Terms and Conditions of Service

This document is the contract between you and the operator of Tobia. It describes what Tobia does and does not do, what the other party sees, what happens to what you write and how payments work. It is written to be read: if anything is unclear, contact us before using the service.

1. Who operates Tobia

Tobia is a service of Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea, a sole proprietorship, VAT number 03666510791, with its registered office at Piazza Tommaso Campanella 6, Lamezia Terme (CZ), Italy. For any communication about the service and these terms, contact ciao@tobia.io; for formal communications: andreacurcio@pecaruba.it (certified email, PEC).

In this document, “we” means Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea; “you” means anyone using Tobia; “Tobia” means the tobia.io website and all its features.

2. What Tobia is

Tobia is a software tool. It helps two or more people considering working together — forming a company, joining a project, dividing equity and roles — identify in advance where they are not aligned. Each person answers independently, without seeing anyone else’s answers; once everyone has finished, the answers are compared and Tobia provides a report (Lettura) on where you agree, what information is missing and which conversations are worth having.

Tobia produces information and questions. It does not make decisions, draw up legal instruments or create binding agreements.

3. What Tobia is not

This is the most important section of this document. Tobia:

• is not a mediator: it does not conduct civil or commercial mediation under Italian Legislative Decree 28/2010, is not an ADR or conciliation body, and does not conduct assisted negotiation or arbitration. Its output is not a conciliation record, an arbitral award or an enforceable instrument;
• is not a notary or public official: it does not authenticate signatures, provide a legally certain date enforceable against third parties, or draft or receive deeds of incorporation, articles of association or shareholders’ agreements;
• is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice: it is not registered with any professional body. What you read in the product — including information about clauses, agreements, vesting and governance — is general information, not advice on your particular case. Actual professional services, when needed, are provided by the professionals described in section 12;
• does not provide tax, accounting, financial or investment advice;
• is not a business information agency or a reputational rating or scoring system: it does not collect information about you from external sources, compile dossiers or provide third parties with judgments about people;
• is not an identity verification, background-check or investigation service: it does not establish who you really are, check criminal records or verify qualifications, résumés or shareholdings;
• is not a matching service: it does not introduce you to potential partners, suggest people or evaluate people in the abstract. It evaluates the relationship between people who decide to enter a journey together.

No automated Tobia feature replaces a licensed professional. Decisions — whether to start, not start, sign or not sign — remain yours, and you alone are responsible for their consequences.

4. Acceptance, capacity and role

By using Tobia or creating an account, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the service. You must be at least 18 and have legal capacity.

If you use Tobia for your professional or business activity — as is most often the case when considering the formation of a company — you act as a professional and consumer protections do not apply to you. If you use Tobia for purposes unrelated to any business or professional activity, you act as a consumer and retain all your mandatory rights. If you use Tobia on behalf of a company, you declare that you have authority to bind it, and these terms also bind the company.

5. Your account

• Access is through a link sent to your email address: there are no passwords. Anyone with access to your mailbox can access your Tobia account. Keeping it secure is your responsibility; notify us immediately if you suspect unauthorized access.
• An account is personal and belongs to one natural person. Do not share or transfer it, or use it under a false name.
• The information you enter in your profile (first name, surname, occupation) must be accurate: the whole point of the service is for the other party to know whom they are dealing with.

6. How a journey works

A Tobia journey (a “Tobia”) follows defined steps. In summary:

• Agreement. The person opening the journey accepts its ground rules; an invitee accepts the same rules before joining. The journey exists only when both have accepted them.
• Invitation. The person opening the journey enters the email addresses of those to be invited. Each invitation is a personal link with an expiry date. The first person to accept takes the place; the other invitations lapse.
• Sealed envelope. Each person answers independently, within the allotted time, without seeing the other person’s answers. During this phase you know only one thing about the other party: whether or not they have finished.
• Finalization. When you finalize your answers, they really are final: they can no longer be changed. This is what gives the sealed envelope its meaning.
• Report. When all parties have finalized, their answers are compared and each receives the report. From that point, the other party can see your answers, and you can see theirs.
• Materials and confirmations. There is no sealed envelope here: what you say you bring to the project, the documents you upload and the confirmations you request from third parties are visible to the other party as entered.
• Outcomes. When the journey ends, we ask you to tell us what happened, including months later. Responding is optional.

