Ethical Guidelines
A practical framework for using OSINT Search Engine in ways that protect people, support legitimate investigation, and reduce misuse.
Open-source intelligence can help people understand public exposure, verify claims, protect communities, and respond to risk. It can also be misused when context, consent, proportionality, or legal authority are ignored. These guidelines explain how we expect the platform to be used and how we operate the service behind it.
Our Operating Principles
We design OSINT Search Engine around controlled access, transparent rules, short raw-result availability, and auditability. The platform is not a tool for harassment, intimidation, covert surveillance, or high-impact decisions about people. It is a research and safety aid that requires judgment from the user.
Lawful, accountable use
OSINT Search Engine is intended for lawful research, safety, verification, and public-interest analysis. Users must have a legitimate reason and an appropriate legal basis for every search they run.
Minimization by design
We limit what we store, reduce raw result availability after a short review window, and preserve only the operational metadata needed for security, fraud prevention, compliance, and service reliability.
Human impact first
Publicly available information can still affect real people. Results should be treated as signals to verify, not as final judgments about a person, organization, or risk profile.
- Search results should be reviewed carefully, verified independently, and interpreted with context.
- Users should avoid collecting more information than is necessary for their legitimate purpose.
- Public availability does not remove privacy, safety, contractual, or legal responsibilities.
Acceptable Uses
The service is designed to support practical, responsible workflows such as:
- Reviewing your own publicly visible digital footprint.
- Journalistic, public-interest, compliance, or human-rights research where lawful and proportionate.
- Public safety and investigative support by appropriately authorized teams.
- Verifying public signals without attempting to bypass access controls, private systems, or authentication barriers.
Prohibited Uses
You must not use the platform, results, exports, or derived insights for:
- Harassment, stalking, doxxing, intimidation, blackmail, coercion, or retaliation.
- Discriminatory targeting or profiling based on protected characteristics.
- Unauthorized surveillance, monitoring, tracking, or pressure campaigns against individuals.
- Consumer credit, employment, insurance, tenant screening, admissions, or similarly significant decisions about a person.
- Attempting to access private accounts, private communications, hidden systems, or non-public data.
- Rate-limit evasion, abusive automation, resale of results, or redistribution without permission.
- Using breach or public-paste signals to target, solicit, pressure, shame, or exploit affected people.
Breach and Public-Paste Signals
Email Search may show clearly attributed Have I Been Pwned breach information. These are indicators for lawful, proportionate review—not a reason to contact, market to, or otherwise target people who may be affected. Public-paste lookup is disabled by default, is separately controlled, and never authorizes access to external paste content.
Data Retention and Result Minimization
To reduce unnecessary exposure, raw search result content is designed to remain available only for a short review period. Under the current retention model, stored result payloads are anonymized after approximately 1 day, while the search query and history row remain subject to the normal technical-retention and HMAC anonymization schedule described in our Privacy Policy and Terms.
This means users can still understand that a search occurred, when it occurred, and what type of search it was, but raw result content is not intended to remain available indefinitely. Limited operational records may be preserved when needed for security, fraud review, payment disputes, abuse investigation, audit, or legal compliance.
Misuse Review and Enforcement
When platform misuse is reported or detected, we may restrict accounts, require additional verification, disable features, preserve limited operational evidence, suspend access, or take other enforcement action needed to protect users, affected individuals, the service, or our legal obligations.
Enforcement decisions may consider the user's stated purpose, account history, query patterns, reported harm, legal requirements, payment or fraud signals, and whether the activity appears proportionate and authorized.
Misuse Reports and Safety Requests
If you believe OSINT Search Engine has been used in a way that conflicts with these guidelines, please contact us with enough detail for review. We take safety reports seriously and may respond with account review, evidence preservation, feature restriction, or other appropriate action.
- Email: support@osintsearchengine.com