Acceptable Use Policy

01Purpose

Finowl helps teams protect accounts and add useful context to their products. This Acceptable Use Policy describes uses of the Services that are not allowed, so that the Services stay safe, lawful and fair for everyone. It forms part of our Terms of Service and applies to every account, API key and request.

If you are unsure whether a use case is allowed, ask us at support@finowl.co before you build it.

02Uses we built Finowl for

Checking whether passwords your own users choose have appeared in breaches, at sign up, login or password change.
Alerting your own users when their email address appears in a known breach, and prompting them to secure their accounts.
Assessing account risk in your own fraud and security workflows, alongside other signals and human review.
Adding gender estimates to your own customer or lead records for aggregate analytics, segmentation and light personalization, such as choosing a greeting.

03Unlawful use and missing consent

You may not use the Services:

in violation of any applicable law or regulation, including privacy, data protection, consumer protection, anti-discrimination and anti-spam laws;
to process personal information you do not have the right, notice or lawful basis to process; or
to process information about children in violation of applicable law.

04Breach data and security

Breach checks exist to protect people. You may not use them to cause harm. In particular, you may not:

check passwords or email addresses to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access to any account, system or network, including through credential stuffing, password spraying or account takeover;
check email addresses of people who are not your users, customers or employees, or who have not asked you to check them, in order to profile, target, stalk, harass, dox or extort them;
submit passwords that do not belong to accounts on systems you operate or are authorized to secure;
use breach results to compile lists of exposed people or credentials for sale, publication or attack; or
probe, scan or test the security of the Services, or attempt to bypass authentication, rate limits or credit limits, without our written permission.

05Gender predictions

Gender predictions are statistical estimates, not facts about a person. You may not use them:

to make or support decisions about a person's eligibility for, or terms of, credit, employment, insurance, housing, education, healthcare, government benefits or any other opportunity with legal or similarly significant effects;
to discriminate against, harass, exclude or target people based on gender or perceived gender, including in advertising for jobs, housing or credit;
to infer or label a person's gender identity, or to contradict how a person has told you they identify;
to identify, track or surveil individuals, or for law enforcement or immigration enforcement purposes; or
to target or profile minors.

06Consumer reports

Finowl is not a consumer reporting agency and the Services are not consumer reports. You may not use the Services or any results as a factor in establishing a person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment or any other purpose covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or similar laws.

07Platform integrity

You may not:

resell, sublicense, white label or redistribute access to the Services or raw results, or use them to build a competing product, dataset or model;
store or aggregate results to create a database of results for other people or organizations, or to offer results outside your own product;
reverse engineer the Services, or attempt to identify the data sources, partners, models or methods behind Finowl intelligence;
share API keys with third parties, or create multiple accounts to obtain extra free credits or evade limits or enforcement;
send requests designed to overload, disrupt or degrade the Services, or that contain malware or malicious code; or
misrepresent your identity or your relationship with Finowl, or suggest that Finowl endorses your product without our permission.

Storing results within your own product for your own users, for example keeping a gender estimate in a customer record or caching a breach result to avoid repeat lookups, is allowed.

08Enforcement

We may investigate suspected violations. If we believe you have violated this policy, we may warn you, rate limit or block requests, revoke API keys, or suspend or terminate your account, depending on the severity of the violation. Credits are not refunded when an account is suspended or terminated for violating this policy. Where appropriate, we may report activity to law enforcement or affected parties.

09Reporting misuse

If you believe someone is misusing Finowl, please email support@finowl.co with as much detail as you can. We review every report.