Acceptable use

Public data about people is still data about people. Whether collecting it is legitimate depends in part on what it is used for, so these are contractual prohibitions rather than suggestions — and they are what the public data notice relies on when it says the processing is proportionate.

• Build or train biometric identification systems. No facial recognition, no face matching, no voice identification, no gait or other biometric templates, from any media the API returns.
• Surveil, track or profile individuals. Monitoring a specific private person’s activity, movements, associations or opinions over time is out of scope, whatever the stated purpose.
• Harass, stalk, dox or intimidate. Including assembling a dossier on someone, publishing their whereabouts, or targeting them for abuse.
• Re-identify or de-anonymise. Do not combine this data with other sources to identify people who are not identified in it.
• Resell personal data. You may build a product on this API. You may not operate a people-search, background-check or dossier service on it, or sell the personal information of the individuals in a response as a product in itself.
• Discriminate unlawfully. Do not use it to make or inform decisions about credit, housing, insurance, employment or benefits for an identified person.
• Target children. Do not use it to collect data about people you know or believe to be children.
• Attack anyone. Not the platforms, not us, not a third party. No using the API as a load generator, and no attempting to circumvent the rate limits, credit caps or endpoint restrictions attached to your key.

The same line binds us, or it would be worth nothing:

• Public, logged-out data only. We hold no account credentials for any platform, use no logged-in sessions and no cookies belonging to a person. If a feature would require signing in, we do not build it.
• Public pages, not private profiles. On platforms that distinguish them — Facebook, for instance — we read public Pages.
• No inference sold as measurement. Where a value is derived rather than published by the platform, it is labelled as derived. We declined to build an audience demographics endpoint for exactly this reason: deriving a population statistic from a follower sample yields an estimate, and a field that presents it as a measurement is dishonest whatever the surface.

We may suspend or terminate the account. A suspended account is served no data and charged nothing while suspended. Where we are obliged to report something, we will.

If you think someone is using this service against this policy, tell us at support@truescrape.com.