Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP") applies to everyone who uses any Keelhelm Service. It is part of the Keelhelm Terms of Service, and individual apps may add stricter rules in their own terms. The point of this policy is simple: use our Services lawfully, and don't use them to harm other people, the Services, or the platforms we depend on.

You must not use any Service to:

Break the law

• Do anything illegal, or promote, facilitate, or provide instructions for illegal activity.
• Violate the rights of others, including intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, or contractual rights.
• Evade sanctions, export controls, or other trade-control laws.

Infringe intellectual property

• Upload, generate, store, or distribute material that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, patent, or trade-secret rights, or misrepresent that you hold rights you do not.

Exploit or endanger children

• Create, store, request, or transmit child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any content that sexualizes minors, or use a Service to groom, endanger, or exploit a child. We have zero tolerance for this. We remove such material, terminate the account, preserve relevant evidence, and report it to the appropriate authorities and hotlines as required by law.

Attack, defraud, or deceive

• Distribute malware, ransomware, or other harmful code, or run phishing, credential-harvesting, or fraud schemes.
• Impersonate a person or organization, or misrepresent your affiliation, in a way intended to deceive.
• Send spam or unsolicited bulk or commercial messages, or harvest contact details for that purpose.

Harm or harass people

• Harass, threaten, defame, or incite violence against anyone, or promote hateful conduct against people based on protected characteristics.
• Publish another person's private or identifying information without a lawful basis ("doxxing"), or use a Service to stalk or surveil someone unlawfully.

Abuse or overload the Services

• Probe, scan, or breach the security of a Service, access accounts or data that are not yours, or circumvent authentication, rate limits, quotas, or usage controls.
• Interfere with or place an unreasonable load on the Services or the infrastructure and third-party platforms they run on, including denial-of-service activity.
• Reverse-engineer, scrape, or copy a Service except as the law expressly permits, or use a Service to scrape or attack a third party in violation of their terms.

Misuse for high-risk or prohibited purposes

• Rely on a Service as the sole control in safety-critical, medical, legal, financial, or other high-risk settings without your own independent verification and safeguards. Our Services are general tools, not certified advice or life-safety systems.
• Resell, sublicense, or misrepresent a Service as your own except where an app's terms expressly allow it.

Enforcement

If we believe you have violated this policy, we may remove or disable the offending content, throttle, suspend, or terminate your access, and where the law requires or permits, preserve evidence and notify the relevant authorities. We try to act proportionately and to give notice where reasonably possible, but for severe violations — especially those that endanger people or the Services — we may act immediately and without prior notice. Serious or repeated violations can result in a permanent ban, including a repeat-infringer termination under our Copyright / DMCA Policy.

Reporting a violation

If you believe someone is misusing a Keelhelm Service or that content on our Services is illegal, please tell us. Use the reporting form for abuse and illegal content, the copyright notice form for infringement, or email legal (at) keelhelm (dot) com. See the Reporting & Notice-and-Action Policy for how we handle reports. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first.