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Version 2 · Last updated on 2026-09-06
The Terms of Service say what you and we are agreeing to. This page says why they are written that way — what we are trying to build, and the two freedoms we think matter most.
A repository of learnable human knowledge that its users make and its users own — free as in freedom, and free as in beer.
That is an old ambition and an easy one to state. What makes it hard is that most of what people actually want to learn is written by someone else. The rules below are our attempt to be useful about that rather than pretend it away.
The most valuable thing Buboflash accumulates about you is not your cards. It is the record of how you learn — every repetition, every grade, every interval. It is what makes the scheduling work, and it is the thing that would make leaving expensive.
So we do not claim it. You can export it and use it anywhere — the Terms say so in binding words (§ 2.2).
We are not being generous. A tool that holds your learning history hostage has stopped competing on whether it is good, and we would rather compete on whether it is good.
What we do keep is the models, and what the models make of your data — the scheduler that decides when a card comes back; in time, the models that work out what material actually teaches; and what we derive by running them: fitted parameters (including any tuned on your history alone), skill maps, suggestions. That is ours, and it is where the work is. The distinction we are drawing is: what you put in is open to you — everything you wrote and everything you did. What our models make of it is ours. Where a derived thing is worth seeing — what you still remember, what a passage exercises — we show it to you in the product; it is simply not part of the export.
Everything you write on Buboflash belongs to you.
When you make something public — a card, an annotation, a set — it is shared under a licence that lets anyone use it, adapt it and build on it, as long as they credit the author and pass the same freedom on. Which licence depends on where the words came from, and the Terms set it out in § 2.5; the short version is: your own words, CC BY-SA; a verified open source, that source's licence; an unverified page, your judgement, and no licence named by us. The reason a source's licence follows the card is not ours to change: share-alike licences attach to anything adapted from them, and nobody downstream can swap one for another. The moment of publishing says which of the three applies, in those words.
That licensing is the point rather than a formality. A learning repository that could not be copied, corrected or forked would not be a commons; it would be our collection with your labour in it.
Sharing with named people is different, and deliberately so. Showing a document and your notes on it to two colleagues is not publishing them, and it grants no licence (Terms § 2.5). What you show a small circle stays under your control; what you make public joins the commons. The line between the two is one you cross on purpose.
Software is not covered by that — see the Terms — and neither is your learning history, which is simply yours.
Here is the honest part.
Most people come to Buboflash with a book, a paper, or a webpage. You did not write it. Making cards from it, for yourself, is ordinary private study and is the main thing this tool is for. Showing those cards to other people is a different act, because they carry the author's words.
So the default depends on what a card actually carries. The rules are in the Terms, § 3; here they are at a glance:
| what you made | who sees it by default |
|---|---|
| A card you wrote yourself — your own question, your own words | follows your setting; it can be public |
| A card cut from an openly-licensed source we have verified (Wikipedia and its sister projects, to start) | public, carrying that licence and its attribution — and you can keep any page's cards to yourself |
| A card cut from anything else — a book, a paper, a webpage | private |
| An image or audio clip, from anywhere at all | private |
That last row is not caution for its own sake (Terms § 3.5). An article's licence does not extend to every picture in it: a photograph may be separately owned even on a page that is otherwise free to reuse, by someone the article does not name. Until we can check a file's own licence, we assume we cannot. Its limit matches the PDF rule: you can show an image or audio card to named people — a picture with parts hidden for self-testing travels with the document it was cut from — and public is not on the menu. The exception is a file whose own licence we do know: those follow the openly-licensed row (the pronunciation recordings we ship from the Shtooka project are such files).
Where a card came from decides the limit as well as the default: for a document, named people is as far as it goes (Terms § 3.1); for a webpage, you can choose to publish, taking on the judgement that the source permits what you quoted (§ 3.2).
One thing the table cannot show, because it is about a set rather than a card. A card in your own words carries none of the author's expression, which is why it can be public; a few hundred of them that walk a reader through a book chapter by chapter can still carry the book's selection and order, which are the author's work too. Cards in your own words are yours; a set that stands in for the book is a different thing — and only you can tell which you have made, because we do not know what book you had open (Terms § 4.1).
There is no "fair use" to fall back on. "Fair use" is United States law. The exceptions that exist here — quotation, criticism and review, non-commercial research and private study — are narrower, conditional, and not a general permission.
Quite a lot, and it is worth saying plainly rather than only listing restrictions:
Webpages you annotate belong to whoever wrote them. Buboflash reads them the way a browser reads them; we are not affiliated with the sites you visit and we do not redistribute them. Your annotations on them follow section 3.
PDFs you upload are yours to manage: private on upload, and shareable only with named people (§ 3 above; Terms § 3.1). Whether you have the right to share one even with a named few depends on the document, and that is your call to make, not ours to guess.
Some of what you most want to learn is material nobody may republish — a textbook, a paper behind a paywall, your employer's internal documentation.
Buboflash is still the right tool for it. Everything above is about visibility between users; none of it restricts what you may learn privately. The eventual answer for the most sensitive material is Buboflash running on your own machine, where nothing leaves it at all.
For the agreement itself, see the Terms of Service. For what the browser extension can and cannot see, see the extension privacy page.