Acceptable Use Policy

If you do not agree with this policy, do not use Cognardo Workbench.

1. Purpose of this policy

Cognardo Workbench is built to help users save, organize, search, transform, summarize, compare, cite, copy, export, verify, and sync AI work.

This policy exists to protect:

• users
• third parties
• websites and platforms where the extension may operate
• Cognardo Workbench infrastructure
• AI, cloud, payment, and authentication providers
• the security and reliability of the service
• lawful and responsible use of AI tools

You are responsible for how you use Cognardo Workbench and for any content you submit, save, sync, analyze, transform, export, or share through the service.

2. General rule

You may use Cognardo Workbench only for lawful, authorized, and responsible purposes.

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to:

• break the law
• harm others
• violate third-party rights
• violate third-party platform terms
• process content you are not allowed to process
• attack, abuse, overload, or bypass the service
• misuse AI outputs
• misrepresent AI-generated or citation-checked content as guaranteed truth
• process sensitive or regulated content unless you are authorized and legally permitted to do so

3. Illegal activity

You must not use Cognardo Workbench for illegal activity, including:

• fraud
• scams
• identity theft
• impersonation
• money laundering
• tax evasion
• bribery
• corruption
• cybercrime
• unlawful surveillance
• unlawful scraping
• unlawful data collection
• unlawful discrimination
• unlawful harassment
• intellectual property infringement
• violations of export control, sanctions, or trade restrictions
• any activity prohibited by applicable law

You are responsible for ensuring that your use of Cognardo Workbench complies with the laws that apply to you, your location, your organization, your content, and your use case.

4. Malware, phishing, credential theft, and security abuse

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to create, support, test, improve, distribute, or facilitate:

• malware
• ransomware
• spyware
• credential theft
• phishing
• social engineering
• account takeover
• malicious browser extensions
• keyloggers
• botnets
• exploit kits
• unauthorized vulnerability exploitation
• evasion of security systems
• malicious automation
• unauthorized access to systems, accounts, networks, browsers, or devices

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to collect, store, transform, summarize, or organize stolen credentials, session tokens, API keys, private keys, passwords, authentication cookies, recovery codes, or other secrets.

If you discover a security issue in Cognardo Workbench, report it to security@workbench.cognardo.com. Do not exploit it, publicly disclose it before responsible review, or use it to access data or systems without authorization.

5. Platform abuse, spam, and manipulation

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to support:

• spam
• mass unsolicited messaging
• fake engagement
• review manipulation
• ranking manipulation
• deceptive SEO abuse
• deceptive LLM visibility manipulation
• fake citations
• synthetic source manipulation
• bot activity
• platform evasion
• account farming
• mass signups
• fake identities
• coordinated manipulation
• bypassing rate limits, usage limits, verification systems, or platform controls

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to mislead people, platforms, search engines, AI systems, reviewers, users, or customers.

6. Unauthorized scraping, monitoring, or surveillance

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to:

• scrape websites without authorization
• collect data from websites in violation of their terms
• monitor people without consent
• track users without proper notice and legal basis
• capture private or restricted content without authorization
• collect personal data from third-party systems without permission
• bypass paywalls, logins, access controls, robots restrictions, or technical limits
• build datasets from content you do not have the right to collect
• use the extension as a surveillance, spying, or employee-monitoring tool without proper authorization and legal compliance

Optional website access in Cognardo Workbench is provided so you can use Workbench features on sites where you have permission to use them. It does not give you permission to violate third-party rights, website terms, privacy laws, confidentiality duties, or access restrictions.

7. Content rights and authorization

You must not submit, save, sync, analyze, transform, summarize, export, or share content through Cognardo Workbench unless you have the right to do so.

You are responsible for ensuring that your use of content does not violate:

• copyright
• trademark rights
• database rights
• trade secret rights
• confidentiality agreements
• employment agreements
• client agreements
• website terms
• AI platform terms
• privacy laws
• data protection laws
• contractual restrictions
• any other third-party rights

Cognardo Workbench does not grant you rights to third-party content. If you use the extension on a website, AI platform, document, page, or application, you remain responsible for complying with the rules that apply to that content.

8. Sensitive, confidential, and regulated information

Cognardo Workbench is not designed for processing highly sensitive, confidential, regulated, or restricted information.

