The small print,
in actual words.

1. What DisMis is

DisMis (“DisMis”, “we”, “us”) is an independent claim-checking service available at dismis.in. You give us a claim; we look for what is publicly known about it and publish a short assessment with a label on it: DISMISSED, LEGIT, MID or SUS.

The plainest way to say it: we check, we do not report. We break no stories and we host none. We read what the internet already says about a claim, many independent sources at once, in the seconds you would otherwise spend opening twelve tabs, and hand back the shape of it on one screen. The internet already had the answer. Our job is to stop it being the twentieth result.

By using the service you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the service.

2. Where our answers come from

Assessments are based on publicly available information on the internet. In broad terms, that means material we can reach and read at the time of your request, including: reporting by established media organisations and wire services; statements, notifications and records published by public authorities and institutions; publicly posted material by the people or organisations a claim concerns; and work published by established fact-checking and verification networks.

What comes back is assessed using a combination of automated systems and our own editorial rules. We deliberately do not publish the specifics of our retrieval and assessment methods, the providers we use, or our internal scoring. That detail is our own, and publishing it would make the service straightforward to game by exactly the people who manufacture false claims.

What that means in practice

• An assessment reflects what could be found at that moment, and nothing more. Information appearing hours later can change the answer.
• Absence of evidence is not proof of falsity. A genuinely new event that nothing has reported yet can be labelled DISMISSED simply because no record of it exists at the time of checking.
• We do not control, endorse or vouch for third-party sources, and we are not responsible for their content, accuracy or availability. Where a source is named or linked, it is cited for your own further reading.
• Automated systems make mistakes, including confident ones. Labels are a summary judgement, not a finding of fact.

3. No warranty

The service, and everything on it, is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we disclaim all warranties, including any implied warranty of accuracy, completeness, reliability, currency, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that assessments are accurate or complete, that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that defects will be corrected.

4. Not advice, and not a substitute for your own judgement

DisMis is provided for general information purposes only. It is not legal, medical, financial, investment, safety, professional or journalistic advice, and it is not a determination of anyone's guilt, liability, honesty or wrongdoing.

Do not act, or refrain from acting, on an assessment alone where the outcome matters. For anything involving your health, your money, your safety, your legal position or another person's reputation, consult a qualified professional and check the primary source yourself. Our labels are a starting point for that check, never the end of it.

5. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, neither we nor anyone involved in operating DisMis will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill or reputation, arising out of or in connection with your use of the service, your inability to use it, or your reliance on any assessment, whether or not we were advised of the possibility of such loss.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose (which, for a free service, is ordinarily nil) or INR 1,000.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, including liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

6. Your responsibilities

• Do not submit anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to submit.
• Do not submit other people's private or sensitive personal information. That includes identity numbers, financial details, medical records, or private messages that identify someone. Submit the claim, not the person's data.
• Do not use the service to harass, defame, threaten or target anyone, and do not present our assessments as an accusation against a person.
• Do not attempt to scrape, overload, probe or circumvent the service, its rate limits or its access controls, and do not use automated means to submit claims in bulk.
• You are responsible for how you use, quote or share what we publish, including anything you say alongside it.

We may limit, suspend or refuse access where we reasonably believe these terms are being broken, or where usage threatens the availability of the service for everyone else.

7. If we get something wrong

We would rather be corrected than be consistent. If you believe an assessment is wrong, unfair, out of date, or concerns you personally, write to dismisofficial@gmail.com with the claim and, if you have it, the source that shows the position. We will review it and, where a change is warranted, correct or remove the assessment. Please tell us if you are the person or organisation a claim is about; those get looked at first.

This is the fastest route to a fix, and we ask that you use it before anything more formal.

8. Intellectual property

The DisMis name, design and the text we write are ours. Quotations, screenshots and links to third-party material remain the property of their respective owners and are used for identification, reporting and commentary. You may quote and share our assessments with attribution and a link; please do not republish them wholesale, alter them, or present them as your own work or as anything other than what they are.

9. What we collect

No account, no login, no name required. When you use DisMis we record:

• The claim you submit, as typed. Assumed non-private, because checked claims are published in the public feed and may be shown to other users.
• Your IP address, and an approximate location derived from it (typically city, state and country level). Used for abuse prevention and rate limiting, for the location shown on public activity, and for aggregate statistics.
• Your device and browser type, derived from the user-agent string your browser sends, plus the string itself.
• A visit identifier, a short value derived from your IP and browser, so repeat visits can be counted without a login.
• Messages and comments you post, with the display name attached to them and the approximate location they came from. These are public the moment you send them.
• The email address and message you give us on the support form, if you choose to use it.
• Local storage on your device, holding your preferences and your chat display name. This stays on your device; we do not use advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not run third-party ad or analytics tags.

10. What we do with it

Only these things: producing and displaying the assessment you asked for; showing public activity and the shared feed; preventing abuse and enforcing rate limits; keeping the service up and debugging it; understanding in aggregate what is being checked and from where, so we can improve it; and replying to you if you contacted us.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. We do not use it to build a profile of you as an individual.

Who else sees it

To produce an assessment, the text of your claim is sent to the search and analysis providers we use, and is processed under their terms. Our hosting provider necessarily processes traffic to the service. We may disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect the safety or rights of a person or of the service. Otherwise, nobody.

11. Public by default

Please read this twice: a claim you check may appear in the public feed, and chat messages and comments are visible to other users along with the display name and approximate location attached to them. That location is approximate and never precise, and it may be shown next to public activity, for example “someone in Delhi just checked…”.

Do not paste anything into DisMis that you would not be comfortable seeing on a public page.

12. Keeping it, and getting rid of it

Assessments and public feed entries are kept for as long as the service runs, since they are the record other people rely on. Request logs, which include IP addresses, are kept only as long as they are useful for abuse prevention and statistics. Support-form messages are kept until the conversation is finished.

Want something removed? A chat message, a support enquiry, a claim you submitted, or the request records associated with you. Email dismisofficial@gmail.com and we will action it where we reasonably can, subject to any legal obligation to retain it. If you want to know what we hold about you, ask via the same address.

We apply reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect what we hold, but no internet service can promise absolute security.

13. Children

DisMis is not directed at children under 13, and is not intended for use by them without the involvement of a parent or guardian. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13; if you believe we have, tell us and we will delete it.

14. Changes, law and contact

We may update these terms and this policy as the service changes. The current version always lives at this address, with the date at the top; continuing to use DisMis after a change means you accept the updated version.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and you and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts in India. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

Questions, corrections, privacy requests, anything at all: dismisofficial@gmail.com