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Legal

Review Policy

Last updated: 25 August 2026

Reviews are the point of LivZio. This policy sets out who may write one, what a review may and may not contain, how we moderate before publishing, and — the part designers ask about most — what happens when a designer disagrees with what a homeowner has written.

In short

  • Reviews are the personal experience and opinion of the homeowner who wrote them. They are not statements by LivZio.
  • We moderate every review before it is published, against the rules in this policy.
  • We do not remove a review because it is negative, or because the designer says it is unfair.
  • We are not a court. We do not decide who is right about what happened on your site.
  • A dispute about the underlying project is between the homeowner and the designer. Designers may reply publicly, and may take up any legal claim directly with the reviewer.
  • We remove content that breaks these rules, and we act on valid court or government orders.

This summary is for convenience only. The full sections below are what apply.

1.Why this policy exists

Interior work in India is bought largely on word of mouth, and the homeowner is usually spending a significant share of their savings with someone they cannot easily check. LivZio exists so that experience can be shared and read before the money is committed. That only works if reviews are honest, if they come from people who actually engaged the designer, and if a designer cannot make an inconvenient review disappear. This policy is how we hold those three lines. It applies to every review, and to every rating that feeds a LivScore. This policy is written to be read alongside our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines and Takedown Policy. Where this policy and the Terms differ on a review-specific question, this policy governs.

2.Who may write a review

You may write a review if you personally engaged the designer or firm for interior work at a home you own or occupy, and you are writing about that engagement. That includes work that is complete, work in progress, and work that was abandoned or terminated part-way — provided you say clearly which it is. It also includes an engagement that ended at the quotation or advance stage, if you are describing only what actually happened between you. You must be at least 18 years old. You may not write a review if: • You did not engage the designer yourself and are writing from someone else's account of it • You work for, own part of, or are related to the designer or a competing firm • You have been paid, discounted, gifted or otherwise induced to write it — by anyone, in either direction • You are writing about a designer you have never transacted with, to move their rating One review per designer per project. If your view changes later, update the review you already wrote rather than adding another.

3.Opinion, and the difference between saying and proving

This is the most important section of this policy, both for your protection and ours. A review is your account of your own experience and your honest opinion of it. Opinion is broad and it is yours: that the finish looked poor to you, that you felt ignored, that you would not hire them again, that the money did not feel well spent. You are entitled to say all of that, plainly, and we will publish it. A statement of fact is different. "The kitchen was delivered eleven weeks late" is a fact — checkable, and one you should be able to point to something for. "He cheated me" is not a description of your experience; it is an allegation of dishonest conduct, and in India that is the kind of statement a person can be made to answer for in court. So write what happened to you, and how you found it: • Instead of "they use fake materials", write what you were quoted, what was installed, and how you know they differ • Instead of "he is a fraud", write what you paid, what you received, and what is still outstanding • Instead of "they steal advances", write the amount, the date, and what happened when you asked The first version in each pair is an accusation we may have to remove. The second is a stronger review, more useful to the next homeowner, and far more defensible — because it is what you actually saw. We do not verify the truth of what you tell us, and we cannot. We were not on your site. Publishing your review is not LivZio endorsing it as fact. It remains your statement, and you are expected to stand behind it.

4.Allegations of criminal or dishonest conduct

Accusations of cheating, fraud, theft, forgery, criminal breach of trust or similar carry consequences beyond a bad rating, and we treat them as a separate category. You may describe what happened to you, including that money was taken and work was not delivered, and you may say what you believe about it. What you may not do is assert as established fact that a person committed a crime, when no court has found so. Where a review contains such an allegation we may: • Ask you to restate it as your own account and belief rather than as settled fact • Publish the factual part — amounts, dates, what was and was not delivered — and remove the characterisation • Decline to publish it, if the allegation cannot be separated from the account If you have filed a police complaint or a case, you may say that you have done so and what stage it is at, because that is a verifiable fact about your own conduct. Do not state the outcome of proceedings that have not concluded. This is not us protecting designers. It is us keeping you, the reviewer, out of a defamation suit you would have to defend personally.

