Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy protects candidates, customers, users and the integrity of Social Scanner. It applies to every person who accesses our website, portal, reports, support channels or screening services. It forms part of our Terms and Conditions.

Customers must ensure their authorised users and anyone acting on their behalf follow this Policy.

The Services may be used only for a lawful, specific, necessary and proportionate professional purpose agreed with us. For recruitment screening, this means supporting safer-recruitment due diligence on an identified candidate at an appropriate stage of a fair process.

A Customer must have identified and documented its lawful basis, informed the candidate, limited the scope to relevant public information, and appointed a trained human decision-maker before submitting a screening.

Users must not:

• use a report as the sole basis for rejecting, disadvantaging or otherwise making a significant decision about a person;
• treat an unverified result, shared name, image, opinion or allegation as established fact;
• ignore relevance, age, context, authenticity, identity, explanation or evidence supplied by the candidate;
• seek or use information to discriminate because of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, trade-union activity or another protected status;
• seek to identify health, belief, political, sexual-life, biometric, genetic or criminal-offence information unless this is strictly necessary, lawful and supported by the required safeguards; or
• use information about a spent conviction or caution contrary to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and applicable exceptions.

Before an adverse decision, the Customer should verify material information, distinguish fact from opinion, consider proportionality, and give the candidate a meaningful opportunity to comment where appropriate.

Public availability does not remove a person's privacy or data-protection rights. Screening must remain within the agreed scope and purpose. Users must not request or attempt to obtain private messages, closed-group content, non-public accounts or information hidden by privacy settings.

Users must not impersonate another person, create deceptive accounts, solicit credentials, contact a candidate's connections under false pretences, bypass technical controls, exploit vulnerabilities, or access any computer, account or data without authorisation. They must respect source-platform rules and applicable intellectual-property rights.

Mass scraping, bulk surveillance, fishing exercises, continuous monitoring and screening before the Customer has identified a proper recruitment need are prohibited.

Reports are confidential recruitment records. Users may share them only with authorised personnel who genuinely need the information for the stated purpose. Reports must not be published, posted online, sold, licensed, used for marketing, added to general-purpose intelligence files or disclosed to unrelated third parties.

Users must follow their organisation's lawful retention schedule, securely delete copies when no longer needed, and not try to reconstruct an expired platform report from unauthorised sources. Platform reports are ordinarily deleted 60 days after publication.

Users must use their own account, keep credentials and invite links confidential, use strong passwords, and promptly report suspected compromise. They must not:

• share accounts or allow unauthorised access;
• upload malware or harmful, unlawful or infringing material;
• probe, scan, overload, disrupt or evade security, rate or access controls;
• reverse engineer, copy or extract the platform except where law expressly permits it;
• use bots or automated tools without our written permission; or
• misrepresent affiliation with Social Scanner or use our branding without authority.

Information submitted must be accurate, relevant and obtained lawfully. Users must not submit data about the wrong person, knowingly false information, excessive special-category data, content that infringes another person's rights, or material outside the Customer's documented screening purpose.

Candidate invitation links must be sent only to their intended recipient and must not be published or reused.

Report suspected misuse, unauthorised access, incorrect identity matching, accidental disclosure or other security and privacy concerns without undue delay to info@socialscanner.co.uk. Preserve relevant evidence, but do not investigate by accessing data or accounts without authority.

We may investigate suspected breaches, require reasonable information, restrict a feature, remove unlawful content or suspend access while protecting candidates, customers and the Services. We will act proportionately and, where lawful and practicable, explain our concern and allow the Customer to respond.

A serious or repeated breach may result in termination, deletion of unlawful material, reporting to an affected Customer, regulator or law-enforcement body where required, and recovery of losses as permitted by the contract and law.

We may update this Policy to reflect changes in law, guidance, security risks or the Services. We will give reasonable notice of a material change. Questions should be sent to info@socialscanner.co.uk.