Timing, deadlines, extensions and steps may change as the product evolves: the version that applies is the one shown in the journey.

7. What the other party sees

You need to understand this rule before writing anything. For Tobia to work, it must relate the statements of different people: without this comparison there can be no report. Accordingly:

• your answers become visible to the other party when all parties have finalized. This is how the service normally works, not an accident;
• disclosure is irreversible. Once the report has been opened, there is no going back: we cannot “undo” what the other party has already seen or erase it from their memory or any copies they have made;
• before the report, nothing is shared except the binary status (“finished” / “not yet”);
• a person confirming one of your skills sees only that skill: the requester’s name and the stated skill. They never see the journey, the answers or the other party;
• a person providing confirmation is visible to the other party with their first name, surname and role, and the other party may contact them outside Tobia.

Practical rule: do not write anything in Tobia that you would not be willing for the other party to read. Keep trade secrets, confidential know-how, code, customer lists and third-party data subject to confidentiality out of Tobia, or protect them in advance through an agreement between you.

8. Confidentiality between the parties

Tobia is not a confidentiality agreement and does not create one. We do not disclose your content to people other than those provided for in the journey, but we cannot guarantee the other party’s conduct: after seeing your answers, they may remember, note, photograph or relay them. If you need a binding confidentiality obligation, sign an agreement between yourselves, outside Tobia, before you begin.

We nevertheless ask you, and you undertake, not to disclose the other parties’ answers and materials outside the journey or use them for purposes other than assessing the proposed collaboration. A breach of this undertaking concerns you and the other party, not us.

9. Your statements and the people you involve

• You are responsible for everything you enter: answers, text, documents, transcribed audio and links. You must have the right to provide it and must not breach others’ rights, confidentiality obligations or trade-secret commitments you have made to others.
• When you enter the email address of a person you wish to invite or ask for confirmation, you are disclosing a third party’s data: you declare that you are entitled to do so and have informed that person. Do not use Tobia to contact someone who has not given you a way to contact them.
• Do not enter special categories of data (health, political or religious views, criminal-record data) relating to yourself or third parties: the service is not designed to process them.
• Tobia does not verify whether your statements are true or who you really are. Proof and confirmation features record that a statement was made at a certain time and from a certain account, not that it is true. No feature constitutes authentication, certification or an attestation with the legal effect of a public deed.

10. How Tobia processes what you write

To provide a report, Tobia must read, classify and relate all parties’ answers, comparing them with one another and with the service’s analysis models. By using Tobia, you authorize us to do this for the time and within the limits necessary to provide the service.

• Some processing uses artificial intelligence systems supplied by third parties who act as our data processors and do not use your content to train their own models.
• Automated output may be incomplete or wrong. It offers points for analysis, not verdicts. You must always read it yourself and discuss it with the other party.
• Tobia does not make automated decisions with legal effects concerning you: it does not exclude you, classify you for third parties or create contractual consequences on anyone’s behalf.
• We may use aggregated and anonymous data derived from journeys (statistics, recurring patterns, reported outcomes) to improve Tobia’s questions and models. Aggregated and anonymous means the data neither contain nor enable anyone to identify you, the other party, your projects or your content.

Details about legal bases, retention and rights are in the privacy policy.

11. The value of Tobia’s output

The report, indicators and suggested conversations have informational and organizational value. They are not an expert assessment, legal or accounting due diligence, a professional evaluation or a prediction. A positive result does not guarantee that a collaboration will work; a negative result does not mean the people involved are untrustworthy.

