Acceptable Use Policy

1. Overview

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) governs your use of ProofBeer and all associated services, including our feedback form builder, review widgets, and integrations. By using ProofBeer, you agree to comply with this AUP. Violations may result in suspension or permanent termination of your account.

This policy applies to all users, including free and paid plan subscribers, workspace members, and anyone who embeds ProofBeer widgets on third-party websites.

2. Review and Testimonial Integrity

ProofBeer is built on the premise of authentic social proof. The following activities are strictly prohibited:

• Fake reviews: Creating, importing, or displaying fabricated reviews, testimonials, or ratings that were not submitted by real customers who genuinely experienced your product or service.
• Incentivised reviews without disclosure: Offering payment, discounts, or gifts in exchange for positive reviews without clearly disclosing the incentive to reviewers and to viewers of the review.
• Review manipulation: Using automated tools, bots, or scripts to generate, submit, or inflate review counts.
• Competitor suppression: Using ProofBeer to solicit or publish false negative reviews about competitors.
• Selective display: Configuring widgets to exclusively display only 5-star reviews while hiding all negative feedback, in a way that materially misleads consumers about the overall sentiment of your customers.

3. Prohibited Content

You may not collect, store, or display through ProofBeer any content that:

• Is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, threatening, or obscene
• Infringes any third-party intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights
• Contains malware, viruses, phishing links, or other malicious code
• Constitutes unsolicited commercial communications (spam)
• Violates any applicable data protection or privacy law
• Targets or discriminates against individuals based on protected characteristics
• Promotes illegal activities or is intended to cause harm

4. Form and Data Collection Rules

When using ProofBeer forms to collect data from your customers or visitors, you must:

• Obtain proper consent before collecting personal data, where required by law (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)
• Clearly inform respondents about how their data will be used
• Not collect sensitive personal data (e.g., health, financial, government ID data) without appropriate legal basis and security measures
• Not use forms to collect data for purposes unrelated to feedback, reviews, or testimonials
• Not send unsolicited form links to individuals who have not consented to be contacted
• Honour data deletion and opt-out requests from your respondents

5. Technical Restrictions

You may not:

• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to ProofBeer systems, other accounts, or infrastructure
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of ProofBeer
• Use automated means to scrape, crawl, or harvest data from ProofBeer beyond what is permitted by our API
• Deliberately overload ProofBeer servers through denial-of-service attacks or excessive automated requests
• Use ProofBeer to test vulnerability or conduct security research without our prior written consent
• Resell or sublicense access to ProofBeer without prior written agreement (except as permitted under the Agency plan)

6. Widget Embedding

If you embed ProofBeer widgets on third-party websites, you are responsible for:

• Ensuring the embedding website complies with applicable laws
• Disclosing the use of ProofBeer cookies and tracking to your website visitors
• Not embedding widgets on websites that host illegal, harmful, or prohibited content
• Not using widgets in a way that misrepresents the authenticity or source of displayed reviews

7. Enforcement

ProofBeer reserves the right to investigate suspected violations of this AUP. Upon finding a violation, we may, at our sole discretion:

• Issue a warning and require corrective action
• Temporarily suspend access to your account or specific features
• Permanently terminate your account without refund
• Remove or disable specific content or widgets
• Report unlawful activity to relevant authorities

We will make reasonable efforts to notify you before taking action, except where immediate action is required to protect the platform, other users, or third parties.

8. Reporting Violations

If you believe another user is violating this AUP, or if you have encountered content that should be removed, please contact us at hello@proofbeer.com with details of the suspected violation.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this AUP from time to time. We will notify active users of material changes via email or an in-app notice. Continued use of ProofBeer after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.