Acceptable Use Policy — Lounge & Co.

🚧 DRAFT — Pre-launch counsel review required. This document is a working draft authored by Lounge & Co. internal team on 2026-05-17 as part of the pre-launch legal-doc cascade. Do not publish without counsel review. Estimated counsel-review cost: ~$2–4k (paired with COMMUNITY_GUIDELINES.md and MODERATION_POLICY.md).

Effective: [PENDING LAUNCH DATE] · Last revised: 2026-05-17 (draft v1)

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1. Purpose

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) defines the conduct expected of all Lounge & Co. members (consumers paying subscription tiers), venue subscribers (B2B), and any other party using the Lounge & Co. platform (collectively, “Users”). It is a binding contract supplemental to the Member Terms of Service and the Venue DPA Template.

Violations are enforced under the procedures in MODERATION_POLICY.md.

2. Eligibility requirements

To use the Lounge & Co. platform, you must:

• Be at least 21 years of age (verified at signup via Token of Trust).
• Reside in the United States (verified via IP geofence at signup).
• Have a valid email address you control.
• Provide accurate identity information during Token of Trust verification. Providing false identity information is a material breach.
• Not be subject to any prior account suspension or ban from Lounge & Co.

3. Prohibited content

The following categories of content are prohibited on the Lounge & Co. platform — in posts, comments, ratings, direct messages (DMs), images, profile photos, venue listings, event descriptions, or any other surface where members or venues can publish content:

Editorial discretion. Member Content reflects the views of the Member who posted it, not those of Lounge & Co. Our decisions to host, rank, label, remove, or decline content are our own editorial judgments and do not make any Member Content our speech.

3.1 Illegal content

• Content that violates federal, state, or local U.S. law.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — zero tolerance; reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
• Content that infringes copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property rights. Copyright claims are handled via our DMCA designated agent; members who are the subject of repeated validated infringement notices are subject to the repeat-infringer policy in §5.8.
• Content that facilitates illegal sale or distribution of controlled substances, including unlawful tobacco or alcohol sales.

3.2 Restricted-substance commerce

• No solicitation of tobacco or alcohol product sales through Lounge & Co. Per BUSINESS_MODEL.md §0.1, the platform does not facilitate sale, shipping, or payment for tobacco or alcohol products. Members posting offers to sell, trade, or ship tobacco/alcohol products are in breach of this AUP regardless of medium (posts, DMs, venue listings).
• This does NOT prohibit content about tobacco or alcohol products (reviews, tasting notes, photos of consumption) — those are the core of the platform. Only commerce solicitation is prohibited.
• No health, therapeutic, or reduced-risk claims about tobacco, nicotine, or alcohol products. Members may not post health, therapeutic, medical, safety, cessation, or comparative-risk claims about tobacco, nicotine, or alcohol products (for example, that a product is safer, healthier, lower-risk, or has medical or wellness benefit). Subjective discussion of taste, aroma, draw, and experience is permitted; claims of physiological benefit or reduced risk are not. This reinforces BUSINESS_MODEL.md §0.1 — member UGC may not assert what the platform itself is barred from claiming.

3.3 Harassment and abuse

• Targeted harassment, threats of violence, or intimidation directed at any User.
• Hate speech based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
• Doxxing — publishing another User’s private information without consent.
• Stalking patterns — repeated unwanted contact after a User has declined or blocked.

3.4 Spam and abuse of platform features

• Bulk messaging, mass DM solicitations, or use of the DM Requests inbox to bypass tier-graduated rate limits.
• Coordinated inauthentic behavior — coordinated networks of accounts artificially inflating engagement on any content, venue, or member.
• Scraping, automated harvesting, or other unauthorized programmatic access to Lounge & Co. data.
• Impersonation of another Member, Venue, public figure, or Lounge & Co. itself.

3.5 Sexually explicit content

• Nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit imagery is prohibited regardless of the member’s age verification. (Cigar and spirits photography that depicts consumption in tasteful, lifestyle contexts is permitted; explicit sexual content is not.)

3.6 Violent or graphic content

• Depictions of real-world violence, self-harm, or graphic injury.
• Glorification or promotion of violence, terrorism, or organized criminal activity.

3.7 Misleading content

• False or misleading content presented as factual (deepfakes of real people without consent; falsified reviews; impersonation of Lounge & Co. staff or venue representatives).
• Content that falsely suggests endorsement by Lounge & Co. or a venue.

3.8 User-report categories (in-app surface)

The in-app Report affordance (every post, comment, DM, profile, and venue page) exposes the following seven categories. These are the exact strings the report API accepts (POST /api/me/reports); the moderation queue stores them as the category enum verbatim. Drift between this enumeration and the code is caught by the schema-test regression guard in packages/db/test/schema.test.ts.

1. Harassment / Bullying (harassment_bullying) — surfaces §3.3 (Harassment and abuse).
2. Spam (spam) — surfaces §3.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features).
3. Off-topic (off_topic) — surfaces §3.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features), narrow cut-out for category-mismatch reports that aren’t full-spam.
4. Illegal content (illegal_content) — surfaces §3.1 (Illegal content).
5. Impersonation (impersonation) — surfaces §3.4 (Spam and abuse of platform features, impersonation sub-clause) + §3.7 (Misleading content).
6. Hate speech (hate_speech) — surfaces §3.3 (Harassment and abuse, hate speech sub-clause).
7. Other (other) — required free-text reason; routed to the same triage queue with the explanation attached.

