Acceptable Use Policy - ScrapeBadger

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) forms part of the ScrapeBadger Terms of Service (the “Terms”) and applies to every use of the Services through any Access Channel: the dashboard, the APIs, the SDKs and CLI, the MCP server, marketplace integrations, and any automated agent acting on your behalf. Capitalised terms have the meaning given in the Terms. If you breach this AUP we may act as described in section 10 and in the Terms.

1. The basic rule

You may use the Services only for lawful purposes, in a way that respects the rights of any third parties and others, and the integrity of the Sources you request data from. You, not ScrapeBadger, choose the Sources, formulate the Requests and decide what happens to the Output, and you are responsible for those choices. When in doubt, seek legal advice before making a Request; we cannot give it.

2. Prohibited purposes

You must not use the Services or any Output for or in connection with:

(a) any activity that is unlawful in the Republic of Lithuania, in the country where you are established, or in any country where you use the Services or the Output;

(b) infringing or misappropriating the intellectual-property, database, trade-secret, privacy, personality, publicity or contractual rights of any person;

(d) discrimination against individuals on the basis of protected characteristics, or profiling that produces such discrimination;

(e) fraud, deception, phishing, impersonation, identity theft, or the creation of fake accounts, fake reviews, fake engagement or misleading content;

(f) sending unsolicited commercial communications (“spam”) by email, SMS, messaging platforms, comments or any other means, or building or selling contact lists for that purpose;

(g) ad fraud, click fraud, search-ranking manipulation, review manipulation, or the generation of invalid traffic or engagement;

(h) creating, distributing or facilitating malware, or gaining or attempting to gain unauthorised access to any system, network, account or data;

(i) child sexual abuse material, sexual content involving minors, or the collection of data about children for any purpose that is unlawful or harmful to them;

(j) terrorism, violent extremism, weapons proliferation, human trafficking, or activities of organisations subject to sanctions;

(k) any purpose that is prohibited by an applicable sanction, embargo or export-control restriction; or

(l) any activity that we reasonably determine, acting in good faith, is likely to expose ScrapeBadger to legal liability, regulatory action or serious reputational harm;

(m) collecting, using or disclosing personal data in violation of applicable data-protection or privacy laws, including where you lack a valid legal basis or fail to provide any notice required by law;

(n) collecting or using passwords, authentication credentials, financial account information, government-issued identification numbers or other highly sensitive information, except where expressly permitted by applicable law and the Agreement.

3. Rules for Requests to Sources

3.1 Public content only. You may request only content that the Source makes available to the general public without authentication. You must not use the Services to obtain content or functionality that you are not entitled to access, including content behind a login, paywall, subscription, invitation or private group, or to circumvent authentication, payment or similar restrictions that limit access to authorised users of a Source.

3.2 No credentials. You must not provide to the Services, or configure the Services to use, any username, password, session cookie, token, API key or other credential belonging to you or anyone else for any Source.

3.3 No harm to Sources. You must not design Requests in a manner or volume intended to, or reasonably likely to, disrupt, degrade, overload or deny service to a Source or any network, or to interfere with a Source’s operations. We manage request rates on our side; you must not attempt to defeat those controls.

3.4 No systematic database reconstruction. You must not use the Services to extract or re-utilise all or a substantial part of a Source’s database, to mirror or replicate a Source, or to build a substitute for a Source or a competing database, as described in more detail in the Content Policy.

3.5 Restricted Sources. You must not direct Requests at: (a) Sources that we have blocked or listed as restricted in the Documentation; (b) systems that are evidently not intended for public access (for example administrative interfaces, internal tools, or endpoints that require API keys); (c) government, military, critical-infrastructure or healthcare systems where access is restricted; or (d) any Source that a court, authority or law has prohibited you from accessing.

3.6 Respect for legal blocks and orders. If a Source, a court or an authority has lawfully required you to stop accessing a Source’s content, you must not use the Services to continue doing so.

4. Personal data

The Terms (clause 8) set out your obligations as controller of any Personal Data in Output. In addition, you must not use the Services or Output to:

(a) collect Personal Data without a documented lawful basis and purpose, or in a manner that data subjects would not reasonably expect having regard to the context in which they made the data public;

(b) target, or knowingly collect or infer, special categories of Personal Data within Article 9(1) GDPR, data relating to criminal convictions and offences within Article 10 GDPR, or Personal Data of persons you know or should reasonably know to be under 18, unless you have a specific, documented legal condition permitting it;

(c) conduct covert surveillance, tracking or monitoring of specific individuals, or use stream monitors, filter rules or repeated Requests to follow a private individual’s activity without a legitimate and lawful purpose;

(d) perform facial recognition or biometric identification;

(e) build or sell “people-search”, background-check, credit-scoring, tenant-screening, employment-screening or insurance-underwriting products from Output unless you comply with all sector-specific laws that apply to such products;

(f) make automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without the safeguards required by law;

(g) contact individuals identified in Output with unsolicited marketing unless you have a lawful basis and comply with applicable direct-marketing and e-privacy rules, including honouring opt-outs;

(h) transfer Personal Data internationally without an appropriate legal mechanism; or

(i) keep Personal Data longer than necessary for the purpose for which you collected it.

