Beeline Rules and Use Restrictions

What is this document?

Many organisations, teams and users use Beeline. We are proud to give them a better platform to learn and grow. We also recognize that however good the maker’s intentions, technology can amplify the ability to cause great harm. That’s why we’ve established this policy. We feel an ethical obligation to counter such harm: both in terms of dealing with instances where Beeline is used (and abused) to further such harm and to state unequivocally that the products we make at Beeline are not safe havens for people who wish to commit such harm. If you have an account with our product, you can’t use them for any of the restricted purposes listed below. If we find out you are, we will take action.

Restricted purposes

• Violence, or threats thereof: If an activity qualifies as a violent crime in South Africa, the United States, or where you live, you may not use Beeline’s product to plan, perpetrate, or threaten that activity.
• Child exploitation, sexualization, or abuse: We don’t tolerate any activities that create, disseminate, or otherwise cause child abuse. Keep away and stop. Just stop.
• Explicit Content: Any Content that is in any way pornographic, sexually explicit, offensive, or contains a link to an adult website is not permitted on the Beeline.
• Hate speech or hateful content: You cannot use our Products or Services to advocate for the extermination, domination, or oppression of people. We do not allow hateful text, images, symbols, or other content, including in your username, profile, or bio.
• Harassment: Intimidating or targeting people or groups through repeated communication, including using racial slurs or dehumanising language, is not welcome at Beeline. This includes bullying, threatening, mocking, or shaming someone, or posting things likely to encourage others to do so. We do not tolerate harassment or hatred against any people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.
• Doxing: If you are using Beeline’s product to share other peoples’ private personal information for the purposes of harassment, we don’t want anything to do with you. You are not allowed to use the Services to violate others’ privacy or personal safety, including sensitive, personal or confidential information.
• Duplicate Content: We do not allow the posting of duplicate content on Beeline.
• Restricted Content: We do not allow the following - Promotion of controversial, suspect, or extreme content; Facilitation of gambling or betting; Facilitation of buying or selling social media interactions, including off-platform; Facilitation of sexual services; Facilitation of copyright or other intellectual property violation; Facilitation or evidence of violating the terms of service of Beeline or third party(s); Facilitation of illegal hacking (e.g., stealing credentials, compromising personal data); We do not allow the use of pseudoscience, misinformation, or other content that is contrary to public health or safety
• Malware or spyware: Code for good, not evil. If you are using our product to make or distribute anything that qualifies as malware or spyware — including remote user surveillance — begone.
• Phishing or otherwise attempting fraud: It is not okay to lie about who you are or who you affiliate with to steal from, extort, or otherwise harm others.
• Spam and Site Misuse: We do not allow spam or misuse of Beeline. All cases will be immediately removed from Beeline without notification.
  
  • Examples include: Posting content to drive traffic to external sites, products or services; scraping and reposting sources; posting duplicate content; content clipped for the purpose of redirecting to other resources for the full content; performing bulk automated actions; repeatedly using interactions as a method of promotion or marketing; undertaking campaigns to artificially inflate rankings or ratings in any way; reusing content templates and content with only minor modifications.
  • No one wants unsolicited commercial emails. We don’t tolerate folks (including their bots) using Beeline’s product for spamming purposes. If your emails don’t pass muster with CAN-SPAM or any other anti-spam law, it’s not allowed.
  • Cybersquatting: We don’t like username extortionists. If you purchase a Beeline account in someone else’s name and then try to sell that account to them, you are cybersquatting. Cybersquatting accounts are subject to immediate cancellation.
  • Infringing on intellectual property: You can’t use Beeline’s product to make or disseminate work that uses the intellectual property of others beyond the bounds of fair use.
  • Responsible Use of Embedded Content and Personal Information Collection: While Beeline permits the integration of official in-built and external tools for surveys and feedback, such usage must adhere to strict guidelines. Only necessary information, in alignment with applicable personal information protection acts, should be collected. Organisations are responsible for ensuring their data collection practices do not infringe upon user privacy rights. They assume full liability for the information collected through these means. This includes compliance with legal requirements and ensuring no excessive or irrelevant personal data is gathered.

While our use restrictions are comprehensive, they can’t be exhaustive — it’s possible an offence could defy categorization, present for the first time, or illuminate a moral quandary we hadn’t yet considered. That said, we hope the overarching spirit is clear: Beeline is not to be harnessed for harm, whether mental, physical, personal, or civic. Different points of view — philosophical, religious, and political — are welcome, but ideologies like white nationalism, or hate-fueled movements anchored by oppression, violence, abuse, extermination, or domination of one group over another, will not be accepted here.

How to report abuse

For cases of suspected malware, spyware, phishing, spamming, and cybersquatting, or any use of the Services which go against the Use Restrictions, please alert us at info@beeline.life.

For all other cases, please let us know by emailing info@beeline.life. If you’re not 100% sure if something rises to the level of our use restrictions policy, report it anyway.

Please share as much as you are comfortable with about the account, the content or behaviour you are reporting, and how you found it. Sending us a URL or screenshots is super helpful. If you need a secure file transfer, let us know and we will send you a link. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account. For copyright cases, please follow let us know at info@beeline.life as well.

Someone on our team will respond within one to ten business days to let you know we’ve begun investigating. We will also let you know the outcome of our investigation (unless you ask us not to, or we are not allowed to under law).

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0.