Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP") describes prohibited uses of the Citations.io platform, websites, APIs and related services (the "Service"). The AUP is part of our Terms of Service and binds anyone who accesses the Service.

You must not use the Service to upload, generate, store, transmit or make available any content that:

• is unlawful, defamatory, fraudulent, obscene, hateful, harassing, discriminatory, or threatens violence;
• infringes intellectual property, privacy, publicity or other rights of any person;
• contains malware, ransomware, spyware or other harmful code;
• sexualises minors or otherwise exploits children;
• facilitates terrorism, human trafficking, weapons of mass destruction, or other serious crimes;
• impersonates any person or misrepresents your affiliation with any person or entity;
• contains personal data of others without a lawful basis to process it.

You must not:

• access the Service by any means other than the interfaces we provide, or attempt to circumvent rate limits, quotas, technical restrictions or access controls;
• probe, scan, attack or test the vulnerability of the Service except as expressly permitted in section 5 below;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of the Service, except to the extent permitted by mandatory law;
• use the Service to build a competing product, train competing AI models, or extract data for resale;
• resell, sublicense or otherwise commercially exploit the Service without our written agreement;
• use the Service to send unsolicited bulk communications or other spam;
• use the Service to scrape, crawl or interfere with third parties (including search engines, social platforms or competitor websites) in violation of those parties' terms or applicable law;
• use the Service to generate, distribute or amplify content designed to deceive consumers about a brand's origin or endorsements;
• interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the Service, including by introducing automation that imposes a disproportionate load.

• Do not use AI features to generate content that violates the prohibited-content list above.
• Do not attempt prompt injection, jailbreaks or other techniques intended to bypass safety measures on our models or upstream providers.
• Do not use the Service to generate disinformation, deepfakes or other content intended to deceive about real people, events or institutions.
• Do not present unedited AI Output as professional advice (legal, medical, financial or otherwise).

Good-faith security research is welcome. Email security@citations.io with details of any suspected vulnerability before disclosing it publicly. Do not access data that does not belong to you, do not degrade service for other users, do not run automated scans without prior written approval, and follow any instructions we provide. We will not pursue legal action against researchers who follow this policy.

We apply rate limits and fair-use thresholds to protect the Service for all customers. Limits applicable to your plan are documented in our developer docs. We may throttle or block requests that exceed limits or that appear abusive. Negotiated higher limits are available on Enterprise plans.

To report content or behaviour that may violate this AUP, email legal@citations.io with as much detail as possible. We investigate every credible report.

We may investigate suspected violations, remove or block content, and suspend or terminate accounts. For severe or repeated violations, we may terminate without notice and report the matter to law enforcement. We are not obliged to monitor user activity but may do so where reasonably necessary to operate the Service, comply with law, or protect rights.