Terms of Service

These terms cover CivicLens India — the website at www.theciviclens.tech, its email digest and its RSS feed. By using any of them you agree to what follows. If you do not, please do not use the site.

CivicLens is run by one person as a free public-interest project. These terms are written to be readable rather than impressive, but they are meant seriously: the limits below are the reason a free site like this can exist at all.

CivicLens collects public news headlines about Indian districts and states, uses an AI model to summarise them, and publishes the result with links back to the original articles. It is free, it does not require an account, and there is nothing to pay for.

It is a signpost, not a newsroom. Its job is to tell you that something appears to be happening near you and to point you at the people who actually reported it.

AI models make mistakes. They can misread a headline, merge two unrelated stories, attach the right event to the wrong place, drop the qualification that made a claim an allegation rather than a fact, or state something confidently that is simply wrong. We design against all of that — see our Editorial & AI Policy for the exact standards each summary is written to — but no amount of design makes it impossible.

Nothing on this site is a finding of fact about any person, company or authority. Where a summary describes an allegation, a police complaint, an investigation or a political claim, it is describing what was reported — not asserting that it is true and not implying guilt or wrongdoing by anyone named.

CivicLens is general information. It is not advice and must not be treated as advice. In particular, nothing here is:

• legal advice — including on your rights, an ongoing case, a notice you have received, or a deadline
• financial or investment advice — including about land, property, schemes, subsidies or markets
• medical or public-health advice — including during an outbreak, a heatwave or a flood
• safety or emergency guidance — in an emergency, contact the emergency services, not a website
• voting or electoral guidance — we do not endorse candidates or parties, and a summary mentioning a politician is not a comment on them

For anything that affects your money, your health, your safety, your legal position or your vote, use an official source or a qualified professional.

Every summary links the articles it was built from, with the publisher named. If something on this site matters to you — if you are going to act on it, quote it, forward it, report on it or make a decision because of it — open the original article and check it there first.

For anything official — a government order, a scheme, a deadline, a notification, a court listing — check the relevant department’s own website or office. A summary is not a substitute for a primary source and we do not ask you to treat it as one.

You agree not to:

• scrape, crawl or automate against the site in a way that degrades it for other people, or that ignores robots directives and rate limits
• attempt to gain access to the admin area, the database, any private endpoint, or anyone else’s subscription
• probe, overload or interfere with the site, its infrastructure or the services it depends on
• subscribe an email address that is not yours, or submit false flag reports in volume
• republish summaries in a way that presents them as verified reporting, as CivicLens’ own journalism, or as a finding about a named person
• use the site for anything unlawful

Reasonable personal and journalistic use is welcome: quote a summary, link to a district page, cite us as the AI summary source and the publisher as the reporting source. If you want to build on the data at any scale, email us first and we will almost certainly say yes.

CivicLens claims no ownership of anyone else’s reporting. The underlying facts, articles, headlines and photographs belong to the publications that produced them, and we do not host, mirror or republish article text. What we publish is a short original summary plus a link and a credit to the publisher.

If you are a publisher

If you would rather CivicLens did not summarise or link your work, or a particular article, email hello@theciviclens.tech from an address at your publication and tell us what to remove. You do not need to send a legal notice and we will not argue about it — we will remove it and exclude the source going forward.

The site itself

The CivicLens name, design and code are ours. The summaries are machine-generated from someone else’s reporting, so we make no copyright claim over the underlying facts and would not try to stop you quoting a summary with attribution.

If a summary is wrong, unfair, out of date, or reads as though it is accusing someone of something, we want to hear about it and we will fix it. There are two routes:

• “Flag this summary” — the button under every summary. This is the fastest route, because it tells us exactly which district, date and text you mean. Pick the closest reason, add a line of detail, and leave an email address if you would like a reply.
• Email hello@theciviclens.tech — better for anything broader: a pattern across several summaries, a publisher request, or a legal concern. Include the page link and what specifically is wrong.

If something published here is defamatory, presents an allegation as an established fact, or names a private individual in a way that should not have happened, say so and we will take it down while we look — we will not leave it up while we decide. There is no form to fill in and no fee. Our correction process sets out what happens after you report something.

CivicLens is provided free, as is, and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the site or anything on it — including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

We do not promise the site will be available, that a summary will be published on any given day, that it will be correct, that a district will be covered, that the email digest will arrive, or that links to other sites will keep working. Automated pipelines break, upstream feeds change, and free hosting has limits.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CivicLens and the person who runs it are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of the site or your reliance on anything published on it. That includes indirect, incidental, special and consequential loss, and it specifically includes loss of profit, loss of opportunity, reputational harm, and any decision you took because of a summary.

Because the service is free and you pay nothing for it, our total aggregate liability to you for any claim is limited to nil. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, such as liability for fraud.

If you republish, forward or otherwise reuse material from CivicLens and somebody brings a claim about it — for example because a summary was presented as verified fact, or used to accuse someone — you agree to cover the reasonable costs and damages we incur as a result. This does not apply to claims caused by our own content decisions on our own site, which remain ours to answer for.

We may change, pause, restrict or discontinue any part of CivicLens at any time, including the whole site, without notice and without liability. Realistically, the most likely version of this is that a free-tier limit is reached or the project stops being maintained.

You can stop using the site whenever you like. If you subscribed, the unsubscribe link in every email ends it immediately. We may also block access or remove a subscription if the acceptable-use section above is being ignored.

These terms and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of CivicLens are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction.

We may update these terms. When we do, the “last updated” date at the top of this page changes, and continuing to use the site after that means you accept the new version. We do not keep an archive of previous versions. If a change is significant — something that meaningfully affects what you can rely on or what you are agreeing to — we will say so on this page rather than slipping it into a rewrite.