Sexually-explicit (§3.5), violent / graphic (§3.6), and other content categories not present above are caught by the Hive auto-classifier (post-N6) and the founder-triage flow routes any “Other” report claiming such content into the same critical-content path described in MODERATION_POLICY.md §3.2.

4. Prohibited member behavior

In addition to the prohibited content categories above:

• Age-verification fraud. Providing false identity, attempting to bypass the Token of Trust verification, or sharing your verified account with a person under 21. This is treated as a material breach with no warning.
• Subscription fraud. Chargebacks without legitimate cause, payment method fraud, multi-account creation to evade tier limits, or any other attempt to abuse subscription billing.
• Reverse engineering. Reverse engineering, decompiling, or attempting to extract source code or proprietary algorithms from the Lounge & Co. apps, including the concierge’s prompt content or ranking signals.
• Circumvention of moderation. Creating new accounts to evade a suspension or ban; using VPNs or proxies to evade the US-only geofence.
• Misuse of venue access. Misrepresenting affiliation with a venue you do not work at; impersonating venue staff; misusing private-venue access granted via approval.

5. Enforcement actions

When this AUP is violated, Lounge & Co. (acting through its trust & safety team) may take any of the following actions, in any order or combination, based on severity:

Lounge & Co. determines severity using:

1. The nature of the content/behavior (zero-tolerance categories vs subjective categories).
2. The User’s history (first-time vs repeat offender).
3. The impact on other Users (private breach vs viral harm).
4. Context (intent, surrounding posts, response to warnings).

5.8 Repeat infringers

In accordance with 17 U.S.C. § 512(i), Lounge & Co. maintains and reasonably implements a policy for the termination of members who are repeat copyright infringers. Members who are the subject of repeated validated copyright-infringement notices will have their accounts terminated. Three (3) validated DMCA takedown notices within a rolling 12-month period, where no successful counter-notice is filed, will result in permanent account termination. Lounge & Co. does not reinstate terminated repeat infringers.

A strike counts against you only when a takedown notice is validated and the content is removed or disabled — an unvalidated or withdrawn notice does not. If you file a successful counter-notice and your content is restored, the related strike is removed and no longer counts toward this threshold.

The operational implementation of this policy — notice validation, counter-notice handling, the strike counter, and the termination decision — is described in MODERATION_POLICY.md §7.5 and §5.1. Copyright takedown notices and counter-notices are submitted to our DMCA designated agent at dmca@lounge.co per the DMCA designated agent process.

6. Appeals

A User who receives an enforcement action may appeal within 30 days via the in-app appeals form (or by emailing appeals@lounge.co / Bcoulter@aoshi-labs.com if the form is inaccessible). The appeals queue is reviewed by a trust & safety reviewer who was NOT involved in the original action — this reviewer-separation rule is enforced in code at the appeals decision endpoint, not just documented here.

Appeals must include:

• The account email.
• The specific action being appealed.
• The User’s account of what happened.
• Any relevant context (screenshots, links, witness Members).

Appeals are resolved within 14 days of submission. The reviewer’s decision is final and not subject to further appeal within the platform (does not affect the User’s external legal rights).

7. Venue-level enforcement (B2B subscribers)

Venues that subscribe to Lounge & Co. (Free Claimed, Pro, or Estate tiers) are bound by the AUP as it applies to:

• Content the venue publishes (venue page, event listings, catalog descriptions).
• Conduct by accounts associated with the venue (owner, staff).
• Content moderation within their workspace — venues are expected to flag clear AUP violations they encounter (e.g., a member posting CSAM in their venue’s feed). Venues are NOT expected to do platform-level moderation; that remains Lounge & Co.’s responsibility.

Venue-level AUP breaches are escalated through the venue admin contact and may result in:

• Removal of violating venue content.
• Suspension of venue subscription (no refund pro-ration past the breach date).
• Termination of the venue’s claimed status (page reverts to auto-stub).
• Removal of the venue from Lounge & Co. entirely in severe cases (per the DPA termination clause).

8. Reporting violations

To report content or behavior that violates this AUP:

• Member-side: in-app report buttons on every post, comment, DM, and member profile. Reports are routed to the moderation queue per MODERATION_POLICY.md with a 24-hour SLA.
• Venue-side: venue admins can flag violations within their workspace via the admin console; flagged items escalate to the central moderation queue.
• External: email trust@lounge.co for reports that don’t fit an in-app surface (e.g., off-platform harassment by a Lounge & Co. member toward another).
• DMCA copyright claims: see the dedicated DMCA designated agent process.

9. Changes to this AUP

Lounge & Co. may revise this AUP. Material revisions will be announced via in-app notification + email at least 30 days before they take effect. Continued use of the platform after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised AUP.

For non-material revisions (clarifications, typo fixes, formatting), the revised AUP takes effect immediately with notice in the revision history below.

10. Revision history

11. Contact

• General inquiries: Bcoulter@aoshi-labs.com
• Trust & safety: Bcoulter@aoshi-labs.com
• Appeals: Bcoulter@aoshi-labs.com
• DMCA designated agent: see Copyright Office registry entry for Lounge & Co. (registration pre-launch)
• Legal: Bcoulter@aoshi-labs.com