5.What we do not publish

We refuse or remove reviews containing: Authenticity failures • Reviews written by the designer, their staff, their family, or anyone acting for them • Reviews written by a competitor, or by anyone in the trade about a rival • Reviews written in exchange for payment, discount, gift, referral or any other benefit — including a benefit offered to change or withdraw an existing review • Coordinated submissions intended to move a rating in either direction • Reviews of an engagement that never happened Harm to people • Abuse, threats, intimidation, or targeted harassment • Content attacking someone's religion, caste, region, gender, sexuality, disability or similar • Obscene or sexually explicit material Privacy • Personal information about individuals — home address, phone number, email, Aadhaar or other identity numbers, bank or UPI details — whether the designer's staff, site workers, or anyone else • Photographs or screenshots in which another person's personal details are legible and unredacted • Private correspondence reproduced in a way that exposes a third party's personal data The firm is fair to name. A named individual site supervisor, their personal phone number, or their family is not. Content problems • Unverifiable assertions of criminality, as set out above • Material copied from elsewhere, or that infringes someone's copyright • Commentary unrelated to the interior engagement — politics, personal grievances, general rants • Advertising, solicitation, or links to your own or another business • Impersonation of another homeowner, the designer, or LivZio

6.Photographs of your home

Photographs are often the most useful part of a review, and also the most sensitive, so they have their own rules. You may upload photographs of work carried out at your home. By doing so you confirm you took them or have the right to share them. Before you upload, consider that a photograph of your own home can identify where you live — a visible flat number, a nameplate, a society board, a view from the window. Remove or obscure anything you would not want a stranger to have. Do not upload photographs showing other people's faces without their agreement, or documents with personal details left legible. A designer may hold copyright in their own design drawings and renders. Photographs you took of the physical work in your home are yours to share; the designer's drawings generally are not, unless your contract says otherwise. We do not currently display uploaded files publicly. They are used by our moderators to assess the review, and are stored so that they are not accessible to other users.

7.What we verify — and what we do not

We would rather be exact about this than impressive, because a verification claim we cannot support is worse than none. What we do: • Every review is read by a human moderator before it appears. Nothing publishes automatically. • We check the review against this policy — authenticity signals, prohibited content, whether allegations are stated as experience or as fact. • We record what supporting material a reviewer chose to attach, and moderators may take it into account. • Where a review is submitted from an account, that account has been authenticated by email, Google or mobile number. What we do not do, today: • We do not verify your identity against a government ID. • We do not check society or municipal records to confirm you live where you say. • We do not require documentary proof of the engagement, and we do not inspect uploaded documents to confirm they are genuine. • We do not verify the accuracy of what a review says happened. We are working towards the author-traceability practices described in IS 19000:2022, the Bureau of Indian Standards specification for online consumer reviews, and towards requiring an authenticated account for every submission. We will describe those changes here when they are in place rather than in advance. Reviews that have completed moderation are labelled as moderated. That label means a person applied this policy to it. It does not mean we established that the events described occurred.

8.How moderation works

A submitted review enters a moderation queue and is assessed against this policy. The possible outcomes are: • Published — the review meets this policy and appears on the designer's profile and in aggregate scores • Held — we need to look further, or have asked the reviewer to restate something • Rejected — the review breaks this policy and will not be published We aim to complete moderation within a few working days. Volume, and the care some reviews need, mean we do not guarantee a fixed turnaround. We may edit a review only to remove material that breaches this policy — a phone number, a name that should not be there — and never to change its substance or its rating. Where the offending part cannot be separated from the review, we reject it rather than rewrite it. You may update or withdraw your own review at any time from My Reviews. A withdrawn review is removed from the designer's profile and from their scores.

