Messaging Terms

1. Scope and your role

Bodek provides the tooling and the numbers. You are the sender. Every message sent from your account — by you, by a member of your organization, by your own code through the API, by a text menu you built, or by a group member texting the group — is your message, and you are responsible for it. We act only as a conduit and are not the sender, the author or the originator of your traffic, and we do not review it before it goes out.

Bodek is not a telecommunications carrier and does not provide telephone service. Messages and calls are carried over commercial mobile networks operated by third parties, on equipment we operate on your behalf, and are subject to those networks' rules, capabilities and failures.

2. Consent is your responsibility

You must have the consent that applicable law and carrier rules require from every person you message, before you message them, and you must be able to prove it. This includes, as applicable:

• The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and its regulations, including prior express consent for informational messages and prior express written consent for marketing messages, with the disclosures those rules require;
• State messaging, telemarketing, do-not-call, calling-time and call-recording laws, including those that require all-party consent to record a call;
• CAN-SPAM, the CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices, and the rules of the carriers and the messaging industry, including campaign registration requirements such as A2P 10DLC where they apply to your traffic; and
• any other law that applies where you or the recipient is located.

You must keep records of consent (who, when, how and what they were told) for as long as the law requires and produce them to us within 5 days if we ask. You must identify yourself or your business in your messages, send only the kind of messages the person agreed to receive, and never message a number obtained from a purchased, rented, scraped or otherwise unverified list.

We do not obtain consent for you, do not verify your lists, and do not provide legal advice. If a claim, complaint, investigation or penalty arises out of your messages or calls, it is yours, and section 11 and the indemnity in the Terms apply.

3. Group texting

A group gives several people one number to text, and every reply goes to everyone in the group with the sender's name. Because of that:

• only add someone to a group if they have agreed to be in it;
• tell members, before or as they join, who runs the group, that their number and display name are visible to the other members through the #members command, and that anything they send goes to everyone;
• honor a member's #leave or opt-out immediately and do not re-add them; and
• moderate your group. You are responsible for what members send through it, and we may remove a member, close a group or suspend a number in response to abuse.

Group members' numbers and names are visible to other members and to the group's administrators. You are responsible for telling them that, and for any privacy notice they are owed (see the Privacy Policy).

4. Opt-outs and STOP

Anyone may stop messages at any time. STOP ends automated messages to that number, and #leave removes a member from a group; we record the opt-out and apply it to automated sending from that number. An opt-out is not a substitute for your own obligations: you must honor an opt-out received by any means — a text, an email, a phone call, a verbal request — promptly and across your systems, and you must not message that person again without fresh consent. You must also honor keywords recipients expect, such as HELP for assistance, and must not design a flow, a keyword or a menu that makes opting out harder or that requires a reply to opt out other than a plain STOP.

Our automatic handling covers automated sending through Bodek SMS. It does not block a message you address directly to an individual, and it cannot stop a group member from texting the group. Suppressing opt-outs, removing them from your lists, or routing around them is a serious breach of these Terms.

5. Prohibited messages

You may not send, or build a flow that sends, messages that:

• fall in the categories carriers prohibit or restrict, including the "SHAFT" categories — sex, hate, alcohol, firearms and tobacco — cannabis and other controlled substances, gambling, lotteries, sweepstakes, payday, high-risk or debt-relief lending, credit repair, get-rich-quick or work-from-home schemes, and cryptocurrency or investment solicitations;
• are phishing, smishing, fraud, impersonation or spoofing, or that contain malware or a deceptive link;
• harass, threaten or abuse the recipient, or that keep contacting someone who asked you to stop;
• include a URL shortener of the public, shared kind that carriers block, or that disguise the destination of a link;
• contain content prohibited by the Acceptable Use Policy; or
• violate any law, including state and federal rules on the hours during which you may contact a consumer.

Do not send sensitive data by text — passwords, payment-card numbers, government identifiers, health information — and do not ask recipients to send it back to you. SMS is not a secure channel (section 8).

6. Calls, menus and flows

Call-handling rules let you decide what a number does with an incoming call: ring, forward, send to voicemail or hang up. A missed-call text-back or a keyword can start a text menu (flow) that asks questions and alerts your staff. You are responsible for what a flow says, for what it asks a person to disclose, and for how the answers are handled and stored — and the consent rules in section 2 apply to a flow exactly as they do to a message you type yourself.

