Terms of use

• WebVigilante looks, and explains what it found and how sure it is.
• It does not contact anybody on your behalf, and it does not remove anything for you.
• Asking for something to be taken down is not the same as it having been taken down.
• An empty result means the sources that ran found nothing. It is not a clean bill of health.
• This is a private beta. It changes, it can be wrong, and it can be interrupted.

WebVigilante is invite only during the private beta. You may create an account for yourself, and you may ask it to look for information about yourself or about somebody you are legally entitled to act for. Do not use it to look for information about anybody else.

Enter only identifiers that are yours or that you are entitled to use. Keep your password to yourself. If you think somebody else has reached your account, change your password and delete anything you no longer want held.

These are separate on purpose, and the product keeps them separate. Most of what people expect from a service like this sits in the last one, and that is the one WebVigilante does not do for you.

Discovery. Looking for information about you in the sources that are enabled, and recording what was seen, where, when and by which source. Discovery produces sightings. A sighting is a record that something was observed. It is not a judgement that the information is correct, current or about you.

Guidance. Turning a finding into what you could do about it, in order, with the steps written out and with the acting party named. Where you have to do something, the surface says so and says that it is you. Guidance is information, not legal advice, and it does not guarantee an outcome.

Verification. Establishing whether something is still there. A claim only becomes verified when something independent has actually checked. Telling WebVigilante that you dealt with something is recorded as your statement, exactly as you said it, and it is worth keeping, but it is not evidence that anything was removed. An item you have reported shows as waiting to be checked, and it says plainly that nobody has looked yet.

External actions. Anything that leaves this machine on your behalf: sending a removal request, emailing a site owner, filing a privacy request, changing an account somewhere else. WebVigilante does none of this. Nothing is sent to anybody on your behalf. Where an action is needed, you take it, and WebVigilante keeps the record of what you did and when.

Results are incomplete. No service searches the whole internet, and this one does not claim to. A scan covers the sources that were enabled and that actually ran. A source without a credential reports itself unavailable and is skipped, and the scan record says so, because a scan that finds nothing because nothing ran is a very different fact from a scan that found nothing.

An empty result is not proof of absence. It says what was checked and stops there. It does not mean nothing about you is exposed.

A result can be wrong. Findings carry a confidence, and the reasons behind it, because a match on a common name is not the same as a match on an address only you use. If a finding is not you, mark it, and it stays out.

Severity is a policy, not an opinion. How serious a finding is comes from stated rules applied the same way every time, and each finding shows which rules produced it. It is separate from how sure WebVigilante is that the finding is about you.

Submitted is not removed. A request that has been submitted is submitted. Nothing further is claimed about it, and the product never shows a case as removed on the strength of a request having been made.

Nothing here is a claim that you are safe. WebVigilante does not offer, and these terms do not promise, that your information is protected, that exposure has been prevented, or that anything is being watched continuously. Where something is scheduled to be looked at again, the product says when. Where nothing is, it says that instead.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. Deleting it removes the account, the records held under it and the stored evidence files. You can take a copy of everything first, from the same page.

We may suspend or close an account that is used to look for information about other people, to attack the service, or in a way that breaks these terms or the law.

WebVigilante is unfinished software offered for testing. Features appear, change and are withdrawn. Sources come and go. There is no promised uptime, and the beta itself can end. Do not rely on it as your only record of anything: the export in Settings exists so that your copy is yours.

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, there is no warranty that discovery is complete, that a finding is accurate, or that acting on guidance will produce any particular outcome.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability where the law does not allow it to be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you keep every right your national consumer law gives you, and nothing here reduces them. If a term here conflicts with a mandatory consumer right, that right wins.

The operating entity behind WebVigilante and the governing law of these terms are not yet published. They are settled and stated here before WebVigilante is offered outside the private beta. Until then, these terms describe how the service behaves, and they do not ask you to give up anything the law gives you.

These terms carry a version. When they change materially the version changes with them, and the current version is always the one on this page. If you do not accept a change, delete your account.

What WebVigilante holds about you, who else can see it and how you get it back is set out in the privacy notice.