5. Output and redistribution

5.1 You must comply with the Content Policy in everything you do with Output.

5.2 You must not: (a) resell, license or redistribute raw Output, or substantially unmodified Output, as a product in itself; (b) publish or redistribute Third-Party Content in bulk; (c) offer a service whose primary function is to give others on-demand access to the Services or to Output; or (d) breach clause 5.2(c) of the Terms (competing services).

5.3 Products and services that use Output as an input, for example analytics, dashboards, monitoring, research, price intelligence, market intelligence, lead qualification, AI applications and internal tools, are permitted, provided that they comply with this AUP, the Content Policy and applicable law, and that you bind your own customers as required by clause 3.4 of the Terms.

5.4 Where Output includes references to images or other media hosted by a Source, you must not download, store, re-host, republish or commercially exploit that media except as permitted by the rights holder or by a statutory exception that clearly applies to you.

6. Rules for particular categories of Source

The following rules apply in addition to the rest of this AUP.

6.1 Search engines and AI assistants. Do not use Output from search-engine or AI-assistant endpoints to manipulate rankings, generate invalid clicks or impressions, or create misleading content. Do not use AI-assistant endpoints to generate content that is unlawful, harmful, deceptive or that infringes the rights of others, or to attempt to compromise, jailbreak or extract non-public information from the underlying AI service. Analysing how brands, products or topics appear in search or AI answers is permitted.

6.2 Social media and content platforms. Do not use Output to harass, dox, impersonate or defame anyone; to compile dossiers on private individuals; to create fake engagement or fake accounts; or to republish user-generated content (posts, images, videos, comments) in a manner that infringes the rights of the platform or its users. Monitoring public conversations, trends, brands, public figures in their public capacity, and public accounts for legitimate research, journalism, marketing or safety purposes is permitted.

6.3 Marketplaces, classifieds and real-estate platforms. Do not use Output to copy listings, listing photographs or listing descriptions to competing listing services; to contact sellers, agents or landlords with unsolicited offers in breach of section 4(g); to manipulate prices or availability; or to reconstruct a platform’s listing database. Price monitoring, market analysis, valuation research and lead qualification are permitted where they comply with this AUP and the Content Policy.

6.4 App stores. Do not use Output to manipulate ratings or reviews, or to redistribute app reviews or listing content as a product.

6.5 Stream monitors and filter rules. Real-time monitoring features must be used for legitimate purposes such as brand monitoring, customer support, crisis and safety monitoring, research, journalism, and monitoring of public figures in their public capacity. They must not be used to monitor private individuals, and they must not be configured to trigger unlawful automated actions.

7. Platform integrity

You must not:

(a) create multiple Accounts, or use another person’s Account, to obtain additional Promotional Credits, evade rate limits, quotas or pricing, or avoid a suspension or termination;

(b) share, publish, sell or lend API keys, or allow anyone outside your organisation (or outside your product, as permitted by the Terms) to use them;

(c) provide false registration, billing or verification information, use a payment method you are not authorised to use, or initiate unjustified chargebacks;

(d) reverse engineer the Services, probe or scan our infrastructure, or interfere with the Services, other customers’ use of them, or our metering and billing;

(e) use the Services in breach of clause 5.2(c) of the Terms (competing services);

(f) misrepresent your relationship with ScrapeBadger, or use our name or marks without permission; or

(g) help anyone else do any of the above.

8. Your responsibility for others

You are solely responsible for everything done through your Account, your API keys, your automated agents, and any product or service you build on the Services, whether by you, your staff, your contractors or your customers. You must ensure that all such persons and systems comply with this Agreement, and any act or omission by them in connection with the Services will be treated as your act or omission for the purposes of this Agreement.

9. Reporting abuse

If you become aware of a breach of this AUP, by you or by anyone else, please report it to legal@scrapebadger.com with the subject line “Abuse Report”. Rights holders and Sources should use the notice process in the Content Policy.

10. Enforcement

10.1 If we believe in good faith that you have breached this AUP, or if we receive a substantiated complaint, we may take any action we consider appropriate, including: issuing a warning; requiring you to change or stop a particular use; throttling or rate-limiting your Account; blocking specific Sources, domains, endpoints or Request patterns for your Account; suspending your Account or particular features; terminating the Agreement (in which case Credits are forfeited as stated in clause 16.5 of the Terms); and reporting the matter to Sources, rights holders or authorities where we consider that appropriate or are required to do so.

10.2 We will normally tell you what we have done and why, and give you an opportunity to respond and to remedy the breach, unless the breach is serious, repeated, or we are prohibited from notifying you. We may act on a first breach where it is serious or where the risk to others or to us requires it.

10.3 We may also act where we have not identified a breach but reasonably consider that a use creates an unacceptable legal, security or reputational risk (Terms, clauses 6.3 and 16.3(c)).

10.4 No Credits or Fees are refunded for interruptions or terminations caused by a breach of this AUP.

11. Changes

We may update this AUP in accordance with clause 17 of the Terms. The version in force is always the one published at scrapebadger.com/legal/acceptable-use, with the effective date shown at the top.

Questions: legal@scrapebadger.com