1. About these Terms
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Echo, a civic-tech platform operated by ECHORA SYSTEMS, a company registered in the Federal Republic of Nigeria (CAC BN 9855532), which is the legal entity providing the Echo platform and the contracting party to these Terms ("Echo", "we", "us") that helps university students raise issues, rally support, and engage their institution's leadership. By using the Echo website or platform, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use Echo.
Institutions that join the Founding Institution Program also accept a separate Founding Institution Agreement, which applies alongside these Terms.
2. Eligibility
Echo is built for university communities and is available only to verified members of participating academic institutions, including students, faculty, and appointed institutional representatives. Students join through their institution's Echo community, and institutional representatives join through their institution's engagement with Echo. Access requires institutional verification, normally through your institutional email domain.
Accounts are personal to the verified member who holds them. You may not share your account or sign-in credentials, transfer your account to anyone else, or create an account using false credentials or another person's identity.
Echo does not currently perform age verification; however, applicable protections for younger users under Nigerian law still apply, and we may restrict access where required.
3. Accounts
If you create an Echo account, you agree to provide accurate information and to keep it up to date. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials confidential and for activity that happens under your account. Tell us as soon as you can at hello@mail.echo-ng.com if you believe your account has been compromised.
4. Institutional membership
Echo is organized around institutional communities. Your access to an institution's space depends on being a verified member of that institution, and some institutions may require approval before membership is granted. Each institution's administrators manage roles within its community (for example, student members and institutional representatives), and those roles determine what each person can see and do. If your membership or role ends, your access to that institution's space may end too.
For the student and community information inside an institution's Echo space, that institution acts as the Data Controller and Echo acts as the Data Processor, handling that information on the institution's documented authority. Our Privacy Policy explains what that means for your information.
5. Your content
"Content" means what you submit through Echo: Pings, Waves, comments, media you upload, and similar material.
- You keep whatever rights you have in your own content. Echo does not claim ownership of your ideas or submissions.
- You give Echo a limited, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, reproduce, display, process, moderate, and technically transform your content as necessary to operate, secure, and improve the service. This may include storing it, showing it to your institution's community, tracking its status, and generating notifications about it.
- You also give your institution a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, display, aggregate, and analyze the contributions you publish, so that it can understand and improve campus services and respond to the issues raised. This does not transfer ownership of your ideas to Echo or to your institution.
- Submitting content does not make it private. Depending on the feature and your institution's configuration, content may be visible to other students in your community, institutional representatives, and (where you post anonymously) visible without your name attached. See our Privacy Policy for how visibility and anonymity work.
- You are responsible for the content you submit and confirm you have the right to share it.
Anonymous contributions
Echo allows you to publish content, including Pings and comments, anonymously. When you do, your public profile is masked: your name is not shown alongside that content to other users.
- Anonymity is permanent once published. It cannot be retracted, and neither you nor other users can unmask the author afterwards.
- Anonymous does not mean unknown to Echo. Echo keeps the account record behind anonymously published content so the service can be operated, secured, moderated, and kept accountable.
- Authorized moderators may inspect identity information in serious cases. Institutional moderators reserve emergency inspection rights strictly where content poses an immediate threat to life, health, or university safety, or involves severe violations such as hate speech, violence threats, or criminal activity, handled in accordance with campus safety rules. Our Privacy Policy explains how this works in practice.
6. Acceptable use
You agree not to use Echo to:
- harass, bully, threaten, or intimidate anyone;
- impersonate another person, student, or official;
- post unlawful content, or content that infringes others' rights;
- spam, phish, or distribute malware or other malicious code;
- deliberately spread false information intended to mislead your community;
- attempt to bypass moderation, anonymity rules, or institutional boundaries;
- attempt to access other users' accounts or non-public data;
- interfere with, overload, or compromise the platform; or
- use Echo in violation of applicable law.
Echo also prohibits the following, which we treat as serious misuse:
- Defamation: publishing false statements that damage another person's reputation;
- Hate speech: attacking, degrading, or inciting hostility against people because of their identity;
- Sexual harassment: unwanted sexual advances, requests, or content, and sexual content directed at another person without their consent;
- Academic dishonesty: cheating, plagiarism, or using Echo to gain an unfair academic advantage;
- Unauthorized commercial advertising: advertising, promoting, or soliciting for products, services, or causes without our permission; and
- Personal doxxing: publishing someone's private or identifying information without their consent.
Violations may result in removal of the content concerned, temporary suspension of your account, or, where the conduct also breaches your institution's rules, action by your institution under its campus disciplinary procedures, including a campus ban.
7. Moderation
Echo may review, restrict, remove, or decline to display content, and may limit accounts, where content violates these Terms or platform rules. Institutional administrators may also have moderation powers within their institution's community according to their role. Where feasible and appropriate, we'll tell you when action is taken on your content.
8. Institutional decisions
Echo is a feedback and accountability channel. It does not direct institutional decisions. Echo does not guarantee that an institution will act on, approve, respond to, resolve, adopt, fund, or implement any Ping, Wave, or other matter. Consequential decisions remain with the institution's accountable officers.
Echo also does not control campus disciplinary processes. Decisions about discipline, sanctions, and campus safety rest with your institution, and Echo is not responsible for the outcome of those processes.
9. Availability
Echo is an evolving product. It may experience downtime, maintenance, bugs, interruptions, or changes to features. We aim to keep things running well but do not promise uninterrupted or error-free availability.
10. Intellectual property
Echo's software, branding, design, wordmark, logos, and platform technology are owned by Echo or its licensors and are protected by applicable law. Using Echo does not transfer any ownership of the platform to you. You may not copy, modify, or reverse-engineer the platform except as permitted by law.
11. Third-party services
Echo depends on third-party infrastructure providers (such as hosting, database, email-delivery, and analytics services) to operate. Their availability and practices affect the service, and their handling of personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.
12. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate access to Echo, in whole or in part, for serious or repeated violations of these Terms, security concerns, abuse, fraud, legal requirements, or where an institution's participation ends. Where feasible, we'll explain what happened.
13. Account deletion
You can stop using Echo at any time. You can delete your account yourself from Settings > Delete Account, and you can download a machine-readable JSON copy of your own data from Settings > Export My Data. If you would rather have us action a request for you, contact hello@mail.echo-ng.com.
Verified deletion requests are actioned subject to legal and audit obligations. For example, Founding Institution acceptance records must be retained as durable agreement records, and content that others in a community have engaged with may not be removable in every trace. Anonymous posts you published stay anonymous and are not reattributed. See our Privacy Policy for how deletion and retention work.
14. Disclaimers
Echo provides a platform for feedback and institutional engagement. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Echo is provided "as is" and "as available", and Echo makes no warranties or guarantees about: outcomes, resolutions, policy changes, or responses from institutions; the accuracy or completeness of user-submitted content; uninterrupted or error-free operation; or fitness for a particular purpose.
15. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Echo will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost opportunities, or harms arising from institutional decisions or inaction, in connection with your use of Echo. Echo's total liability for direct damages relating to the service will be limited to the amount you paid Echo in the twelve months before the claim arose or, if you paid nothing (as during pilots), to the maximum extent permitted by law.
Echo does not control institutional decisions or campus disciplinary outcomes. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Echo is not liable for a university's decision or failure to decide on any matter raised through the platform, or for disciplinary sanctions applied by an institution under its own rules.
16. Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
17. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms as Echo evolves. The "last updated" date above shows the current version. If a change is material, we will take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention. Continuing to use Echo after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.