Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

Effective date: 2026-06-15

This Acceptable Use Policy supplements the Terms of Service (in particular § 4 and § 5) and is incorporated into it by reference. It governs all use of Essence.Report. Violation may result in immediate suspension or termination without refund.

Prohibited content and conduct

You may not use the Service to generate, request, or process content that:

1. Illegal or harmful

Facilitates unlawful activity in the jurisdictions of you, your subjects, or us
Provides operational instructions for weapons, explosives, biological/chemical/nuclear hazards, or significant cyber-attacks
Generates malware, spyware, ransomware, or exploitation code
Facilitates trafficking of persons, controlled substances, weapons, or stolen goods
Violates sanctions, export-control, or anti-corruption laws (see Terms § 17)

2. Sexual exploitation

Any sexual content involving minors (zero tolerance; will be reported to NCMEC and law enforcement)
Non-consensual intimate imagery
Sexual content involving non-consenting identifiable real persons

3. Targeted harm and surveillance

Harassment, threats, or stalking of identifiable persons
Doxxing — aggregating private personal data to facilitate harm
Unlawful surveillance, profiling, pattern-of-life analysis, or dossier-building on identifiable individuals without a lawful basis
Targeting individuals because of their participation in protest, demonstration, journalism, or other protected expressive conduct
Monitoring employees, students, or other individuals without their consent or another lawful basis
Obtaining or publishing the home address or contact details of protected persons (such as judicial, law-enforcement, or other at-risk individuals) where prohibited by law
Generating content designed to defame an identifiable real person

4. Fraud and deception

Generating phishing content, scam scripts, or social engineering scripts
Producing forged documents (e.g. identification, legal documents, medical records)
Election interference: fabricated quotes from named political figures, mass-generated disinformation, fake voter materials
Impersonating real persons for deceptive purposes

5. Discrimination and hate

Content that promotes hatred or violence against protected groups
Content that systematically dehumanises ethnic, religious, gender, or sexual identity groups

6. Privacy violations

Submitting personal data of third parties without a lawful basis (you are the controller of such data — see Terms § 6 and our DPA)
Generating content specifically designed to violate the privacy of identifiable persons
Bypassing privacy settings or access controls to obtain non-public data

7. Service abuse

Scraping, mirroring, or systematically extracting outputs to train or seed a competing AI system
Circumventing quota, rate limits, or access controls — including operating multiple accounts or aliases to evade them
Sharing accounts or credentials with parties not covered by your subscription
Automated submissions at a rate inconsistent with human use, unless we authorise it in writing
Reverse-engineering the Service to derive underlying model architecture, weights, or prompts
Accessing or attempting to access another user's Reports, Vault, or account
Probing, scanning, or testing vulnerabilities except under our published responsible-disclosure process

8. Professional-advice misuse

The Service is research synthesis, not professional advice. Do not use it to:

Provide medical diagnoses to patients
Provide legal advice to clients without independent review by a qualified lawyer
Provide investment advice for fiduciary decisions without independent review
Substitute for required professional licensure or duties

You are free to use the Service to support your own professional work; you remain the responsible professional.

Restricted and regulated uses

These restrictions apply even where the content itself is lawful, and mirror § 5 of the Terms of Service. Essence.Report is not a consumer reporting agency, and Reports are not "consumer reports." You must not use the Service or any Report:

For FCRA-covered eligibility decisions — as a factor in establishing an individual's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing/tenancy, or for any other purpose covered by the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or any analogous law in any jurisdiction.
As sole evidence — as the sole basis for any adjudicative, disciplinary, lending, hiring, or other consequential decision about a person, without independent human review, verification, and, where relevant, chain of custody.
For unlawful targeting — to surveil, profile, or build dossiers on individuals without a lawful basis (see § 3 above).

High-risk categories — additional friction

For certain queries, we may:

Decline to process
Reduce output detail
Require attestation that you are a qualified professional
Add a prominent disclaimer to the Report

Categories include: detailed pharmacological dosing, security vulnerability exploitation specifics, content covering real ongoing legal proceedings about minors or victims of crime, and operational instructions in CBRN domains.

Enforcement

We may, at our discretion:

Severity	Action
First-time low-severity	Warning + content removal
Repeated low-severity	Temporary suspension
High-severity	Immediate termination, no refund
Illegal content	Termination + report to law enforcement

Our default is to engage first and give you a reasonable opportunity to correct the conduct, reserving more disruptive measures for willful, repeated, or seriously harmful conduct — except where the conduct poses an immediate risk to the security, integrity, or availability of the Service, in which case we may suspend immediately and without prior notice. Decisions are made by humans where practicable; automated systems may apply preliminary holds pending human review.

Reporting violations

Report suspected violations to abuse@essence.report. Include:

The account or content URL (if known)
The specific violation
Any evidence available

We treat reports confidentially to the extent legally possible.

Appeals

If your account is suspended or terminated and you believe it was in error, email appeals@essence.report within 30 days. Include:

Account email
Date of action
Reason given (from our notice)
Your response

We aim to respond within 10 business days. Decisions on appeals are final.

Updates

Material changes to this AUP will be notified per § 18 (Changes to these Terms) of the Terms of Service.

Acceptable Use Policy