Technical records (date and time of statements, integrity of content) help reconstruct what was said and when. At present they are not equivalent to a qualified timestamp or qualified electronic signature; if we activate qualified trust services in the future, we will say so expressly in the journey.

12. Lawyers, notaries and accountants working with Tobia

Tobia engages licensed professionals — lawyers, notaries, accountants and other advisers — for work requiring professional expertise: formalizing agreements, corporate instruments, tax obligations and opinions on specific cases. The relationship works as follows:

• professionals work for Tobia. We engage, coordinate and pay them. They are neither our employees nor our partners: they remain independent professionals, registered with their respective professional bodies and subject to their own professional and insurance rules;
• everything goes through Tobia. Requests, documents, schedules, communications and fees relating to this work pass through the platform and are invoiced by Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea. Unless expressly provided for and signed, you do not directly retain the individual professional and owe them no fee;
• technical independence is theirs, as is responsibility for it. We do not interfere with the content of their professional work, which the professional performs in accordance with their expertise, judgment and professional rules. The professional who performed the work is responsible for that content — the accuracy of opinions, instruments, filings and deadlines — under their professional liability and mandatory insurance cover. At your request we will tell you the name, professional body, registration number and insurance-policy details of the professional who worked on your case, so that you can assert your rights directly against them;
• our contract with them. We sign an agreement with each professional that assigns them responsibility for the work performed, requires current professional civil-liability insurance and compliance with confidentiality and the rules of this section, and requires them to indemnify us for the consequences of their breaches. The limitations in these terms in our favor do not reduce what you may claim from them;
• when work leaves the platform. If the professional considers a direct engagement, a legally reserved activity or a public deed necessary, they will tell you. In that case, the relationship is between you and the professional, on their terms, and Tobia is not involved in the engagement or the fee;
• confidentiality and data. Professionals access only what is needed for the requested work, are bound by professional secrecy and are appointed data processors when processing data on our behalf;
• no exclusivity over you, no circumvention of Tobia. Professionals working with us undertake not to use contacts and information obtained through the platform to acquire clients of their own. Likewise, you undertake not to circumvent Tobia: for twelve months after the last piece of work, you will not engage professionals you met through Tobia directly, outside the platform, for work connected to a journey conducted here, unless we give written consent. Professional relationships you already had before Tobia and independently of it remain unrestricted;
• what we are responsible for. We are responsible for what we do: selecting licensed and insured professionals, coordination and the proper transfer of information and documents. We are not responsible for the content or outcome of professional work, which is an obligation of means rather than result and remains the professional’s responsibility as described above. Even when work is carried out as part of the service, the parties agree — also for the purposes of article 1228 of the Italian Civil Code and within the limits of article 1229 — that responsibility for the technical content rests with the professional. You may nevertheless report a problem to us: we will receive the complaint, forward it to the professional and enable you to take action against them.

Nothing in this section makes Tobia a professional practice: activities reserved by law are performed exclusively by people licensed to perform them. If you are a consumer, your mandatory rights remain unaffected: the allocation of responsibility in this section operates only to the extent permitted by law.

13. Permitted and prohibited use

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to use Tobia, limited to assessing a collaboration in which you participate. You must not:

• use Tobia to select, assess or profile people who are not parties to the journey, or for recruitment, employee assessment, creditworthiness, insurance or discriminatory purposes;
• resell, sublicense, publish or distribute to third parties the reports, questions, models or any other service output;
• systematically extract content (scraping, crawling, bulk downloads), copy the question bank or replicate the service;
• decompile, disassemble or attempt to reconstruct how the processing engine works, except where mandatorily permitted by law;
• use Tobia to train or feed third-party artificial intelligence systems;
• create false accounts, impersonate others, circumvent technical limits, overload systems or test their security without our written authorization;
• enter unlawful, defamatory or threatening content, or content that infringes third-party rights.

14. Your content and our property

What you write remains yours. You grant us only the license needed — free of charge, limited to the duration of the service and the purposes described here — to host, process, compare and display your content to the parties in the journey, and to derive aggregated and anonymous statistics from it.

