Acceptable use policy

This policy forms part of the Terms of service and applies to everybody who uses Fieldbase — your staff, your contractors, your students and anyone else you admit to your organisation. Defined terms have the meanings given in the Terms.

You are responsible for the conduct of everyone you admit. If somebody in your organisation breaks this policy, we will come to you first, and we would rather fix it with a phone call than with a suspension.

1. The service itself

Do not:

• attempt to gain access to any account, organisation, device or system you have not been admitted to;
• probe, scan or test the security of the Services without our prior written permission — see clause 5 for how to get it, which is easy;
• disrupt the Services, including through denial of service, deliberate overload, or circumventing rate limits, quotas or metering;
• circumvent, disable or tamper with authentication, the licence check, seat counting, roles and permissions, or the audit trail;
• use automated means to access the Services beyond the documented API and export features, or scrape them;
• resell, sublicense or provide the Services to third parties, unless you are an authorised reseller under a written agreement with us;
• reverse engineer the Services except where the law expressly permits it; or
• introduce malware, or use the Services to store or distribute it.

2. Other people’s data, and other people’s land

Do not use Fieldbase to:

• record, map or analyse land you have no right to be on or no right to survey;
• collect or store personal data without the lawful basis your own jurisdiction requires — Fieldbase stamps every observation with who recorded it, and in most jurisdictions telling your staff that is your job, not ours;
• store special category data — health, biometric, racial or ethnic origin, and the rest — which Fieldbase is not designed to hold. If your assessments need to, speak to us first;
• infringe anybody’s intellectual property, including by importing datasets you are not licensed to use; or
• harass, threaten or defame anyone, including through notes, photographs or device and plot names.

Photographs taken in the field can capture people who did not expect to be photographed. Where that happens, the obligations are yours and the local rules vary more than most people assume.

3. Machinery, and the rules that are not negotiable

These exist because the consequences are physical. Clause 7 of the Terms of service sets out the full position; this is the short list an operator needs.

Never:

• operate machinery under Fieldbase control without a qualified operator in command of the vehicle. Fieldbase switches implement outputs; it does not drive, steer or brake anything, and unattended operation is not a supported configuration;
• disable, bypass, modify or automate past the preflight check, the arming step, the GPS-degradation watchdog or the USB-loss failsafe;
• wire a channel so that its safe state is its dangerous state;
• commit product to a field before verifying channel mapping against the physical wiring, using the simulator or a dry run;
• rely on positional accuracy alone where an error would cause injury, environmental harm or significant loss. Use markers, margins and human verification as well; or
• treat a Fieldbase record as evidence that an operation complied with a chemical label, a buffer zone, an environmental designation or any other regulation. Fieldbase records what was done. Knowing what was permitted is yours.

Always keep the machinery, the implement and the control hardware maintained, calibrated and inspected, and keep your operators trained.

4. Research integrity

Fieldbase is built so that a result can be defended: provenance on every reading, stable plot identity, an append-only record where a retracted value is marked withdrawn rather than erased, and an analysis that refuses when the design cannot support an honest error term.

Do not use the Services to fabricate or falsify a record, to misattribute an observation to a person who did not take it, or to present an analysis the product refused as though it had been produced. We will not police your science, and we have no wish to. But a customer using these features to make a fabrication look rigorous is misusing the one thing the product is for, and we will terminate for it.

5. Reporting, and testing our security

If you find a vulnerability, tell us at security@fieldba.se. We will acknowledge, keep you informed, and credit you if you want it. We will not pursue anybody who reports in good faith, tests only against their own organisation’s data, does not degrade the service for others, and gives us reasonable time to fix it before going public.

If you want to run a penetration test against Fieldbase Cloud as part of your own security review, ask at security@fieldba.se and we will arrange a window. The answer is normally yes.

To report misuse of Fieldbase by somebody else, write to legal@fieldba.se.

6. What happens if this policy is broken

Proportionately, and in this order where the circumstances allow it: we tell you, we agree how it gets fixed, and we give you a reasonable time to fix it.

Where the breach is causing active harm — to the Services, to another customer, or to a person near a machine — we may suspend the affected access immediately and talk afterwards. Suspension never blocks export, which clause 6.3 of the Terms puts beyond our reach for exactly this sort of moment.

Repeated or unremedied breach is grounds for termination under clause 18 of the Terms.

7. Changes

We may update this policy as the product grows; material changes are notified the same way the Terms are. The “last updated” date at the top is the one to check.

Questions go to legal@fieldba.se.