Terms of Use

1. Who you are dealing with
2. What Colocalizer is (and is not)
3. Accepting these terms
4. Accounts
5. Your data and your responsibilities
6. Free and paid plans
7. Acceptable use
8. Availability and changes to the service
9. Scientific accuracy and your judgement
10. Intellectual property
11. No warranty
12. Limitation of liability
13. Ending the agreement
14. Changes to these terms
15. Governing law and disputes
16. Contact

1. Who you are dealing with

Colocalizer is operated by Colocalizations, an empresa unipersonal registered in Uruguay. An empresa unipersonal is a sole proprietorship: the business and its owner are the same legal person.

• Trading name: Colocalizations
• Registered business details: available on request at [email protected]
• Contact: [email protected]

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean Colocalizations. "You" means the person using Colocalizer. "The service" means the website at www.colocalizations.com, the Colocalizer application it serves, and any accounts or paid features we offer through it.

2. What Colocalizer is (and is not)

Colocalizer measures the colocalization of fluorescence channels in microscopy images. It computes Pearson's correlation, Manders' coefficients, Mander's overlap coefficient (MOC) and Costes' automatic threshold, and draws the accompanying charts.

All of that maths runs in your browser, on your own device. Your image files are read by the page from your disk; the pixels are decoded and analysed locally. We do not receive your images, we cannot see them, and we could not produce them if someone asked us to. This is not a policy we could quietly change without you noticing; it is how the software is built.

3. Accepting these terms

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

Using the analysis tool anonymously requires nothing more than that. When we launch accounts, creating one will require you to actively accept these terms: a tick box or an equivalent, not a pre-ticked one.

When you accept, we record that you did: the date and time, the version of these terms you accepted, your IP address and your browser's user-agent string. That record exists so that either of us can later show what was agreed and when. We explain how long we keep it, and why, in the Privacy Policy.

4. Accounts

Accounts are not live yet. When they are, the following applies.

• You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address, or with your ORCID iD. There is no password to lose.
• An account is for one person. Do not share your sign-in link, your one-time code or your session with anyone else.
• Keep the email account or ORCID account you sign in with secure. Anyone who controls it controls your Colocalizer account.
• You must be at least 16 years old, or the minimum age for a data-processing contract where you live if that is higher.
• If you sign up on behalf of a lab, an institution or a company, you confirm that you are allowed to accept these terms for them.
• Tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else has got into your account.

5. Your data and your responsibilities

Your images and results stay yours

We claim no ownership of your images, your results, or anything you produce with Colocalizer. You keep every right you had before you opened the page. We do not use your work to train models, we do not publish it, and we do not sell it.

You are the controller of your research data

Under data protection law, the "controller" is whoever decides why and how personal data is processed. For your own research data, that is you, or your institution. It is not us. Because your images are analysed inside your browser and never reach our servers, we are not a processor of them and there is nothing for us to hold, disclose or lose.

You must have the right to use the data you process

You confirm that, for every image and every file you put into Colocalizer, you have the legal right to do so. That includes ethical approval and participant consent where your work involves human material, permission from whoever owns or licensed the data, and compliance with your institution's rules and your funder's conditions. Do not process data that you are not allowed to process.

6. Free and paid plans

Running an analysis in your browser is free, and we intend to keep it that way. Features that use our servers (saving results, organising them into projects, sharing them with collaborators) are planned as paid plans.

• Payments are handled by Polar (Polar Software Inc.) acting as our merchant of record. That means Polar is the seller on the transaction: it takes the payment, handles sales tax and VAT, and issues your receipt. Polar's own terms apply to the payment itself.
• We never see or store your full card number. Polar does.
• Prices are shown before you pay, and tax is calculated by Polar based on where you are.
• Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel. You can cancel at any time; the plan then runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
• If we raise the price of a plan you are on, we will tell you by email at least 30 days before it applies to you, and you can cancel instead.
• Consumers in the EU and the UK have statutory cancellation and refund rights. Nothing here removes them. Outside those rights, refunds are at our discretion, but ask us; if the tool did not do what we said it would, we will refund you.

7. Acceptable use

Please do not:

• break the law with the service, or use it to process data you have no right to process;
• attack, overload or probe our infrastructure, or try to get at other users' saved results;
• get around usage limits, plan restrictions or authentication;
• scrape or automate the service in a way that degrades it for other people;
• resell the service, or present it as your own product;
• strip out attribution or misrepresent where a result came from.

You may absolutely read the client-side source, run it offline, cite Colocalizer in a paper, and use the results commercially.

8. Availability and changes to the service

We aim to keep the service up, but we do not promise a particular level of uptime, and there is no service level agreement. We may change features, add them, or retire them.

If we retire a feature you depend on, or shut the service down, we will give account holders at least 60 days' notice by email and keep the export function working throughout, so you can take your saved results with you.

Because analysis runs in your browser, a server outage on our side stops you saving results; it does not stop you analysing images.

9. Scientific accuracy and your judgement

We test Colocalizer's maths against published benchmarks and publish the results in the validation report. We take correctness seriously.

Even so, choosing the right coefficient, the right threshold method and the right controls for your experiment is your call, and interpreting the output is your responsibility. Colocalization statistics are easy to misread: they are sensitive to background, bleed-through, sampling, registration and segmentation. Colocalizer will happily compute a number for a badly acquired image. Please check your work, and report your methods and settings when you publish.

10. Intellectual property

The Colocalizer name, the logo, the interface design and the site content are ours. Third-party open-source components included in the application remain under their own licences, and those licences govern them. Your results, your images and your writing are yours.

If you would like to reuse part of the interface or the branding, ask us: the answer is often yes.

11. No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind (express or implied) about it. In particular we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose, and we do not warrant that any result it produces is correct or suitable for a given experiment.

Some countries do not allow certain warranties to be excluded. Where that is the case, this section applies only as far as the law permits, and your statutory rights as a consumer are untouched.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, lost data, lost grant funding, retracted or delayed publications, or wasted staff or instrument time.
• Our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period, or US$100 if you paid us nothing.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and for the mandatory rights of consumers.

These limits are a deliberate part of the deal: the tool is offered free or cheaply, and it is offered without our ever seeing your data, which also means we cannot check what you did with it.

13. Ending the agreement

You can stop using Colocalizer at any time. When accounts exist, you will be able to delete yours from within the app; deletion removes your saved results and your account record as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaches these terms, or where we must do so by law. Except where the breach is severe or we are legally prevented, we will warn you first, tell you why, and give you a chance to export your data. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of what you have paid.

14. Changes to these terms

We will update these terms from time to time. Every version carries a version date, shown at the top of this page.

• For material changes (anything that meaningfully reduces your rights or increases your obligations), we will email account holders at least 30 days before the new version takes effect, and ask you to accept it.
• For minor changes, such as fixing a typo or clarifying wording, we simply publish the new version and update the date.
• If you do not want to accept a new version, stop using the service and delete your account before it takes effect. You will not be charged for a renewal after that.

We do not apply changes retroactively to something that already happened.

15. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, and the courts of Montevideo, Uruguay, have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Union or the United Kingdom, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts.

Before anything formal, please email us. Most problems turn out to be a misunderstanding and take one message to fix.

16. Contact

Colocalizations · [email protected]

For anything about personal data, see the Privacy Policy, which explains what we collect, why, and how to exercise your rights.