DUBYU

Terms of Service — Dubyu (Ulster County Legislative AI)

Operator: John Peter Quigley (contact: feedback@trydubyu.com) Candidate version: 2.0 — 2026-08-15 (invite-only browser pilot) Release state: the browser clauses below are the accepted invite-only pilot contract, not evidence that the browser pilot is deployed or open. Release requires matching code, migrations, staging evidence, and explicit approval. Quick summary: use the Terms link in the browser or send /terms to the Telegram bot. The Telegram command is answered without a model call and without storing the request.

Using Dubyu requires accepting these terms and the privacy policy (PRIVACY.md). Dubyu asks you to acknowledge both — once per terms version — in the browser or in chat before it answers questions for you.

The release gate must set the application's required Terms/Privacy versions to these candidate versions before browser access opens. A materially changed version requires a fresh acknowledgment before another question is accepted; a documentation date by itself is not proof of the version currently deployed.

1. Dubyu is an unofficial resource — verify against the real record

This is the most important section, so it comes first.

  • Dubyu is a private, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by Ulster County, the Ulster County Legislature, the Clerk of the Legislature, or any government body, official, or agency.
  • Dubyu's answers are generated by an AI model over a database built from scraped public records. Both layers can fail: the database can be incomplete, stale, or contain ingestion errors, and the AI can misread, misattribute, or omit. Answers can be wrong even when they sound confident and carry a citation.
  • You must fact-check anything that matters against the official record before relying on it or repeating it. Official sources, for each county, are that county's website and that county's official media channel. For Ulster, that is the Legislature's published records on the county site (legislature.ulstercountyny.gov, ulstercountyny.gov) and the Legislature's official media channel. Where a Dubyu answer and the official record disagree, the official record is correct and the answer is wrong. Unpublished official material is a wait-on-county gap, not a closed product. FOIL is not a required path for public material.
  • Dubyu tries to cite the official source URL for every factual claim precisely so you can do this check. Use the links.

2. Not advice

Nothing Dubyu produces is legal advice, election-law advice, professional advice, or an official statement of any government position. Decisions with legal, electoral, financial, or reputational consequences need a qualified human and the primary record, not a chatbot.

3. No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranty of any kind — express or implied — including accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or availability. The operator does not guarantee the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, and is not liable for decisions made in reliance on its output. Your sole remedy for dissatisfaction with the service is to stop using it.

4. Access

  • Access is deny-by-default, granted personally by the operator, and may be suspended or revoked at any time, for any reason, without notice. Guest access expires automatically.
  • Browser access is invite-only. A one-time access code is issued to one named, already-approved roster user and must not be shared. Claiming it creates an essential host-only browser session cookie. You must not copy or share the code or cookie, attempt to assume another user's session, or bypass a suspension, expiry, logout, or revocation. Logging out ends the current session; the operator may revoke codes, sessions, membership, or access at any time.
  • Usage is budgeted (per-user, per-group, and global daily limits, plus hourly question limits — see PRIVACY.md §7). Browser and Telegram use by the same person share that person's financial ceiling. Approved end users may ask up to 15 questions in their first hour after activation, then 5 questions per rolling hour; founder/admin operator accounts may have higher operational ceilings. When a limit is hit Dubyu says so; the question is not processed.
  • Don't abuse the service: no attempts to extract other users' data, no prompt-injection or jailbreak attempts against the bot's safety rules, no automated scraping of the bot, no use of the service to harass, defame, or deceive, and no resale or republication of the service itself.

5. Your content and data

  • What Dubyu stores about you, for how long, who can see it, and how to delete it is governed by the privacy policy (PRIVACY.md) — it is part of these terms.
  • You are responsible for what you send. Don't send anything you wouldn't put in a message to the operator.
  • The service runs through third-party platforms and processors named in the privacy policy, including Railway and Anthropic. Telegram applies only when you use the Telegram surface; Groq applies only when configured for a voice message. Their own service terms and retention rules may also apply to data they process.

6. Acknowledgment requirement

Before Dubyu answers questions for you, you must confirm — through the browser acceptance control or the in-chat acknowledgment button — that you have read this document and the privacy policy and agree to both. Your acceptance (a timestamp and the versions accepted, nothing more) is stored on your access record. When either document changes materially, you will be asked to acknowledge the current versions again before further use.

7. Changes

Material changes are announced on the applicable browser/chat surface before they take effect, this document is versioned in the project repository, and the current version is available through the browser Terms link and via /terms in Telegram.

8. Contact

Questions, complaints, corrections, or deletion requests: use Ask Dubyu Support in the Telegram bot when available (start your message with "Dubyu:") or email feedback@trydubyu.com.