Working draft — not live legal until effective date is set.
Effective date: [EFFECTIVE DATE]
Operator: TradesKnow
Product: TradesKnow (tradesknow.com)
Contact: [CONTACT EMAIL]
This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) is part of the Terms of Service. If you violate it, we may refuse Outputs, suspend or terminate your account, withdraw your invite, and (where appropriate) report conduct to an employer, insurer, or law enforcement.
TradesKnow is an AI assistant for and by the trades. It is not a marketplace, lead-gen tool, FSM platform, or licensing body. Use it accordingly.
1. Lawful use only
You may not use the Service to:
- violate any law, regulation, code-enforcement order, or lawful AHJ directive;
- commit or plan fraud, theft, trespass, vandalism, or unauthorized access to property or systems;
- evade sanctions, export controls, or similar restrictions;
- exploit, abuse, or endanger minors (zero tolerance).
“The model answered” is not a defense.
2. No circumventing licenses, permits, or qualifications
You may not use the Service to:
- perform, or help someone perform, work that requires a license, registration, or permit you (or they) do not hold;
- draft, generate, or falsify licenses, permits, inspection stickers, insurance certificates, or AHJ approvals;
- coach someone to misrepresent license status, apprenticeship status, or insurance to a customer, AHJ, or platform;
- substitute TradesKnow Outputs for a required inspection, engineering stamp, or qualified-person determination.
TradesKnow does not issue licenses and does not authorize work.
3. Safety no-gos — gas, live panels, structural, confined space
You may not request or provide, through the Service, how-to instruction that substitutes for a licensed professional on site for:
- gas work (natural gas, LP / propane, and related fuel-gas systems), including “how do I bypass / fire this off / make it safe enough”;
- live / energized electrical panels and other live electrical work, including bypassing lockout-tagout or “how to work it hot”;
- structural work, including cutting, notching, or removing load-bearing members, undermining foundations, or similar;
- confined space entry or work, including “just a quick look” without a program, attendant, and permit where required.
The product will refuse hazardous how-to that crosses that line. You may not:
- rephrase, jailbreak, or fragment prompts to defeat safety refuses;
- use Ask as a step-by-step stand-in for a competent person, LOTO procedure, or confined-space program;
- run a bulk-approve, batch-clear, or rubber-stamp workflow for hazardous jobs or the classes above.
Refuses are expected. Arguing the model into an answer is prohibited use.
This AUP does not ban high-level conceptual questions that stay on the safe side of the line (e.g., “what code article generally addresses bonding of X” as a reference pointer). It does ban using the Service as the person who decides, designs, or performs the hazardous task.
4. No treating Outputs as professional advice or AHJ authority
You may not:
- represent Outputs as stamped engineering, legal advice, code-official interpretation, or manufacturer approval;
- represent “Verified” or “Draft” Ask labels as state-board verification, license verification, or AHJ approval — those labels are corpus vs. model-draft provenance only;
- brand your work “TradesKnow-approved,” “AHJ-cleared,” or “license-verified by TradesKnow”;
- hold out TradesKnow as your qualifier, supervisor, or competent person.
5. No misrepresentation of authority
You may not impersonate:
- an AHJ, inspector, licensing board, or utilities operator;
- TradesKnow, or another user;
- a licensed professional you are not.
You may not scrape or display our marks or UI to imply TradesKnow licensed or inspected a job.
6. Scraping, extraction, and abuse of infrastructure
You may not:
- scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the site, corpus, Ask Outputs, or Field data except as allowed by law (e.g., certain search-engine indexing of public marketing pages) or our written permission;
- use bots, harvested invites, or credential stuffing;
- overload, probe, or disrupt the Service (except good-faith security research reported to [CONTACT EMAIL] without exploiting user data);
- bypass rate limits, invite gates, loopback / Field network gates, or safety refuses;
- mine the Service to build a competing corpus by systematic extraction.
7. Reverse engineering
You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract model weights, system prompts, or non-public corpus except to the extent applicable law prohibits that restriction (and then only to that extent). You may not use Outputs to train a competing model in bulk.
8. Other people’s information and User Content
You may not:
- upload personal information about customers, homeowners, coworkers, or bystanders unlawfully or beyond what a job capture reasonably needs;
- upload license images, passports, or ID photos (not collected; do not dump them into Ask or Field);
- record audio or photos in violation of wiretap, privacy, or customer-contract rules;
- submit content you do not have the right to submit (including another shop’s proprietary manuals if you lack rights);
- upload malware, or content that is harassing, hateful, or sexually exploitative.
Field job data, if any, remains your responsibility to capture lawfully. TradesKnow will not use it to train models (see Terms and Privacy Policy).
9. Teach / expert contribution (when offered)
Phase 1 does not include a production Teach clickwrap. If we later offer Teach:
- you may not submit others’ confidential job data as “expert content” to evade the two-door rule;
- you may not consent on behalf of a shop or manufacturer you do not bind;
- you may not strip safety context to make a hazardous procedure look like a training-ready snippet.
Until counsel clears contributor terms, do not assume emailing “tips” to TradesKnow is a training license.
10. Commercial misuse of a free invite
You may not:
- resell, sublicense, or publicly un-gate invite access;
- use the Service to operate a competing public Q&A desk that republishes Outputs at scale;
- imply TradesKnow endorses your shop, prices, or license.
Fair internal use by an invited tradesperson or shop seat is expected.
11. Enforcement
We may:
- refuse or complete-block prompts (especially safety no-gos);
- delete User Content;
- suspend or terminate accounts without a refund (Phase 1 is free);
- preserve logs for security and legal process;
- cooperate with lawful requests.
We are not obligated to pre-screen all content. Enforcement may be automated in part. Repeat attempts to defeat safety refuses are serious violations.
12. Reporting
Report AUP or safety issues to [CONTACT EMAIL]. If someone is in immediate danger, call emergency services first.
13. Changes
This AUP may change as described in the Terms of Service. Safety no-gos, the ban on license substitution, the ban on bulk-approve of hazards, and provenance-only meaning of “Verified” / “Draft” are not optional marketing copy.