Acceptable Use Policy

1. Your responsibility

You are responsible for activity under your account and for ensuring that your use of PrivateNumber complies with this policy, our Terms of Service, and applicable law. You must also ensure that anyone you authorise to use your account follows these rules.

2. Lawful use only

Do not use PrivateNumber to commit, promote, coordinate, conceal, or facilitate unlawful activity. This includes fraud, theft, extortion, harassment, stalking, trafficking, unlawful gambling, distribution of illegal material, infringement of intellectual-property rights, or evasion of lawful restrictions, investigations, sanctions, or court orders.

You must comply with telecommunications, caller-identification, do-not-call, marketing, privacy, recording, surveillance, consumer-protection, and data-protection requirements that apply to your communications.

3. No harm, threats, or exploitation

You may not use the service to threaten, intimidate, abuse, exploit, or endanger another person; facilitate self-harm or violence; distribute intimate material without consent; target children; or discriminate unlawfully. Do not collect or expose highly sensitive personal information without a lawful and legitimate reason.

4. No spam or abusive communications

• Do not place unsolicited bulk, automated, or prerecorded calls where prohibited or without required consent.
• Do not conduct robocalling, phishing, smishing, vishing, fraudulent support, fake debt collection, or deceptive sales activity.
• Do not repeatedly contact someone who has asked you to stop, bypass blocks, or rotate numbers to evade complaints or carrier controls.
• Do not manipulate caller ID, originate spoofed calls, or misrepresent the source, purpose, price, or terms of a communication.
• Do not use PrivateNumber as a substitute for emergency calling or to disrupt emergency, healthcare, or public-safety services.

5. Identity, consent, and AI

Do not impersonate another person, organisation, government body, carrier, bank, or trusted service. The AI receptionist must remain clearly identified as automated. You may not instruct it to deceive callers, obtain secrets or credentials, make unlawful claims, or agree to commitments without authority.

You are responsible for notices and consent required to record, transcribe, translate, summarise, monitor, or otherwise process calls. Never request passwords, payment PINs, one-time codes, private keys, or full payment-card details through automated screening.

6. Protect systems and accounts

Do not probe, scan, disrupt, overload, reverse engineer, bypass access controls, introduce malicious code, scrape protected data, exploit vulnerabilities, or interfere with another user or provider. Do not resell, share, or transfer account access or numbers unless your plan and our written terms permit it.

If you discover a vulnerability, do not exploit or publicly disclose it before giving us a reasonable opportunity to investigate. Report it to the address below.

7. Fair use of service resources

Do not use abnormal call patterns, excessive automation, artificial traffic, traffic pumping, revenue-share schemes, or other activity intended to generate fees, manipulate metrics, degrade service, or avoid plan limits. We may apply reasonable technical limits to protect service quality, carriers, and other subscribers.

8. How we enforce this policy

We may investigate suspected violations and preserve relevant information. Depending on severity and urgency, we may warn you, limit a feature, block traffic or callers, suspend numbers or accounts, remove content, terminate service, or notify carriers or authorities when required or appropriate. Where practical, we will provide notice and an opportunity to respond, but urgent action may be taken without advance notice to protect people, systems, or legal compliance.

Attempts to evade an enforcement action are a separate violation. We may consider context, intent, harm, repetition, remediation, and legal obligations when deciding how to respond.