated record is erased from every system at that exact moment. Limited records may remain where reasonably necessary for security, abuse prevention, moderation, legal compliance, backups, dispute handling, or service integrity.
4. User Content and Profiles
Users may submit names, usernames, profile photos, banners, bios, majors, academic year information, messages, and other profile information ("User Content").
You retain ownership of User Content you submit. By submitting it, you grant Sahara a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, process, and distribute that content solely as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, improve, and provide the service.
You represent that you have the rights necessary to submit your User Content and that it does not violate applicable law, these Terms, or another person's rights.
5. User Safety and Offline Interactions
Sahara facilitates introductions. Sahara does not control user conduct and is not Indiana University safety, police, or student-affairs infrastructure.
Unless expressly stated otherwise, Sahara does not run criminal background checks, guarantee identity, verify intentions, guarantee current student status, or guarantee that another user's profile is accurate.
You are responsible for judgment when communicating or meeting someone. Use precautions when meeting in person, sharing personal information, or moving a conversation off Sahara.
6. User Responsibilities
Use Sahara lawfully and only for legitimate social or networking purposes.
You must not:
- harass, threaten, intimidate, stalk, bully, or abuse another person;
- impersonate another person or misrepresent your identity or affiliation;
- create an account for another person without authorization;
- share content that is unlawful, defamatory, exploitative, hateful, sexually abusive, or otherwise seriously harmful;
- use Sahara to facilitate fraud, violence, illegal activity, or exploitation;
- scrape, harvest, sell, or misuse user information;
- use bots, scripts, automated accounts, or other unauthorized automation;
- probe, disrupt, overload, reverse engineer, bypass, or attempt to compromise Sahara's security or access controls;
- send spam, mass unsolicited communications, or deceptive messages; or
- use Sahara in a way that violates another person's intellectual property, privacy, publicity, or other legal rights.
7. Moderation, Reporting, and Enforcement
Sahara may investigate reports, restrict content, limit functionality, suspend or remove accounts, preserve records, or take other reasonable action to protect users, the service, or third parties. Reports are private moderation signals for review; submitting a report does not by itself establish that another user violated these Terms.
Sahara may retain limited report, moderation, enforcement, and safety records after content expires or an account is deleted when reasonably necessary to prevent abuse, document prior enforcement, investigate safety issues, comply with law, or protect the service. Where appropriate, records may be de-identified or retained with only the identifying information reasonably necessary for those purposes.
Sahara is not required to monitor every interaction or review all User Content before it appears. Failure to act in one instance does not waive the right to act later.
8. Privacy and Data
Sahara processes information necessary to operate the service, including account, profile, authentication, social interaction, messaging, security, and technical information.
Part II of this document explains what Sahara collects, how it is used, when it may be shared, how long it may be retained, and the choices available to users.
Do not use Sahara to transmit highly sensitive information that is unnecessary for ordinary networking.
9. Sahara Intellectual Property
Sahara's software, interface, branding, logos, graphics, and other original platform materials are owned by or licensed to Sahara.
Subject to these Terms, Sahara grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the service for its intended purposes. You may not copy, resell, sublicense, exploit, or create unauthorized derivative products from Sahara.
10. Third-Party Services
Sahara may rely on third-party providers for authentication, hosting, storage, communications, analytics, infrastructure, or other functionality. Your use of those providers may also be subject to their terms.
Sahara is not responsible for outages or actions of third-party services outside Sahara's reasonable control.
11. Payments and Future Paid Features
Sahara may offer paid features later. If so, price, billing, renewal, cancellation, and refund terms will be shown before purchase. Sahara will not charge you unless you choose to buy.
12. Suspension, Termination, and Service Changes
Sahara may suspend, restrict, or terminate access to enforce these Terms, protect users, comply with law, address security or abuse, or protect the service.
Where the in-product account-deletion control is available, using it is intended to permanently delete your Sahara login and profile and remove account-linked product data and profile media from the active service. Deletion cannot be undone. Limited records may still be retained where reasonably necessary or legally permitted, including de-identified or minimally identifying moderation, safety, security, fraud-prevention, legal, and backup records.
Sahara may change, discontinue, test, limit, or remove features, networks, eligibility rules, or portions of the service. No feature is guaranteed to remain available indefinitely.
13. Warranties and Disclaimers
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Sahara is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory.
Sahara does not warrant that the service will always be secure, uninterrupted, error-free, accurate, or available, or that interactions with other users will be safe, successful, or satisfactory.
14. Limitation of Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Sahara and its owners, operators, personnel, contractors, and service providers will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages arising out of or relating to your use of or inability to use Sahara.
Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.
15. Indemnification
To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Sahara and its owners, operators, personnel, contractors, and service providers from third-party claims arising from your unlawful use of the service, your User Content, or your material violation of these Terms.
16. Copyright and Intellectual Property Complaints
If you believe content on Sahara infringes your copyright or other intellectual property rights, contact Sahara with enough information to identify the content, the claimed right, and how we can evaluate the request.
Sahara may remove or restrict allegedly infringing material and may terminate repeat infringers when required by law or reasonably necessary.
17. Governing Law and Disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, except where applicable law requires otherwise. That choice of law does not make Sahara an Indiana University service.
Before filing a formal claim, you and Sahara agree to make a reasonable good-faith effort to resolve the dispute informally.
18. Changes to These Terms
Sahara may update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, Sahara may provide notice through the service or by another reasonable method.
Continued use after updated Terms become effective constitutes acceptance to the extent permitted by law.
19. General Terms
If any provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect to the extent permitted by law.
