Acceptable use policy

1. What this policy covers

This policy applies to the AirBubble app for macOS, the hosted gateway the app talks to, and this website. It is part of the terms of service, so breaking it is a breach of those terms.

It applies to you, and to anyone who uses your account or uses AirBubble on a Mac you administer. Where this page and the terms disagree on a question of use, this page wins.

In this policy, AirBubble, we and us mean the company that makes the app and runs the gateway. The registered name and address are not settled yet and are deliberately left blank rather than guessed.

2. The rule the rest of this comes from

AirBubble does three things that touch the world outside your own head: it reads a frame of your screen when you release the chord, it turns what you say into text while the keys are down, and it clicks and types in other apps if you turn the agent on and confirm the run. Each of those is something you can already do at your own keyboard. The app does it faster, out loud, and with a model in the middle.

So the rule is short. Use it on your own machine, in your own session, on material you have a right to look at, and with the agreement of anyone else it involves. Every clause below is that rule applied to a case where people get it wrong.

3. Other people's screens and sessions

The screen reader and the agent are not surveillance tools, and using them as one is a breach of this policy. You may not:

• run AirBubble on a Mac, or in a user session, that belongs to someone else, without that person knowing it is there and what it does;
• hold the chord over a screen that is not yours to read material that was not shown to you: a colleague's display, a shared monitor, a projector, a device left unlocked;
• install it on a device you hand to an employee, a family member or a student in order to watch what they do on it;
• use it during a remote support session on someone else's computer without telling them that a frame of their screen is being sent to a model to produce the answer;
• ask someone to share their screen with you and then read it with AirBubble without saying that is what you are doing.

If you deploy AirBubble across an organisation's Macs, the people using those Macs must be told it is installed, that it reads the screen on a held chord, and that the agent can act in their apps. Deploying it quietly to observe staff is exactly the use this policy exists to forbid. The app has no capture-hiding and no process-hiding, precisely so that nobody can be watched by it without seeing it on their own display.

4. Recording a discussion

The Notetaker records when you start it, and stops on its own after eight silent minutes. You start it with the one-tap card it offers, or with ⌘⌥N. Whether recording a particular discussion is lawful depends on where each person in it is sitting and on who has agreed. That is your call to make before you start it, not ours.

You may not use the Notetaker to:

• capture a conversation, a call or a meeting without the consent of the people in it, where their consent is required by the law that applies to them or by any reasonable reading of the room;
• record a discussion you are not a participant in, including one happening near you or audible through a wall, a phone or an open door;
• leave a session running after the people who agreed to it have left, or after the part they agreed to has ended;
• record a conversation that is privileged or confidential to someone else where you are not the one entitled to keep a record: legal advice, medical consultation, a disciplinary meeting.

The app does not announce the recording to anyone but you. Saying it out loud, before you start, is the whole of what consent requires here.

5. What you may not ask the agent to do

The agent is opt-in and sits behind four gates, and all four must pass before one click is sent: the request has to come from a trusted frame, Agent Mode has to be on, you have to confirm that specific run, and an environment switch has to be armed. Switching Agent Mode off stops a run already in flight. Those gates decide whether the agent may act at all. They do not decide whether what you ask it to do is allowed. This clause does.

You may not use the agent to:

• get past a login, a paywall, a licence check, a rate limit or any other access control, whether by guessing, by reusing a credential, or by repeating an attempt until it succeeds;
• collect data from behind an authentication you were not given, or at a volume or speed that the service you are collecting from prohibits;
• automate a service whose terms forbid automated access. If a service says not to script it, that is the answer, whether or not scripting it would work;
• create accounts in bulk, submit forms in bulk, or manufacture activity that is meant to look like it came from many separate people: votes, reviews, sign-ups, applications, queue places;
• complete something that exists because a person is supposed to be present: an identity check, an exam or assessment, a legally binding acceptance, a CAPTCHA or any equivalent test;
• act on an account that is not yours, or on behalf of a person who has not asked you to.

A confirmation prompt is not permission from the service on the other side. Confirming a run says you want it to happen; it does not make the action allowed where it was not.

6. Credentials and unauthorised access

Screens hold secrets. A password manager left open, an API key in a terminal, a one-time code in a notification, a customer record in a support tool. A screen reader is a fast way to collect those, and collecting them is forbidden here.

• Do not use AirBubble to read, transcribe, store or reuse passwords, keys, tokens, recovery codes or card numbers that are visible on a screen you are not entitled to be reading.
• Do not point it at an unlocked session belonging to someone else to gather what they happen to have open.
• Do not use anything it reads or transcribes to reach a system, an account or a dataset you do not have permission to reach.
• Do not use it to probe, scan or map infrastructure that is not yours, or as a step in an intrusion of any kind.

Security testing against systems you own or have written authorisation to test is fine, and so is using the app while you do it. The distinction is authorisation, and it is yours to hold.

