Barney - Communication Translator
Who we are
Barney is provided by Harness the Spark Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 12936448), with its registered office at Forma House, 40 Bowling Green Lane, Farringdon, London, EC1R 0NE.
In these terms, "we", "our" and "us" mean Harness the Spark Ltd. "You" means the person using the app.
Agreeing to these terms
By creating an account or using Barney, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the app.
These terms work alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with your information. Please read both.
Who can use Barney
Barney is not designed for children. You may use it only if you are:
- 16 or over in the United Kingdom and the European Union
- 13 or over in the United States
You also need to be able to enter into a binding agreement in your own country. If you create an account on behalf of someone who does not meet these requirements, we may close it.
What Barney is, and what it is not
Barney helps two people understand each other better. You record what was said, what you meant by it, and how it was heard, and the app suggests ways to repair the gap between those things.
Barney is not a health service. It does not diagnose anything, it does not treat anything, and it is not a substitute for advice from a doctor, therapist, counsellor or any other qualified professional. Nothing in the app is medical advice.
Barney is not for emergencies. If you or someone else is at risk of harm, contact your local emergency services. In the UK you can call 999, or the Samaritans free on 116 123 at any hour.
Barney is not a record of who anyone is. The traits you record describe communication patterns, not identity. Ticking a trait tells the app how you prefer to give and receive information. It is not a claim or a diagnosis about you, and it should not be read as one by anyone who sees it.
Your account
You are responsible for keeping your account details safe. That means:
- Choosing a password you do not use elsewhere
- Keeping your password to yourself
- Telling us promptly if you think someone else has access to your account
Please give accurate information when you register, and keep it up to date. You may hold one account for yourself. Accounts are personal to you and are not to be shared, sold or transferred.
Connections and shared content
Barney only works when you pair with someone. When you connect with another person, you both take part in a shared record: the translations, warm words and notes that passed between you.
Two things follow from that, and both matter:
- What you write to a connection is visible to that connection. Treat anything you enter as something the other person will read, because they will.
- The shared record belongs to both of you. It is not solely yours to keep or to remove. Where a choice affects the other person's history as well as your own, we tell you so before you make it. See "Deleting your account" below.
You choose, for each connection separately, which of your traits that person can see. Changing that choice for one connection does not change it for any other.
Suggestions generated by a language model
Barney's repair suggestions are generated by an SLM (Small Language Model). The text of the translation you are working on, together with any traits you have chosen to disclose for that conversation, is sent to our AI processor to produce the suggestion. Our Privacy Policy names that processor and explains what it may and may not do with the text.
Please understand what this means in practice:
- Suggestions are drafts, not answers. They are a starting point for you to edit, use or ignore.
- They can be wrong. A model can misread tone, miss context it was never given, or produce something that does not fit your situation at all. You decide what you actually send.
- You are responsible for what you send. Once you pass a suggestion on to another person, it is your message.
We do not guarantee that any suggestion will be accurate, appropriate or helpful in your circumstances.
Your content
You keep ownership of everything you write in Barney. We do not claim it.
You give us permission to store, process and display that content for one purpose only: running the app for you and the people you have connected with. That permission lasts as long as we need it to provide the service, and it ends when the content is deleted.
We do not sell your content, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use your conversations to train any AI model.
Acceptable use
Barney exists to help people communicate more kindly. Please do not use it to:
- Harass, threaten, abuse or intimidate anyone, including the person you are connected with
- Impersonate someone else, or pair with someone by pretending to be a person you are not
- Upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to share
- Attempt to reach another person's account or data
- Probe, disrupt or overload the service, or work around its security
- Copy, scrape or resell any part of the app
- Use the app to build a competing product
If you break these rules we may suspend or close your account. Where the situation allows it, we will tell you why.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself, from Settings inside the app. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. There is no grace period and no way for us to restore an account afterwards, so please be sure before you confirm.
Because the record you built is shared with another person, you choose what happens to it:
- Delete my account only. Everything personal to you is destroyed: your name, email address, password, traits, disclosure choices and notification token. Your connection keeps the conversations you both took part in, and sees "Someone who left" where your name used to be.
- Delete everything, including our shared history. The conversations, warm words and shared notes are deleted for both of you. This removes the other person's copy as well as yours, and they are not asked first.
We may close an account that has broken these terms, or where we are required to by law.
Some information stays in encrypted backups for a short period after deletion, as described in the Privacy Policy, before those backups age out.
Test and preview versions
You may be using Barney through a testing programme such as TestFlight or Google Play testing. If so, please note that test versions are provided for evaluation. They are more likely than a public release to contain defects, to change without notice, or to lose data. Please do not rely on a test version as your only record of anything that matters to you.
Any feedback you send us about the app may be used to improve it, without obligation or payment to you.
Availability
We aim to keep Barney running and useful, but we do not promise that it will be available without interruption or free of faults. We may change features, add them, or withdraw them. We may suspend the service for maintenance, and we may stop offering it altogether.
If we decide to discontinue Barney, we will give you reasonable notice and a chance to export your data first, where it is within our control to do so.
The app is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude any warranties that are not written down here.
Our responsibility to you
Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Your legal rights as a consumer are not affected.
Subject to that, we are not liable for:
- Loss of profit, revenue, business or anticipated savings
- Any harm arising from a decision you made based on a suggestion the app generated
- Anything another person writes, sends or does through the app
- Loss of content, where you have not kept your own copy of something important to you
Where we are liable, our total liability to you is limited to £100, or the amount you have paid us for the app in the twelve months before the claim, whichever is greater. Barney is currently free to use.
Ending these terms
You may stop using Barney at any time by deleting your account.
We may end your access if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the service. The sections that by their nature should survive, including ownership, liability and governing law, continue to apply after your account ends.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms as the app develops or the law changes. When we do, we will update the date at the top of this page and, for anything significant, tell you in the app.
If you keep using Barney after a change takes effect, you are accepting the updated terms. If you do not accept them, please delete your account.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. Any dispute may be brought in the courts of England and Wales.
If you live elsewhere in the UK or in the European Union, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections that apply where you live, and you may bring a claim in your local courts.
Contact us
Questions about these terms, or about anything in the app:
Email: lisa@harnessthespark.com
Post: Harness the Spark Ltd Forma House, 40 Bowling Green Lane Farringdon, London EC1R 0NE United Kingdom
We aim to reply within 30 days.
These Terms of Service are effective as of 9 August 2026.