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Acceptable Use Policy

What you may not use Observer for. Categories of business activity Observer does not support. Last updated 2026-05-24.

Effective date: 2026-05-24 Last updated: 2026-05-24

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") sits alongside the Terms of Service and tells you what Observer ("the Service") may not be used for. Breaching this AUP is a material breach of the Terms of Service.

The intent of this policy is twofold: (a) to keep the Service safe and useful for all customers, and (b) to make clear which industries and activities the Company does not support. We have tried to write it without moralising. The categories below reflect operational, reputational, and legal risk to the Company, not a view on the customer's choices in general.

1. Prohibited business categories

The Service may not be used to operate, host, or directly support any of the following:

  1. Gambling, lotteries, and betting platforms, including any service that takes wagers, runs games of chance, or facilitates betting between parties.
  2. Adult content, pornography, and escort services, including any platform whose primary purpose is sexual content, sexual services, or sexual matchmaking.
  3. Alcohol and tobacco retail or marketing, including any platform whose primary purpose is the sale or promotion of alcoholic beverages, tobacco, or vaping products.
  4. Weapons, ammunition, and firearms commerce, including any platform whose primary purpose is the sale of weapons, ammunition, firearms, firearm parts, or accessories.
  5. Predatory financial services, including payday lending, loan-sharking, debt collection that violates applicable law, advance-fee schemes, and any service designed to extract disproportionate fees from people in financial distress.
  6. Anything illegal under the laws of the United Kingdom (where the Company is established) or under the laws of the jurisdiction where you or the systems you are monitoring are located.
  7. Surveillance of individuals without their consent, including covert monitoring of employees, partners, family members, or third parties beyond what applicable law expressly permits.
  8. Safety-critical applications, including any system where failure of monitoring could result in death, serious personal injury, severe environmental damage, or critical infrastructure failure (medical devices in clinical use, aviation, transit signalling, nuclear, defence systems, life-safety alarming).
  9. Resale of the Service or any meaningful component of it without our prior written authorisation, including white-labelling and reseller programs that have not been agreed in writing.

Clarification: The Service's customer-scoped status pages feature, where a Customer creates status pages addressed to their own customers, is not considered "resale" under this clause and is a permitted use of the Service.

These are the categories we have decided the Service does not support today. The list is not exhaustive. We may decline use cases outside the list at our discretion, with notice, where they create risk to the Service or its other customers.

2. Conduct that is always prohibited

Regardless of business category, you may not use the Service to:

  • monitor systems you do not own or do not have explicit authorisation to monitor;
  • attempt to compromise the security of the Service, of other customers, or of third-party systems via the Service;
  • send abusive, threatening, or harassing content;
  • send commercial email or notifications to recipients who have not opted in to receive them (including via the status page subscriber mechanism, which is opt-in only);
  • circumvent or attempt to circumvent the Service's quota, rate, or billing controls;
  • automate sign-ups, multi-account creation, or other behaviour that frustrates the per-account terms;
  • reverse-engineer the Service, scrape it for the purpose of competing with it, or use its API in a way materially inconsistent with the published documentation.

3. Acting against accounts

If we identify a breach of this AUP, we will:

  1. Where it is practical and safe to do so, reach out to the account owner first. Of course, we will reach out before taking any action except in cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other customers, where required by law, or where we have a reasonable basis to suspect fraud, payment risk, or active harm.
  2. Give a reasonable opportunity to cure the breach where the breach is curable.
  3. Suspend or terminate the account if the breach is not cured, is repeated, or is in a category that does not admit of cure.

On termination for AUP breach, the data-retention windows in the Terms of Service apply: 30 days from termination to export data, 60 days total before backup deletion. We reserve the right to delete or refuse to retain content that, in our view, violates this AUP or applicable law, on shorter notice.

4. Reporting a violation

If you believe another customer is using the Service in a way that breaches this AUP, write to [email protected]. Where the violation involves a security issue, write to [email protected].

We will treat reports in confidence and will not identify the reporter to the reported party without the reporter's consent.

5. Changes to this policy

We may update this AUP from time to time. Material changes (in particular additions to the prohibited business categories in section 1) will be notified by email to the account owner and via the in-product notification mechanism at least 30 days before they take effect, except where the change is required by law or for security reasons.

The current version is at https://use.observer/policies/acceptable-use.