Acceptable Use Policy
UKGovscan exists to support transparency, journalism and public accountability. This policy keeps it that way and protects the people who appear in the data. It forms part of our Terms of Service.
On this page
1. Purpose
Everything on UKGovscan comes from official public registers about public office, public spending and political influence. The point of this policy is simple: the service must make public life more accountable without making anyone’s private life less safe.
2. Prohibited uses
You must not:
- use the data to harass, threaten, stalk, intimidate or endanger any individual, or to facilitate doxxing or unwanted contact;
- use it to discriminate against or unfairly profile individuals, or for any unlawful purpose;
- attempt to re-identify individuals from data we have aggregated, or combine it with other data to do so in a way that harms them;
- scrape, crawl or bulk-extract the service, or use it to build a competing or derivative dataset, beyond the exports we provide for your own research;
- circumvent access controls, plan limits, rate limits or security measures, or probe the service for vulnerabilities without our written permission;
- resell, sublicense, share or otherwise redistribute access to the service;
- misrepresent the data as official, or present our derived figures without checking the linked original source.
3. Fair use of the service
You are welcome, and encouraged, to use what you find here in your own research, journalism, academic work and reporting, including publishing findings that cite UKGovscan. The line is between using the service and replicating it: exports, alerts and API responses are provided for your own work, not for wholesale redistribution or for offering the data to others as a service.
4. What we ask of you
- Verify against the original source before publishing. Every record links to it.
- Report inaccuracies or concerns to us so we can review them.
- Remember that appearing in this data does not imply wrongdoing. Treat the people in it as you would expect to be treated: the information concerns public roles and public money, not private lives.
5. Enforcement
We may rate-limit, suspend or close accounts that breach this policy, remove content, and, for unlawful activity, report the matter to the relevant authorities. Serious or repeated breaches are grounds for termination under our Terms of Service.
6. Reporting misuse
If you see misuse of the service or of its data, email [email protected]. Reports are reviewed by a human and handled confidentially.