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to submit, save, sync, analyze, summarize, transform, compare, verify, or export:

• medical records or protected health information
• financial account credentials or regulated financial records
• government ID numbers
• passwords, secrets, API keys, private keys, or authentication tokens
• children’s personal data
• confidential employer, client, customer, or third-party information without authorization
• attorney-client privileged information
• highly sensitive personal information
• regulated data that you are not authorized to process
• content you do not have the right to submit or process

If you choose to process sensitive or regulated information despite this restriction, you are solely responsible for ensuring that you have the required authorization, legal basis, safeguards, contracts, and compliance measures.

9. Harmful, abusive, or exploitative content

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to create, organize, improve, distribute, or facilitate content or activity involving:

• harassment
• targeted abuse
• threats
• doxxing
• stalking
• intimidation
• hate or dehumanization
• exploitation
• blackmail
• extortion
• sexual exploitation
• sexual content involving minors
• grooming
• trafficking
• non-consensual intimate content
• violent extremism
• terrorist support
• instructions for physical harm
• instructions for evading law enforcement
• encouragement of self-harm or suicide
• abuse of vulnerable people

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to help create or optimize content intended to harm, exploit, deceive, or manipulate people.

10. Misinformation, deception, and misrepresentation

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to intentionally create, improve, organize, or distribute deceptive or misleading content, including:

• fake evidence
• fabricated citations
• fabricated sources
• fake reviews
• fake testimonials
• impersonation
• misleading academic work
• misleading professional claims
• deceptive marketing
• misinformation that may cause harm
• content falsely presented as human-authored where disclosure is legally or ethically required
• content falsely presented as verified by Cognardo Workbench

You must not misrepresent citation analysis, hallucination analysis, source-quality scores, summaries, or AI outputs as guaranteed truth.

Cognardo Workbench may help identify unsupported claims, broken links, weak sources, or citation issues, but it does not certify that content is true, complete, lawful, safe, or professionally reliable.

11. Professional, legal, medical, financial, and high-impact use

You must not use Cognardo Workbench or AI outputs as a substitute for qualified professional advice.

You must not rely on Cognardo Workbench as the final authority for:

• legal advice
• medical advice
• financial advice
• tax advice
• investment advice
• employment decisions
• lending decisions
• insurance decisions
• housing decisions
• education decisions
• immigration decisions
• regulatory compliance
• safety-critical decisions
• emergency decisions
• decisions that may significantly affect a person’s rights, access, finances, health, safety, employment, education, or legal status

If you use Cognardo Workbench in professional or high-impact contexts, you are responsible for independent review, human judgment, expert validation, and legal compliance.

12. AI output and citation-checking misuse

You must not use Cognardo Workbench to:

• present AI outputs as guaranteed facts without review
• present citation-checked content as fully verified truth
• claim that a source supports a statement when it does not
• hide weak, missing, broken, or unsupported citations
• use citation analysis to create a false impression of reliability
• generate fake citations or fake research trails
• mislead clients, readers, employers, regulators, teachers, reviewers, or customers
• submit AI-generated work in violation of academic, professional, or platform rules

You are responsible for reviewing, editing, verifying, and validating all outputs before using them.

13. Abuse of Cognardo Workbench systems

You must not:

• bypass usage limits
• bypass credit limits
• bypass billing systems
• bypass subscription entitlements
• bypass access controls
• bypass feature restrictions
• abuse free trials or promotional credits
• create multiple accounts to evade limits
• share accounts or credentials to avoid payment
• tamper with credit accounting
• interfere with sync systems
• manipulate analytics or diagnostics
• overload backend services
• submit excessive automated requests
• use bots or scripts to abuse the service
• interfere with security, monitoring, billing, or entitlement systems

We may throttle, suspend, limit, or terminate accounts that abuse product systems or create operational risk.

14. Reverse engineering and attacks

You must not:

• reverse engineer Cognardo Workbench except where allowed by law
• copy, clone, or reproduce the service
• extract source code
• bypass technical protections
• tamper with the extension
• modify extension behavior for unauthorized purposes
• interfere with backend APIs
• probe, scan, or test systems without authorization
• attempt unauthorized access to user data
• attempt unauthorized access to cloud systems
• exploit vulnerabilities
• perform denial-of-service attacks
• interfere with infrastructure, databases, queues, logs, or providers

Security research must be responsible, limited, non-destructive, and reported to security@workbench.cognardo.com.