Tobia remains ours. The trademark, name, logo, interface, text, question bank, comparison criteria, report models, code and every element of the service belong to Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea or its licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark and unfair-competition law. No rights are transferred to you beyond the right of use in section 13.

If you send us suggestions, reports or ideas about the product, we may use them freely and without payment, without creating any rights for you.

15. Prices, payments and invoicing

• Some parts of Tobia are free; others are or will become paid features. The price, subject matter and terms of a paid feature are shown to you before payment: you pay only after confirming.
• There are two types of payment: one-time (to unlock a specific result or feature) and recurring (a periodic subscription, automatically renewed unless cancelled).
• Payments are handled by specialized third-party providers. We do not receive or store your card details.
• Prices are in euros. The price shown at checkout is the total amount charged, including for VAT-registered customers. Any applicable VAT is included in that amount and shown on the invoice in accordance with the applicable rules.
• Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea issues the invoices, VAT number 03666510791, including for work described in section 12. If you are an Italian VAT-registered person, you must provide correct and complete tax details (VAT number, recipient code or certified email address) for invoicing through the Sistema di Interscambio. Costs and inconvenience caused by incorrect or missing details are your responsibility.
• If a payment fails or does not go through, we may suspend access to paid features. For subscriptions, we may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice, effective from the next renewal: if you do not agree, cancel before renewal.

16. Withdrawal and refunds

If you are a professional or a company: amounts paid are non-refundable in any form, and there is no right to change your mind. This applies to both one-time payments and subscriptions: the period already started is payable in full, even if you choose not to use it. Cancelling a subscription takes effect at the end of the current period, without a refund for that period or any periods already paid for.

If you are a consumer: in general, you have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract (articles 52 et seq. of the Italian Consumer Code). But Tobia’s features are digital content and services supplied immediately, so:

• at purchase, we ask you to expressly state that you want immediate performance and agree to lose your right of withdrawal once the feature has been supplied. If you make that declaration and the feature is supplied, you can no longer withdraw and the amount is non-refundable;
• for subscriptions, if you withdraw within 14 days after requesting immediate performance, you owe a proportional amount for the service already supplied up to the time you communicate your withdrawal; the remainder is refunded. After 14 days, no refunds are due: cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period, which remains payable in full because the service was made available to you throughout that period;
• to exercise the right of withdrawal when it applies, send a clear communication to ciao@tobia.io within the deadline.

In all cases, legal remedies for a defective or non-conforming service remain available: this section does not limit them.

17. Duration, cancellation and account closure

• The contract lasts for as long as you use Tobia. You may close your account at any time by writing to ciao@tobia.io.
• Closing your account does not erase what the other party has already lawfully seen, or data we must retain to meet legal obligations (for example, tax obligations) or defend ourselves in a potential dispute.
• Journeys never started, invitations never accepted and answers never disclosed are deleted after a period of inactivity, with notice where required. Reports and reported outcomes are retained as described in the privacy policy.
• If a journey is interrupted, withdrawn or expires, its related features cease to be available: any amounts already paid are not refundable for that reason, subject to the limits in section 16.

18. Availability and changes to the service

Tobia is an evolving product. We provide it “as is”, with due care but without a guarantee of uninterrupted operation or guaranteed service levels. We may add, change, limit or discontinue features, including paid features, for technical, legal or product reasons. If a change substantially reduces a feature you are paying for, we will give you reasonable advance notice and you may cancel for the future.

Scheduled maintenance, provider failures (hosting, email, payments, processing), cyberattacks or network outages may make the service temporarily unavailable.

19. Suspension and closure for breaches

We may suspend or close your account, without prior notice in serious cases, if you breach these terms, use Tobia unlawfully or harmfully toward other users, put system security at risk or fail to pay what you owe. Where possible, we will explain why and give you an opportunity to remedy the situation. Serious breaches do not entitle you to any refund.

