Introduction
We believe that communicating with a business should be as easy and natural as talking to a friend. You don’t spam your friends, send them inappropriate or illegal content or jeopardise their wellbeing or property. We set rules on the acceptable use of our services. We do not allow our services to be misused. We enforce these rules for the benefit of all of our customers.
This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) describes the rules that apply to any party (“you”, “your” or “Customer”) using any products and services provided by us or any of our Affiliates (“Services”), including through any of our Partners. It applies to any use or users of our Services, including via any products and services provided by you to your customers (“end users”). You are responsible for your and your end users’ compliance with this AUP.
Terms used in this AUP have the meaning given to them in the General Terms and Conditions agreed between you and us (or any Partner, as applicable), unless the context otherwise requires. The words “includes” or “including” shall be read without limitation.
A violation of this AUP is a material violation of the Agreement between us (or agreed between you and any Partner, as applicable). We reserve the right to take action in respect of any such violation, which may include suspension of the Services and/or termination of the Agreement and your account. You agree to immediately report any violation of this AUP to us and co-operate and provide such reasonable information as we may request with a view to investigating and/or remedying any such violation.
1. Compliance with applicable law
First and foremost, you must use our Services in accordance with all applicable laws. This overarching principle applies to this AUP and all the examples of prohibited conduct and content in this AUP are not exhaustive. You are solely responsible for any penalties or fines incurred as a result of your non-compliance with applicable laws.
Non-exhaustive examples to guide you
Applicable laws include all laws, rules, regulations, ordinances, court orders and, where applicable to a specific Bird product you use, industry standards and telecommunications providers' requirements of any kind in any jurisdiction (i) applicable to you and/or us; and/or (ii) where the recipient of communications is located, the sender of communications is registered or where any other nexus triggers the application of domestic laws.
It is your responsibility to be aware of and understand all applicable laws and ensure that you and your end users comply with applicable law. This includes compliance with data, privacy, e-marketing, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, security, terrorism, corruption, child protection and export control laws.
If you operate in a highly regulated industry, such as banking, financial services or healthcare, you may be subject to jurisdiction specific regulations that may limit your ability to utilize all or some of our Services based on your use case. While many regulated customers are able to utilize our Services in a compliant manner, you are solely responsible for determining whether our Services are suitable for your use case based on the industry specific laws that may be applicable to you.
Without limiting or affecting the foregoing, if you operate in the USA, you may be subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. HIPAA laws apply to ‘covered entities’; Bird is not a covered entity, nor does it qualify as a ‘business associate’. Many customers build their applications in a manner that is compliant with HIPAA rules while still using providers like us as part of their workflows. Unless otherwise specifically agreed to in writing, and with the exception of Push Notifications API Services, you will not submit to any of the Services or use any of the Services to collect, store, or process any Protected Health Information (as defined by HIPAA), or similar health information under other comparable laws or regulations.
2. Messaging - no inappropriate actions, content or users
You will not use our Services, or permit, promote, aid or abet them to be used, to directly or indirectly transmit inappropriate or objectionable content or content that:
is unsolicited (see further below). You must obtain all required consents under applicable law and provide legally adequate opt-out functionality for any marketing or associated activities you undertake using our Services;
is racist, obscene, offensive, tortious, libelous, defamatory, discriminatory (including on grounds based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, age, marital or family status, or membership of protected communities under applicable law) or pornographic;
is harmful, harassing, threatening, exploitative or abusive including hate speech or any communications that originate from a hate group;
encourages violence, harm, discrimination or illegal, unethical or immoral actions or could endanger or pose a threat to public safety;
is false, misleading, inaccurate, fraudulent or criminal in nature; or
is malicious, including content that is or contains malware or viruses or is designed to intentionally evade filters or to advocate or perpetuate hacking or cracking.
Without limiting or affecting the foregoing, you are responsible for ensuring that:
you do not use our Services to circumvent our or, as applicable, an electronic communications provider’s spam or unsolicited message detection and prevention mechanisms;
you do not misrepresent yourself when sending messages over our Services including by means of spoofing the sender ID, disguising, falsifying or manipulating the origin, transmission path or subject matter of messages or the originating address or otherwise attempting to send misleading messages to end-users in respect to your true nature; and
you and your end users do not use the Services to promote or enable the transmission of or access to any prohibited content or communications described in this Section.
You must be able to provide proof that you have in place measures to ensure compliance with these requirements.