If a frame catches a secret by accident, treat it the way you would treat any other accidental disclosure and rotate it. The privacy policy describes what happens to that frame: it is used for the turn and is not stored as an image afterwards.

7. Harming people

You may not use AirBubble, or anything it produces, to:

• harass, stalk, threaten, defame or intimidate anyone, or to help someone else do so;
• build a picture of a particular person from screens, calls or documents they did not share with you: where they are, what they are working on, who they talk to;
• impersonate a real person or organisation, or produce material designed to be mistaken for something they wrote or said;
• generate material that sexualises children, incites or celebrates violence, or encourages someone to hurt themselves;
• develop weapons, malicious software, or techniques whose purpose is to compromise systems belonging to other people;
• run a fraud or a deception: fake documents, fake identities, fake support desks, or anything whose success depends on the other person being wrong about who they are dealing with.

8. The service itself

The gateway is small and it is shared. Do not use it in a way that degrades it for other people, and do not try to route around how it is meant to work.

• Do not send traffic that no person is producing: scripted loads, replayed turns, synthetic sessions or anything designed to sit in front of the gateway on its own.
• Do not work around rate limits, account limits or region restrictions, including by spreading use across several accounts.
• Do not share one account between several people, or pass account credentials to anyone else.
• Do not reverse engineer the app to extract gateway credentials, call our vendors directly through our keys, or bypass the account system.
• Do not attack, overload or attempt to break the gateway. Testing our own security is welcome through the process on the security page, and nowhere else.

9. Reselling and redistribution

What AirBubble produces for you is yours. Use the answers, the notes and the transcripts for your own work, including work you are paid for, and publish them if you want to. What you may not do is stand a business up on top of the service itself.

• Do not resell or sublicense access to your account, or provide AirBubble's answers to other people as a service of your own, with or without charge.
• Do not wrap the gateway in another product, embed it in another application, or expose it through an interface of your own.
• Do not extract output systematically, whether in bulk, on a schedule or by automation, in order to build something that stands in for the product.
• Do not use the output to train, fine-tune or evaluate a model intended to do what AirBubble does, or to assemble a dataset for that purpose.

Writing about the product, comparing it, reviewing it, or showing what it did for you is none of these things and is welcome.

10. Your screen is your responsibility

Before you hold the chord, what is on your screen is under your control. When you release it, a frame of that screen goes to our gateway and on to a model vendor, and what you said goes to a transcription vendor. The privacy policy names each one and what they receive.

Some of the material in front of you is covered by an obligation you owe someone else: an employer's confidentiality rules, patient records, client files, material held under a contract or a court order. You are the one deciding whether that obligation allows a frame of it to leave your Mac. Where it does not, do not hold the chord in front of it. Quit the app or lock the screen if that is simpler.

AirBubble holds no sector certification and we do not currently sign agreements covering regulated categories of data. Until that changes and this page says so, do not use it on material whose handling requires one.

11. How we enforce this

Start with what we can actually see. We hold account details, gateway request metadata and the conversation history attached to your account. We do not read conversations looking for breaches of this policy. Staff access to content happens when we are investigating a fault you reported or a specific abuse report, and it is logged.

When we believe this policy has been broken, we take the smallest step that stops the harm, roughly in this order:

1. we get in touch and ask what is happening;
2. we turn off a capability, most often Agent Mode, and leave the rest of the account working;
3. we suspend the account while the question is resolved;
4. we close it.

We will tell you which step we took and why, unless the law stops us from saying. Where the breach can be put right, we will say what putting it right looks like and give you the chance to do it.

Two things move faster than that order: a use that puts someone in immediate danger, and a use that is breaking the service for other people. For either, we may suspend first and explain afterwards.

If we get it wrong, say so by replying to the message we sent, or by writing to abuse@airbubble.io. A person reads every appeal. Where we were wrong we restore the account, and for a paid account we closed wrongly we refund the time it was down, as described in the terms of service.

12. Reporting abuse

If someone is using AirBubble against you or against somebody else, write to abuse@airbubble.io. It helps to include what happened and when, any account or email address you can point at, and anything that shows it: a message, a recording you are entitled to hold, a description of the session.

If you think AirBubble is running on a machine you use without your knowledge, tell us and we will act on it. The overlay is an ordinary window, it appears in recordings and screen-shares, and the app lists itself among your running applications like any other, so it can be found on the machine itself. There is no hidden mode for it to be in.

A security flaw in our software is a different thing from misuse of it. Report that through the process on the security page, which sets out how we respond.

We are not an emergency service. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number first, then tell us.

13. Changes to this policy

We will change this page as the product grows abilities it does not have yet. When we do, the date at the top changes. If a change restricts something that was previously allowed, we will say so in the app or by email before it takes effect, and the earlier version stays available so the two can be compared.

14. Contact

Reports of misuse: abuse@airbubble.io. Questions about whether something you want to do is allowed: hello@airbubble.io, or the support page. Asking first is always cheaper than being suspended for guessing wrong, and we would rather answer.