20. Liability

We are responsible for the operation of the service under Italian law. To the extent permitted, without prejudice to wilful misconduct and gross negligence (article 1229 of the Italian Civil Code) and consumers’ mandatory rights, we are not liable for:

• decisions you make — whether to form a company, sign, invest or refrain from doing so — and their economic, tax, corporate or personal consequences;
• the truth, completeness or accuracy of what the other parties or their references state, or their conduct on or off Tobia;
• how the other party uses information you have made visible to them through the journey;
• errors, inaccuracies or omissions in automated output;
• the content or outcome of the professional services described in section 12: these are obligations of means, not result, and the professional who provided them is responsible under their professional liability and insurance policy;
• indirect damage, lost profits, lost opportunities or goodwill, reputational damage, or loss of data not attributable to our fault;
• interruptions caused by third-party providers, force majeure or events beyond our reasonable control.

Where we are nevertheless found liable, our liability is limited, except in cases of wilful misconduct or gross negligence, to the amounts you actually paid us in the twelve months before the event, and in any case to a maximum of EUR 500 if you paid nothing during that period.

21. Indemnity

If you use Tobia as a professional or on behalf of a company, you indemnify us against claims, damages, penalties and legal expenses arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms or the law, particularly in relation to the content you entered, third-party data you shared and people you invited.

22. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control: network or provider failures, cyberattacks, measures by public authorities, disasters and similar events.

23. Personal data

How we process data — which data, why, for how long, with whom, and how to exercise your rights — is described in the privacy policy and cookie policy, which form an integral part of these terms.

24. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for technical, product or regulatory reasons. We will notify you of material changes by email or within the service at least 15 days in advance. If you continue to use Tobia after the changes take effect, you accept them; if you do not accept them, you may close your account and, for subscriptions, cancel effective on the date the changes take effect. Journeys already started remain governed by the version in effect when the agreement was made, unless changes are required by law.

25. Assignment

You may not assign this contract without our written consent. We may assign it, together with the service, in the event of a contribution, transformation, merger, transfer of a business or business unit, including to a company formed to operate Tobia. We will notify you and, if you are a consumer, you may withdraw without charge if the assignment reduces your protections.

26. Complaints, governing law and jurisdiction

For any problem, first write to ciao@tobia.io: we respond within thirty days. These terms are governed by Italian law.

If you are a consumer, the court of your place of residence or elected domicile in Italy has exclusive jurisdiction, and you may turn to the alternative dispute resolution bodies provided for by law. If you are a professional or a company, the Court of Lamezia Terme has exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

27. Final provisions

• If a provision is invalid, the others remain valid and the invalid provision is replaced by the lawful provision closest to its purpose.
• Not exercising a right immediately does not mean waiving it.
• These terms, together with the privacy and cookie policies, are the entire agreement between us and replace all previous understandings on the same subject.
• The Italian version is authoritative; any translations are provided as a courtesy.

28. Specific approval

If you use Tobia as a professional or on behalf of a company, under articles 1341 and 1342 of the Italian Civil Code you expressly approve the following provisions: 3 (exclusion of professional, notarial and mediation status), 7 (irreversible visibility of content to the other party), 8 (absence of a confidentiality obligation between the parties), 12 (professionals engaged by Tobia, channeling of relationships and prohibition on circumvention for twelve months), 13 (use restrictions and prohibitions), 15 (prices and price changes), 16 (exclusion of refunds and withdrawal), 17 (closure and deletion), 18 (absence of guarantees and service levels, changes to or interruption of the service), 19 (suspension and closure for breaches), 20 (exclusions and limitation of liability), 21 (indemnity), 24 (unilateral changes to the terms), 25 (assignment of the contract), 26 (exclusive jurisdiction of Lamezia Terme).

29. Contact details

Alfatauri di Curcio Andrea — Piazza Tommaso Campanella 6, Lamezia Terme (CZ) — VAT number 03666510791 — ciao@tobia.io — PEC andreacurcio@pecaruba.it.