Without limiting or affecting the general provisions above, the following paragraphs address important specific issues:
Fraud
You may not use the Services to participate or assist in any way in fraudulent, criminal, illegal, deceptive or harmful activities, directly or indirectly.
Spam and restricted content
You agree to comply with consent and data processing obligations according to applicable laws, including:
using only permission-based marketing lists and/or, as required by applicable law, getting opt-in or another valid form of consent from each message recipient before initiating any communication to them;
having a working “unsubscribe” mechanism in place in the message recipient’s local language that allows the recipient to opt out from Customer mailing list(s), except to the extent certain transactional messages are exempt from “unsubscribe” requirements of applicable law;
maintaining, publishing, and complying with a privacy policy that meets applicable legal requirements and making that privacy policy available to message recipients to the extent required by applicable law; and
not contacting message recipients on do-not-call or do-not-disturb registries.
You may not use the Services to send, store, or process (as applicable):
unsolicited bulk messages or messages that are otherwise considered to be junk messages. Some examples of such messages include affiliate marketing, lead generation, penny stocks, credit repair, illegal gambling, multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes, prostitution, direct to consumer pharmaceutical sales, payday loans, and chain letters;
messages to:
addresses obtained from purchased or rented recipient lists that do not comply with applicable law;
recipient contact information programmatically generated or scraped from the Internet; or
role-based or non-specific recipient contact information (e.g., webmaster@domain.com or info@domain.com) on a routine basis.
highly sensitive information, which includes:
social security numbers, passport numbers, military numbers, voter numbers, driver’s license numbers, taxpayer numbers, or other government identification numbers;
Protected Health Information (as defined by HIPAA), or similar information under other comparable laws or regulations;
financial account numbers (including credit or debit card numbers, primary account numbers, bank account numbers, related security codes or passwords, or similar information); or
“special classes of data” (as defined by the General Data Protection Regulation) of EU residents, or similar information under other comparable laws or regulations; provided, however this restriction does not apply to your use of the Push Notifications API Services.
Where applicable to your Services, you agree to our right to request opt-in proof, together with other relevant information such as the general purpose of your campaign(s) and a sample message. If you fail to provide evidence of confirmation that your recipients have opted-in for receiving these messages within twenty-four (24) hours from the time of our request, we reserve the right to suspend or deactivate your account.
3. Don’t harm, copy or misuse the Services
You may not:
reverse engineer, copy, dissemble, or decompile or create derivative works in respect of the Services, or remove any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Services;
engage in any activity that threatens or impacts the security, stability, integrity, availability or otherwise negatively impacts any aspect of the Services, us, our Affiliates or any third party services or networks linked to or made available through the Services. This includes:
traffic pumping or artificially inflating call or message traffic, transmitting any viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, time bombs or other harmful or malicious code, bots, files, scripts, agents or programs (including denial of service tools) that damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any Services, system, data or personal information;
sending messages that result in an unacceptable number of spam or similar complaints (even if the messages themselves are not actually spam) or employ sending practices that negatively impact the Services or other customers of the Services;
testing for any vulnerability of our infrastructure; or
actions that interfere with other user's enjoyment of the Services we provide;
incorporate, link or distribute our Services or products with any code or software licensed under the GNU General Public License (“GPL”), Lesser General Public License (“LGPL”), Mozilla or any other open source licence, in each case in any manner that could cause or could be interpreted or asserted to cause our Services or products (or any modifications thereto) to become subject to the terms of the GPL, LGPL, Mozilla or any other open source licence;
attempt to bypass, exploit, defeat, or disable fair usage, security, technical or other limitations or restrictions placed on the Services or attempt to access non-public Bird systems, programs, data, pricing or services that have not been made available to you as part of the Services;
use the Services, or any interfaces provided with the Services, to access any Bird product or service in a manner that violates the applicable terms of service or other terms and conditions for use of such Bird product or service (including the General Terms and Conditions); and/or
use our services in a manner that exceeds any permitted maximum usage cap or, where no such cap is expressly specified, in a manner that exceeds a fair and reasonable level for our Services.
Other
Additional requirements for specific Services, including any country specific requirements are included in the Agreement and apply to the extent you use those specific Services.
This AUP may be updated by us from time to time in accordance with Section 12 of the General Terms and Conditions. Your continued use of the Services following notice of any update constitutes your acceptance of the modified AUP.
We encourage you to review this AUP regularly.