9.If you are a designer and you dispute a review

You may tell us a review breaks this policy, and we will look at it properly. What follows is how we decide, stated plainly so that it is not a surprise later. We are neutral, and we stay neutral. We do not take sides between a homeowner and a designer about what happened on a project. We were not there. We have no power to compel documents, examine a site, or hear witnesses, and it would not be honest to pretend that reading two accounts lets us determine which is true. We give limited weight to material supplied by the party who wants the review gone. A completion certificate, a signed handover note, a settlement letter or a WhatsApp thread produced by the person asking us to remove a criticism cannot be tested by us — we cannot confirm it is complete, that it is genuine, or the circumstances in which a homeowner signed it. This is not a judgment about you. It is a limit on what we can responsibly conclude. A contract term does not bind us. If your agreement with the homeowner contains a non-disparagement or confidentiality clause, that is a matter between you and them. We are not a party to it, we cannot assess whether it is enforceable or whether it was fairly agreed, and we will not enforce it by removing a review. No one can pay to have a review removed, moved, or hidden. Not a listed designer, not an advertiser, not a partner. This applies without exception, and any commercial arrangement we enter into will say so expressly. Being negative is not a ground for removal. Neither is the review being one-sided, nor your disagreeing with the homeowner's judgement of your work. What we will remove: • Content that breaks this policy — the categories above, applied to you as they are to anyone • Reviews we conclude on the evidence available to us are not genuine • Content we are required to remove by a valid order of a court or a competent government authority Indian law is consistent with this position. Following Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, an intermediary is required to remove third-party content on a court order or a lawful government direction — not on a private party's assertion that content is defamatory. A legal notice sent to us is not itself such an order. If you believe a review is defamatory, that claim lies against the person who wrote it. You are free to pursue it. We will comply with any resulting order that is properly served on us.

10.Your right to reply

The remedy we do offer, and the one that serves you best, is a public response. Any designer named in a review may submit a response, which we publish alongside the review. The reply is yours and is attributed to you. No one else may comment on a review, so you have the last word on it. To submit a response, write to grievance@livzio.in from an address you can show is connected to the business, identifying the review and setting out your reply. A public response mechanism inside the product is not yet built; until it is, we will publish responses received this way. Responses are held to the same standards as reviews. In particular, do not include the homeowner's personal details — their full name where the review did not use it, their flat number, phone or email. Responses that breach this are removed. In our experience a measured reply that sets out your side does more for a reader than the review it answers. A demand that the review be taken down does the opposite.

11.Soliciting and manipulating reviews

You may tell your customers that LivZio exists and that they are welcome to review you. What you may not do is put a thumb on the scale. Prohibited: • Offering payment, a discount, a gift, a referral fee or any other benefit for writing a review • Offering any benefit for changing, withdrawing or refraining from writing a review • Asking only satisfied customers to review you while steering unhappy ones elsewhere — review gating • Writing reviews of yourself, or having staff, family or associates do so • Reviewing your competitors • Pressuring a homeowner to remove a review, whether through repeated contact, withholding work or documents, or threatening legal action over an honest account Where we find manipulation, our response escalates: a warning; a formal notice to stop; a notice displayed on your public profile telling readers what we found; removal of any verification indicator; and removal of the listing. We may also act where a designer uses legal threats against a homeowner to suppress an honest review. Depending on the circumstances, that may itself be noted on your profile. Offering or accepting consideration for reviews may also engage the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the CCPA's endorsement guidelines, which is a matter between you and the regulator.

13.Complaints about this policy or a decision

If you disagree with a moderation decision — as a homeowner whose review was rejected, or as a designer whose complaint was declined — you may escalate it to our Grievance Officer, whose details are below and in our Takedown Policy. We acknowledge grievances within 24 hours and dispose of them within 7 days, under Rule 3(2) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 as amended in 2026. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, you may appeal within 30 days to a Grievance Appellate Committee constituted under Rule 3A of those Rules, online at https://gac.gov.in. We comply with the Committee’s orders. You may also pursue any other remedy available to you in law.

Grievance Officer

Published under Rule 3(2) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

Name
Poovarasi Parthipan
Designation
Grievance Officer & Co-founder
Email
grievance@livzio.in
Address
Tower 3, 621, S&P Courtyard, Kamarajar Street, Kil Ayanambakkam, Chennai 600095, Tamil Nadu, India
Response
Acknowledged within 24 hours; disposed of within 7 days

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