15. Third-party platform rules

Cognardo Workbench may operate on or interact with third-party platforms, including AI services and websites.

You must comply with all third-party terms, policies, and rules that apply to your use of those platforms, including rules from:

• Chrome
• Chrome Web Store
• Google
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Microsoft
• Perplexity
• payment providers
• websites where you enable Cognardo Workbench
• any AI, cloud, authentication, or search provider you use through or alongside Cognardo Workbench

Cognardo Workbench does not authorize you to violate third-party platform rules.

If a third-party platform restricts or prohibits a use, you are responsible for following that restriction.

16. Use of templates, prompts, and shared resources

Cognardo Workbench may provide templates, prompts, sequences, workflows, examples, and shared resources.

You must not use these resources to:

• violate this Acceptable Use Policy
• create harmful or unlawful content
• mislead others
• infringe intellectual property rights
• resell, scrape, clone, or bulk redistribute Cognardo Workbench resources
• create a competing database or template library without permission
• falsely claim ownership of Cognardo Workbench resources

Templates and shared resources are provided for productivity and convenience. You are responsible for reviewing and adapting them before use.

17. Billing, refunds, and payment abuse

You must not:

• use stolen payment methods
• use unauthorized payment accounts
• commit chargeback fraud
• abuse refunds
• create false billing disputes
• manipulate subscriptions
• resell accounts, plans, or credits without permission
• transfer credits without permission
• exploit billing errors
• create multiple accounts to claim free or promotional credits repeatedly
• bypass payment or entitlement systems

Violation of this section may result in suspension, termination, credit removal, refusal of refunds, reporting to payment providers, or preservation of records for fraud-prevention and legal purposes.

18. Examples of allowed use

Subject to these Terms, you may use Cognardo Workbench to:

• save and organize your own AI conversations
• manage your prompt library
• create prompt sequences for repeatable workflows
• maintain scratchpads for your own projects
• summarize content you have the right to process
• save selected text from pages where you have permission
• run AI actions on authorized content
• compare outputs across supported AI providers
• check citations and source links
• generate bibliographies
• export your own workspace content
• use templates for personal or internal professional work
• sync your workspace across devices when Cloud Sync & Intelligence is enabled

These examples are not exhaustive. Allowed use still depends on law, authorization, third-party terms, and this policy.

19. Enforcement

If we believe you violated this Acceptable Use Policy, the Terms of Service, applicable law, platform rules, or the rights of others, we may take action.

Actions may include:

• warning you
• limiting features
• disabling specific functionality
• throttling usage
• removing content
• disabling sync
• suspending your account
• terminating your account
• removing credits or entitlements
• refusing refunds where permitted
• blocking future access
• reporting abuse to service providers, platforms, payment providers, or authorities where appropriate
• preserving records where needed for security, fraud prevention, legal compliance, or dispute resolution

We may take action with or without prior notice where we believe there is legal, security, operational, financial, platform, or user-safety risk.

20. Reporting abuse

To report abuse, security concerns, or violations of this policy, contact:

• Security and abuse reports: security@workbench.cognardo.com
• Product support: support@workbench.cognardo.com
• General contact: contact@workbench.cognardo.com

Please include enough information for us to understand and review the issue, such as:

• your account email, if relevant
• the feature involved
• the date and time of the issue
• screenshots or logs, if safe to share
• a description of the suspected abuse or violation

Do not include sensitive, confidential, or regulated information in your report unless necessary.

21. Changes to this policy

We may update this Acceptable Use Policy from time to time.

When we make material changes, we may notify you by updating the date at the top of this page, posting a notice on the website, sending an email, showing an in-product notice, or using another reasonable method.

Your continued use of Cognardo Workbench after an updated Acceptable Use Policy becomes effective means you accept the updated policy to the extent permitted by law.

22. Contact

For questions about this Acceptable Use Policy, contact:

• Product support: support@workbench.cognardo.com
• General contact: contact@workbench.cognardo.com
• Billing, account, refund, and subscription questions: accounts@workbench.cognardo.com
• Security and abuse reports: security@workbench.cognardo.com

Public contact name: Raven Black Public trade name: Cognardo Product: Cognardo Workbench