Acceptable Use Policy

This policy applies to everyone who uses HeatCheck — hosts, listeners with accounts, and anyone who opens a show page and votes without one. It forms part of the Terms of Service, and breaking it is a breach of those Terms.

It is written to be short enough to read. The principle behind it is simpler still: do not use HeatCheck to break the law, to hurt people, or to make the number lie.

Do not use HeatCheck to publish, host or link to:

• anything unlawful where you or your audience are, or that promotes or facilitates unlawful activity;
• sexual content involving minors, or any material that sexualises a child, in any form — we report this to the authorities without exception;
• non-consensual intimate imagery, or sexual content presented without a clear content warning;
• content that incites, threatens or glorifies violence, or that promotes terrorism or a violent extremist organisation;
• content that encourages self-harm, suicide or an eating disorder;
• malware, phishing pages, or anything designed to compromise a device or steal credentials;
• someone’s private information — a home address, a phone number, government identifiers, financial details — published without their consent.

Do not use any part of HeatCheck — a show page, a suggestion, a display name, a poll option, a segment title — to harass, bully or threaten a person, or to attack people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, disability or serious disease.

Listener suggestions are the surface where this most often turns up, because the text is written by one person and shown to everybody. Hosts can remove a suggestion and ban its author from suggesting again; we expect them to use that.

• Do not claim to be a person or organisation you are not, or imply an affiliation or endorsement you do not have — including with HeatCheck.
• Do not register a username in order to impersonate someone, to sell it, or to keep somebody else from using it.
• Do not present a HeatCheck score, poll result or audience count as something it is not — for example, as an independent or audited measurement.

Do not upload, embed or publish material you do not have the rights to — including sponsor creative, logos, images and video. If you are not sure you have the rights, you do not have them.

Reporting an infringement

If something on HeatCheck infringes your copyright or trade mark, write to support@heatcheck.io with “Copyright” in the subject line and include:

• the URL of the page, and what on it is infringing;
• a description of the work you own, and where an authorised copy can be seen;
• your name, address and contact details;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law;
• a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them;
• your physical or electronic signature.

We will remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a valid notice, and tell the person who posted it. If you believe your material was removed by mistake, write to the same address and we will consider a counter-notice. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

HeatCheck’s only output is a number an audience produced. Faking it is not a clever growth tactic — it is the one abuse that makes the product worthless for everybody, including the person doing it.

So, do not:

• vote, respond to a poll, upvote a suggestion or check in with automated tools, scripts or bots;
• use multiple devices, browsers, private windows or cleared storage to cast more votes than one person is entitled to;
• buy, sell, trade or coordinate votes, upvotes, check-ins or roll-call standings;
• interfere with someone else’s show, or brigade it in order to drive a score down;
• inflate audience numbers, engagement or click counts presented to a sponsor, an advertiser or anyone else.

Sponsor placements are your advertising, published on a page you control. In addition to the responsibilities in Section 9 of the Terms, a placement must not:

• make a false or unsubstantiated claim, or imply an endorsement that does not exist;
• advertise anything unlawful where your audience is, or promote weapons, illegal drugs, or products claiming to cure a disease;
• promote gambling, alcohol, tobacco, vaping, adult content, credit, or another regulated category without meeting the rules that apply to it;
• imitate the HeatCheck interface, a system message, or an editorial part of the page, so that a listener cannot tell it is an advertisement;
• link anywhere but an HTTPS destination that matches what the creative says it is — no redirect chains to something else, no malware, no deceptive download.

Where the law requires you to disclose a paid relationship to your audience, disclose it. That obligation is yours.

• Do not attempt to gain access to an account, a dashboard, or data that is not yours, or to defeat any authentication or rate limit.
• Do not probe, scan or test the security of the Service except as allowed under Security research below.
• Do not scrape or harvest data — including show pages and public standings — by automated means, beyond ordinary search-engine crawling.
• Do not place a disproportionate load on the Service, or interfere with its operation or with anyone else’s use of it.
• Do not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Service, except where the law gives you a right that cannot be excluded.
• Do not resell or provide the Service to others as a service of your own without our written agreement.

We want to hear about vulnerabilities. We will not pursue or support legal action against anyone who reports one in good faith under this section, and we will treat your research as authorised conduct under this policy and the Terms.

Good faith means, at a minimum:

• you report it promptly to support@heatcheck.io with “Security” in the subject, and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else;
• you only access data that is yours, and stop as soon as you have proved the issue exists;
• you do not degrade the Service for anyone else — no denial of service, no automated load testing, and nothing during someone’s live show;
• you do not exfiltrate, retain, or publish anyone’s personal information, and you delete anything you came across.

We do not run a paid bug bounty, and we will not pretend otherwise. We will credit you if you would like us to.

A show page is published under your username, and its audience-facing surfaces — suggestions above all — carry text other people wrote. You do not have to read every word in real time, but once you know about a problem it is yours to deal with.

• Remove suggestions that break this policy, and ban the author.
• Turn off suggestions if you cannot moderate them during a particular show.
• Make sure your show, your sponsors and your embedded content are appropriate for the audience you are inviting — especially if any of them are children.

Report anything on HeatCheck that breaks this policy to support@heatcheck.io with “Report” in the subject line. Include the URL, what is wrong, and roughly when you saw it — a show page changes as the show runs, so the time helps.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. We cannot respond at that speed.

What we do depends on what happened, how bad it is, and whether it has happened before. In rough order: we may remove content, turn off a feature for an account, suspend the account, or terminate it and refuse further service. We may also report conduct to law enforcement where we are required to, or where the harm is serious.

We aim to tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to fix it before acting, and Section 15 of the Terms says when we will not — where the issue is urgent, illegal or repeated. If you think we got it wrong, reply to the notice; a person reads it.

This policy cannot list everything. We may act against conduct that is plainly against its spirit even where no bullet above quite covers it, and we may update the policy as we find new problems — the “Last updated” date says when we did.