Terms of Service

1. Who this agreement is between

This agreement is between you (or the organisation you represent, together “you”) and CSA APPS, the provider of Digital Footprint (“we”, “us”). By creating an account or using the API you accept these terms. If you are accepting on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

2. What the service is, and what it is not

Digital Footprint checks whether an email address, phone number or username is associated with accounts on public platforms, and reports what it found. It returns observations, with the method and timestamp behind each one. It does not return verdicts.

Specifically, the service is not, and must not be relied on as:

• — a consumer report, credit report, or background check (see section 6);
• — identity verification, identity proofing, or proof that a person is who they claim to be;
• — a determination that anyone has committed fraud or any other wrongdoing;
• — a complete picture. An absent result means we could not confirm something, never that it does not exist.

A result is one input to a decision you make. The decision, and the responsibility for it, are yours.

3. Your account

You must give accurate information at signup, including the use case you declare. You are responsible for keeping your API keys secret and for everything done with them, whether or not you authorised it. Tell us immediately if a key is exposed; you can revoke and reissue keys yourself from the dashboard at any time.

Free trial usage is a fixed lifetime allowance, pooled across accounts sharing a company email domain. Creating multiple accounts to extend that allowance is a breach of these terms.

4. Acceptable use

You may build commercial products on this API and charge your own customers for them. Reselling access, embedding results in your own product, and serving them to your users are all permitted, provided the usage is metered through your own account and you remain responsible for what your users do with it.

At signup you declare the purpose you are using the service for: fraud prevention, AML and compliance, KYC, trust and safety, cybersecurity, recruitment screening, and the other categories listed in that form. That declaration is part of this agreement. You may use the service for the purpose you declared and for materially similar risk, compliance, and security purposes, and not for anything else.

You must have a lawful basis for every query you run, and you must comply with the data protection law that applies to you, including, where relevant, the GDPR and the UK GDPR. Where those laws require you to inform the people whose data you process, or to complete an assessment before processing it, that obligation is yours and we cannot discharge it for you.

5. Prohibited use

You must not use the service, or permit anyone else to use it through your account, for:

• — Fraud, impersonation, or identity theft. Including building or enriching profiles used to impersonate someone, take over an account, target a phishing or social-engineering campaign, or open accounts in another person’s name.
• — Stalking, harassment, or surveillance of individuals. Including doxxing, locating or monitoring a person against their wishes, intimate-partner surveillance, or building a dossier on someone in a personal capacity rather than a business one.
• — Unlawful discrimination. Any use in deciding employment, housing, credit, insurance, education, or any other eligibility, on any basis prohibited by applicable law.
• — Regulated eligibility decisions. See section 6.
• — Wholesale extraction. Systematically querying the service in order to accumulate a copy of its results as a standalone dataset, or to stand up a substitute lookup service. Building your own product on top of the API and charging for it is expressly allowed, see section 13.
• — Circumventing limits. Exposing an API key to your own end users rather than calling us from your backend, sharing a key with another Digital Footprint customer, spreading usage across accounts to pool allowances, or working around rate limits or plan caps by any means.
• — Anything illegal. Any use that breaks the law that applies to you, or that breaks the terms of the platforms whose public surfaces are being checked.

This list is illustrative, not exhaustive. We decide, acting reasonably, whether a use breaches this section, and we do not have to prove harm before acting on it.

6. Not a consumer reporting agency

We are not a consumer reporting agency, and the service is not a consumer report or an investigative consumer report as those terms are defined by the US Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) or any equivalent law elsewhere. The data is not assembled, verified, or maintained to any of those standards.

You must not use the service, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing anyone’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other purpose regulated under the FCRA or its equivalents. If you need data for those decisions, use an FCRA-compliant provider. This restriction applies regardless of what you declared at signup.

7. You are responsible for your queries and your decisions

You choose what to look up and what to do with the answer. As between you and us, you are the controller of the personal data in your queries and results, and you are solely responsible for:

• — having a lawful basis and, where required, a completed assessment for each query;
• — every decision, action, or omission you base on a result, including declining someone, closing an account, or reporting someone;
• — any consequence of treating an unconfirmed or absent result as though it were confirmed;
• — the use anyone within your organisation makes of your API keys.

We do not review your queries before they run, and running one is not an endorsement of the purpose behind it.

8. Accuracy and availability

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We build it to report only what we can actually establish, and to say so plainly when we cannot, but we do not warrant that any result is accurate, current, or complete. Third-party sources change without notice, results may be served from cache with the timestamp shown, and a platform may go dark at any time.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties not expressly stated here, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free operation and we offer no service level commitment on self-serve plans.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, data, goodwill, or business opportunity, however caused.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for any loss arising from fraud, financial crime, or any other unlawful act committed by you, by your users, or by any third party, whether or not the service was used in connection with it. We supply observations about public data; we do not control who queries them or what is done with the answer.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to this agreement, across all claims combined, is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD 100.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by us. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only to the extent permitted.

10. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless against any claim, demand, loss, liability, penalty, or cost (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party, including a person whose data you looked up, a platform, or a regulator, and arising from your use of the service, your breach of these terms, or your breach of any applicable data protection or consumer protection law.

11. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your account immediately, without refund, if we reasonably believe you have breached sections 4, 5, or 6, if your use threatens the integrity or availability of the service, or if we are required to by law. Where it is safe and lawful to do so we will tell you why.

You may stop using the service and close your account at any time. See the refund and cancellation policy for what happens to a paid plan.

12. Fees and billing

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly, at the price shown at checkout. Payments are processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd, who act as merchant of record and are the seller for those transactions; their terms apply to the transaction itself.

Plan caps are enforced. Exceeding a cap stops further lookups until the next period rather than generating an overage charge, so a runaway integration cannot produce a bill you did not expect. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice, effective at your next renewal.

13. Our intellectual property

We own the service, the API, the documentation, and everything in them. While your account is in good standing you get a non-exclusive, revocable right to use the API for your declared purpose, including the right to incorporate results into your own product and to make them available to your own customers, commercially or otherwise.

That right covers results as they are used and displayed in your product. It does not extend to republishing the accumulated results as a standalone dataset, or to using them to build a service that substitutes for this one. You keep ownership of the queries you send, and you remain responsible under section 7 for everything your own customers do with what you pass on to them.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For material changes we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email to the address on your account, and the “last updated” date above will change. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms.

We may transfer this agreement, together with your account, to an affiliate or to a successor in connection with a reorganisation, merger, or sale of the business. Your rights under this agreement are unaffected by such a transfer, and we will tell you when it happens. You may not transfer your account to anyone else without our written consent.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force, and nothing here removes a mandatory protection given to you by the consumer law of the country you live in.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms, or reports of misuse: sales@digifootprint.dev.