Acceptable Use Policy

What Bearings Network is for

A verifiable public reference of organizations contributing to specific defense and national-security missions, organized so that legitimate participants can find each other and so the record itself can be corrected in the open.

• Publishing and maintaining an accurate Organization Record.
• Requesting disclosure from another organization by legitimate business need through the network's consented workflow.
• Discovering organizations connected to a mission, program, or technology.
• Correcting or disputing published facts about your organization or a third party.

What Bearings Network is not for

Identity and claim integrity

• No impersonation. Claiming an organization you are not authorized to represent is a launch-blocking violation. Claims are rate-limited, domain-checked, and POC-notified; every claim leaves an audit trail.
• No fake organizations. Records must correspond to a real, legally-formed entity with a valid public identifier (UEI, CAGE, foreign equivalent, or university/lab registry entry).
• No shell claims to launder foreign control. Attempting to route around export-control or foreign-owner disclosure requirements is a permanent ban.
• No credential sharing or account resale. Every claimant is a natural person with a verified email; accounts do not transfer.

Information integrity

• No falsifying public-source facts. Public-source facts (SAM, USPTO, USAspending, SBIR, grants) are mirrored with provenance. Editing them to misrepresent your record is prohibited; the correct remedy is to fix the source.
• No fabricated capabilities, facilities, or evidence. Organization-provided fields must be truthful and current. Evidence links must resolve to the content they claim to prove.
• No verification-washing. Claiming a verification tier you have not earned, or presenting a BASIC-CONFIRMED record as VERIFIED, is prohibited and detected.
• No abuse of the dispute channel. Filing disputes to harass a competitor or bury a legitimate fact is prohibited.

Data and privacy

• No CUI. Do not upload, paste, or transmit Controlled Unclassified Information anywhere in Bearings Network. This includes evidence links pointing to CUI-marked resources.
• No classified information of any kind.
• No personal data harvesting. Bearings Network is not an employee directory. Do not use published contact functions to scrape, enrich a personal-data broker list, or export beyond the workflow the network provides.
• No screen-scraping or automated crawling of non-public surfaces. Public directory pages are indexable by search engines; the private/authenticated surfaces are not.
• No re-publication of private-tier facts. Fields you receive under Anonymous Matching, Approved Orgs, or Organization Only visibility must not be re-published outside the network.

Communication and disclosure

• No spam. Disclosure requests must state a real business context. Bulk or templated requests without specific relevance will be rate-limited and may result in account suspension.
• No sales pitches disguised as introductions. The introduction workflow is for legitimate mission-relevant contact, not for marketing outreach.
• No recruiter outreach. Bearings Network is not a hiring surface. Contact functions are for business-to-business coordination on missions and programs.
• No re-contact after opt-out. If a counterparty declines a disclosure request or opts out of a contact channel, do not re-request from a second account or via out-of-band contact discovered through the network.

Platform integrity

• No abuse of the AI-exclusion opt-out. Fields marked Excluded from AI & Matching are honored system-wide; attempting to bypass that flag is prohibited.
• No security testing without written authorization. Report suspected vulnerabilities to security@bearings.network. Do not exploit, exfiltrate, or persist access.
• No rate-limit evasion. Public and authenticated rate limits protect the network for everyone; multi-account or IP-rotation evasion is prohibited.

Content posture — what is not allowed on public pages

Bearings Network public pages present factual reference only. Organization-provided content that reads as opinion, forecast, recommendation, competitive claim, or superlative ("leading," "defining," "expected to," "flagship") will be edited or held for review. The Correction and Dispute channel is available to readers who spot content that drifts outside the editorial standard.

How misuse is handled

Enforcement is layered. The intent is to be forgiving with genuine mistakes, precise about deliberate ones, and public about how the system works.

• Automated controls stop most abuse before it lands: claim rate limits, per-UEI rate limits, domain checks, POC notification, evidence-URL safety scanning, and content-posture screening.
• Admin review queue handles ambiguous claims, ownership disputes, and reports of suspicious activity. Timeline is typically 3 business days.
• Corrective action may include a warning, reverting an edit, temporarily suspending a claim, reversing a claim to another party, or permanently disabling an account. Serious violations (impersonation, shell-claim laundering) result in permanent bans without warning.
• Appeals are handled through the same Correction and Dispute channel and, for suspended accounts, via a direct email address included in the suspension notice.

Reporting misuse

Anyone — a claimant, an operator inside a claimed organization, or a member of the public — may report a violation.

• Content that misrepresents a fact — use the in-page dispute action on the record.
• Wrong-party claim on your organization — submit an ownership dispute via Correction and Dispute Policy.
• Spam, harassment, or suspicious activity — abuse@bearings.network. Include the organization slug, the offending account or message, and enough context to reproduce the report.
• Suspected security issues — security@bearings.network.

Changes to this policy

Changes are dated in the "Last reviewed" line at the top of this page. Material changes are announced to claimants via the in-app notification matrix. Continued use of Bearings Network after a material change constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.