Privacy and responsible use

UserSearch works with real personal data about real people. Every search you run can return information belonging to a living third party — the subject of your search. That capability is powerful, and it carries responsibility. This page explains the kinds of personal data the product surfaces, the principles for handling it responsibly, and how this documentation itself protects privacy.

Caution

This page is guidance on responsible use, not legal advice. It does not tell you what the law permits or requires in your jurisdiction or for your role. You are responsible for understanding and meeting your own legal, contractual, and ethical obligations before you search, store, or act on anyone’s data.

The personal data a search surfaces

Results are not synthetic samples — they are real values about the person you are looking up. Across the product’s search types, a search can return the following classes of subject data:

Data class	Where it appears
Subject email addresses	Search input, results, and Bookmarks value column
Subject usernames and handles	Username searches and result rows
Phone numbers	People and Phone result rows
Person names, physical addresses	People results and Profile tabs
Vehicle records	Vehicle result rows
Cryptocurrency addresses	Crypto result rows
IP addresses with geolocation	Cyber result rows
Connections graph nodes and edges	Profile View and graph tabs

All of the above is a real third party’s personal information. It is the search type of data that OSINT ethics and applicable law are most concerned with. Treat it as sensitive from the moment it appears on screen.

Principles for responsible use

1. Have a legitimate basis. Run searches only for a lawful, defined purpose. Do not look up people out of curiosity or for personal reasons.
2. Minimize what you collect. Search and retain only the data your purpose actually needs. Bookmark and enrich selectively rather than harvesting everything a subject touches.
3. Handle results as sensitive. Subject data (emails, usernames, phones, names, addresses, vehicle, crypto, IP and geolocation) is real personal information. Store it securely and share it only with people who are entitled to see it.
4. Keep operator context private. Your Case names, your Credits balance, My Team membership, and billing history are your own operational context. Do not expose them unnecessarily.
5. Know your obligations. Consent requirements, data-protection law, and platform terms differ by jurisdiction and by the nature of your work. Confirm what applies to you before you act on results.

Protecting secrets inside a Case

A Case can hold genuine secret material — a per-case Forensic Mode key, a private key, and passwords, shown in the Case-Management modal. This is the most sensitive tier of anything the product exposes.

Caution

Treat case keys and passwords as live secrets. If one is ever exposed — captured in a screenshot, pasted into a message, or shared with someone who should not have it — assume it is compromised and rotate it in the app. Do not rely on hiding or deleting the exposure after the fact.

Never publish, forward, or paste a real case key, private key, or password outside the app.

How these docs handle personal data

UserSearch’s documentation is held to a strict, binding privacy policy so that helping you learn the product never exposes a real person. This is a hard rule, not a guideline.

• No real personal data ever appears in these docs. Original captures of the app contain real third-party PII and are kept private. Only a redacted derivative that has passed a formal redaction gate is ever published.
• Synthetic substitution, not blurring. Where a screenshot needs to show what a result looks like, the real value is replaced with a realistic fake of the same shape — a synthetic email that looks like an email, a synthetic phone that looks like a phone — so the image still teaches without exposing anyone. Reserved example ranges (such as @example.com) are preferred so a fake can’t be mistaken for a live lead.
• Redaction is opaque, never reversible. When a value is masked, it is covered with a solid, opaque block. Blur, pixelation, and mosaic are prohibited over personal data because they can be reversed.
• Consistency across images. A given real value maps to the same synthetic value everywhere it would appear, so the redacted screenshots stay internally consistent.
• Independent verification. Before any image is published, a second pass checks that zero real subject data remains, that no reversible redaction was used, that no secret material is present, and that alt text contains no real PII.

The result: you can rely on every screenshot in this documentation to illustrate real product behavior without ever revealing a real person’s data.

Verified against UserSearch v2.0.20