Failure to enforce a provision does not waive the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without Sahara's consent. Sahara may assign these Terms as part of a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or transfer of the service.
These Terms and any policies expressly incorporated into them are the agreement between you and Sahara concerning the service, except where additional terms are presented for a particular feature.
Part II — Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy describes how Sahara collects, uses, discloses, and retains information when you visit Sahara, create an account, build a profile, discover users, send or receive pings, create Nodes, exchange messages, upload media, submit a report, or otherwise use the service.
By using Sahara, you acknowledge these practices. This Privacy Policy is part of the Terms & Privacy document.
21. How We Use Information
We may use information to:
- create, authenticate, maintain, and secure accounts;
- confirm control of a supported email domain;
- display profiles and provide discovery, pings, Nodes, notifications, and messaging;
- store and display profile pictures, banners, bios, and other User Content;
- operate time-limited features and determine when pings or messages expire from active access;
- prevent spam, fraud, abuse, unauthorized access, and violations of these Terms;
- investigate reports and enforce platform rules;
- measure product funnels and understand whether core Sahara features are working, using Sahara's first-party analytics;
- maintain, troubleshoot, analyze, and improve Sahara;
- communicate about accounts, security, support, or material service changes; and
- comply with applicable law and protect users, Sahara, and others.
22. Information Visible to Other Users
Sahara is a networking service. Profile information may be visible to other eligible users. That can include display name, username, photo, banner, major, year, bio, and other network information the service shows.
Do not put information on your profile that you do not want other eligible users to see.
23. How Information May Be Shared
Sahara does not sell your personal information merely by providing the service. Sahara's current private-beta funnel measurement is first-party: Sahara does not use a third-party advertising tracker or browser fingerprinting system for that funnel.
We may disclose information:
- With other users: when necessary for profile, discovery, ping, Node, notification, and messaging features.
- With service providers: vendors that provide authentication, databases, storage, hosting, security, or other technical services may process information on Sahara's behalf.
- For safety and legal reasons: when reasonably necessary to investigate abuse, protect rights or safety, enforce these Terms, respond to valid legal process, or comply with law.
- Business transactions: as part of a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, sale of assets, or similar transaction.
- With your direction or consent: when you ask us to share information or otherwise authorize disclosure.
Sahara does not share user lists with Indiana University as a condition of using an @iu.edu address, and use of that domain does not make IU a data controller of Sahara.
24. First-Party Analytics
Sahara uses limited first-party event data to understand the path from visiting the landing page through requesting access, signing up, opening the app, completing a profile, sending Pings, creating Nodes, sending messages, and submitting reports.
For visitors who are not signed in, Sahara may store a randomly generated analytics identifier in the browser and use a session identifier for the current visit. Sahara does not intentionally use this identifier to derive a real-world identity. Once you are signed in, product events may be associated with your existing Sahara user identifier so Sahara can measure whether the product is functioning and being used as intended.
Sahara's current private-beta analytics are not designed for cross-site advertising or browser fingerprinting.
25. University Email Domains
Sahara may use a supported email domain, including @iu.edu, only as an account-access requirement. That is not affiliation, sponsorship, endorsement, or operation by Indiana University or any other institution.
Possession of a supported email address is not treated as independent proof of current enrollment, academic standing, campus, identity, or any other official status unless Sahara expressly implements and discloses an additional verification process.
26. Data Retention and Expiring Features
Sahara retains information as reasonably necessary to provide the service, maintain accounts, protect security, prevent abuse, moderate reports, resolve disputes, comply with law, and keep appropriate records.
Some features expire from active user access after a limited period, including Pings that are generally actionable for about 24 hours. Expiration from the interface does not always mean every associated record is immediately erased from all systems. Limited information may remain in databases, logs, backups, moderation records, or security records where reasonably necessary.
If you permanently delete your account through Sahara's in-product deletion control, Sahara is intended to remove your login, profile, profile media, and account-linked product data from the active service. Certain moderation, safety, fraud-prevention, security, legal, and backup records may be retained where reasonably necessary or legally permitted. Where appropriate, Sahara may de-identify those records or retain only the identifying information reasonably necessary for the applicable purpose.
27. Security
Sahara uses reasonable administrative and technical measures intended to protect information. No online service can be guaranteed completely secure.
You are responsible for protecting your credentials. Notify Sahara if you believe your account was accessed without authorization.
28. Your Choices and Requests
You may edit certain profile information in Sahara. Where available, you may replace profile pictures and banners.
Where the account-deletion control is available in Sahara, you may use it to permanently delete your account. This action cannot be undone. As described above, limited records may remain where reasonably necessary or legally permitted.
You may contact Sahara for help with access, correction, deletion, or other data questions. Sahara may need to verify the request before acting on it.
29. Age Requirement
Sahara is only for users who are at least 18. Sahara does not knowingly offer accounts to anyone under 18. If Sahara learns an account was created in violation of this rule, Sahara may remove or restrict it.
30. Third-Party Infrastructure and Links
Sahara uses third-party infrastructure providers, including Supabase for backend services such as authentication, database functionality, and file storage. Sahara may also use other providers for hosting, security, communications, and related infrastructure. Those providers may process information as needed to provide their services to Sahara.
Sahara may contain links to third-party sites. Sahara is not responsible for the privacy practices of third parties you choose to use.
31. Changes to This Privacy Policy
Sahara may update this Privacy Policy as the service, technology, legal requirements, or data practices change. If a change is material, Sahara may provide notice through the service or another reasonable method. The updated date at the top of this document is when the combined Terms & Privacy document was last revised.