Bodek SMS does not record call audio and does not transcribe calls. If you forward a call to a number where it is recorded, or you record it yourself, obtaining the consent every party is owed under federal and state law is your responsibility. We do not provide an automated dialer, predictive dialing or voice broadcasting, and you may not build one on top of the Service.

7. Numbers

A number we make available to you is assigned for your use while your plan includes it. You do not own it and you cannot port it, sell it, or take it with you, unless we agree otherwise in writing. We may change or reassign a number where a carrier, a regulator or an operational need requires it, and we will give you reasonable notice where we can. When your plan or your use of Bodek SMS ends, the number is released and may later be reassigned to someone else, and messages or calls sent to it after that will not reach you. A number is intended for your own business or personal use, not for reselling messaging capacity to others.

8. Delivery, carriers and the privacy of messages

We do not guarantee that any message or call will be delivered, that it will arrive quickly or in order, or that a status we show you is correct. Messages are commonly delayed, truncated, split into segments, re-ordered, filtered, blocked or silently dropped by carriers, handsets, spam filters and network conditions outside our control, and a "sent" status means we handed it on, not that it arrived. Long messages are split into multiple segments and may be reassembled imperfectly; emoji and special characters can reduce how much fits in a segment. Media (MMS) may be re-compressed or rejected by a carrier.

A text message is not private or secure. To deliver it, the carriers on both sides and the devices involved necessarily handle the number and the content, and it remains on the recipient's phone and may be visible to anyone with that phone or that account. Once sent, a message cannot be recalled. Our systems keep the conversation, including media for a limited period, as described in the Privacy Policy.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Bodek is not liable for undelivered, delayed, duplicated, truncated, misdirected or unwanted messages or calls, for anything a carrier does, or for any loss arising from reliance on a message being delivered, read or acted upon. Do not use Bodek SMS where a missed or late message could cause harm, financial loss or legal exposure.

9. Not for emergencies

BODEK SMS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY SERVICE. IT CANNOT BE USED TO CALL OR TEXT 911 OR ANY OTHER EMERGENCY NUMBER, IT DOES NOT PROVIDE LOCATION INFORMATION TO EMERGENCY RESPONDERS, AND IT MUST NOT BE RELIED ON FOR ALARMS, DISPATCH, MEDICAL, SAFETY, SECURITY OR OTHER TIME-CRITICAL NOTIFICATION. YOU MUST KEEP A SEPARATE, CONVENTIONAL MEANS OF REACHING EMERGENCY SERVICES, AND YOU MUST TELL ANYONE WHO USES YOUR NUMBERS THE SAME.

10. Limits and pay-as-you-go

Your plan includes a daily message allowance, and per-number and per-key rate limits apply so that one sender cannot degrade the network or the Service for others. Sending stops when you reach your allowance unless you have turned on pay-as-you-go, in which case you authorize charges at the posted rate for every additional message, including messages sent by your own code, by an automation you built, or by anyone using a key you issued. Segments are billed individually, and a message that a carrier later rejects may still be billable. Usage counters we maintain are the basis for billing. We may impose, change or lower limits to protect the Service, to satisfy a carrier requirement, or to prevent abuse.

11. Suspension and indemnity

We may block a message, a recipient, a keyword, a flow or a number, pause or throttle your sending, or suspend Bodek SMS for your account — immediately and without notice where necessary — if we believe there is a violation of these Terms, a carrier complaint or requirement, a spam or fraud pattern, an unusual spike, a legal demand, or a risk to recipients, to the network or to Bodek. We may also be required to give a carrier or a regulator information about your traffic and your consent records.

You will defend, indemnify and hold Bodek harmless from every claim, complaint, investigation, fine, penalty, settlement, loss and reasonable legal fee arising out of your messages, calls, groups, flows, lists or consent practices, including claims under the TCPA, state messaging, telemarketing, recording or privacy statutes, and carrier or industry rules, as set out in section 15 of the Terms of Service. Statutory damages in messaging cases can be very large per message; the limitation of liability in section 14 of the Terms applies to us, and this indemnity applies to you.