Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") form a binding agreement between you and Open World ("Open World", "we", "us") and govern your access to and use of the Open World website, web application, and API (together, the "Service"). By creating an account, submitting a search, calling the API, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Open World is operated by a registered legal entity. The entity's registered name, address, and company details are available on request via our contact page.

1. What the Service is

Open World is a search engine for publicly available online information. When you submit an identifier — a username, an email address, or a person's name — the Service sends live HTTP requests to approximately 690 public websites to determine whether a public profile page exists for that identifier, and calls approximately 11 public APIs (including GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Hacker News, npm, Mastodon, dev.to, Keybase, Lichess, Chess.com, and Gravatar) to enrich the results with publicly published profile information.

2. What the Service is not

We are not a data broker. We do not maintain, compile, license, buy, or sell any database of personal data about the people you search for. Every result is fetched from its public source at the moment of your query and is not retained by us as a dataset. We do not access, scrape, or bypass private, authenticated, paywalled, or otherwise access-restricted content, and we do not defeat technical protection measures.

Open World is not a consumer reporting agency and the Service is not a consumer report. You may not use the Service, or any information obtained through it, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing a person's eligibility for employment, credit or insurance, housing or tenancy, or for any other purpose regulated by the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq.) or any equivalent law in your jurisdiction.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 16 years old (or the minimum age of digital consent in your country, if higher) to create an account. You must provide accurate registration information and keep it current. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account and for keeping your password and API keys confidential. Notify us at security@openworld.io as soon as you become aware of any unauthorised use of your account.

You may not share an individual account between multiple people, create multiple accounts to circumvent plan limits, or resell access to your account.

4. Acceptable use

Your use of the Service is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms. In summary, the Service is intended for lawful purposes such as cybersecurity and threat research, personal digital-footprint awareness, brand and trademark protection, fraud prevention, due diligence, and lawful investigations. It may not be used for stalking, harassment, doxxing, unlawful surveillance, discrimination, or for any decision regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

You must also comply with applicable data-protection law when you process results about identifiable people, including the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act. Where you use results to make decisions about people, you act as an independent controller of that data and are responsible for having your own lawful basis.

5. Plans, fees, and renewal

We offer a Free plan ($0), Plus ($9 per month), Pro ($29 per month), and Teams (custom pricing). Paid plans are purchased for a fixed duration (monthly or annual) and paid in advance in cryptocurrency through our payment provider, NOWPayments. Prices are stated in US dollars; the amount of cryptocurrency due is quoted at checkout.

Paid plans do not renew automatically. When the period you paid for ends, your account reverts to the Free plan until you purchase again, so there is nothing to cancel. Refunds and the statutory right of withdrawal are described in our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

If a payment fails, we may retry the charge and may suspend paid features until payment succeeds. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice before the change applies to your next renewal; if you do not accept a price change, you may cancel before it takes effect.

6. Quotas, rate limits, and the API

Each plan includes a search quota and a per-minute rate limit. Quotas are provided for your own use and do not roll over between billing periods. You may not circumvent, mask, or attempt to exceed rate limits — for example by rotating accounts, IP addresses, or API keys — and you may not run automated bulk collection beyond the limits of your plan. We may throttle, queue, or reject requests to protect the stability of the Service and the public sources we query.

7. Your content and search history

We store the searches you run and a snapshot of their results so that you can revisit them in your history. You retain any rights you have in the queries you submit, and you grant us only the limited licence needed to operate the Service for you. You can delete individual searches or your entire history at any time from your account. How long we keep this data is set out in our Privacy Policy.

8. Accuracy of results

Results reflect what was publicly visible at the moment of the query and may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. A match means that an identifier resolves to a page on a platform; it does not prove that the account belongs to a particular person, and it does not prove that two matches belong to the same person. Usernames are frequently reused, impersonated, or shared. You are solely responsible for verifying results before relying on them and for any decision you make on the basis of them.

9. Third-party sources

The Service links to and describes content hosted by third parties. We do not control that content, do not endorse it, and are not responsible for it. Your use of a third-party site reached through Open World is governed by that site's own terms.

10. Intellectual property

The Service, including its software, interface, source catalogue, and branding, is owned by Open World and protected by intellectual property law. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service in accordance with these Terms and your plan. You may not copy, reverse engineer, decompile, or create derivative works from the Service, nor use it to build or train a competing product or dataset.

11. Individual removal requests

Any person can ask to be excluded from results using our opt-out form. Because Open World does not maintain its own database of personal data, an exclusion applies to what our Service will surface in future queries; it cannot remove information from the underlying public sources, which you must contact directly.

12. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice depending on the severity, if you breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if your use threatens the security or availability of the Service or of the public sources we query, if we are required to do so by law, or if payment for your plan fails and remains unresolved. Where we terminate for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the unused portion of any prepaid period.

13. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, complete, or accurate. Nothing in these Terms excludes any warranty or right that cannot be excluded under the law that applies to you, including mandatory consumer rights.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Open World will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to the Service. Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars. These limits do not apply to liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or to any other liability that cannot be limited by law.

15. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold Open World harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from your use of the Service in breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, or from your processing of personal data obtained through the Service.

16. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

We may add, change, or remove features, including the list of sources we query, as platforms appear and disappear. We may update these Terms; when we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and, for account holders, notify you by email or in the app at least 14 days before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the updated Terms.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the country in which the Open World operating entity is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of that country have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer-protection rules, nothing here deprives you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence or of your right to bring proceedings there. The applicable entity and forum details are available on request via our contact page.

18. General

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger or sale of assets. These Terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Refund & Cancellation Policy, are the entire agreement between us regarding the Service.

19. Contact

General and account questions: hello@openworld.io. Security and abuse reports: security@openworld.io. Privacy and data-protection requests: privacy@openworld.io.