Acceptable Use

Effective: 6 September 2026

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026

This document forms part of the ApexIQ Companion Service Terms and applies to every Topic. It sets out what must not be sent to us.

Most of it comes down to 1 principle: send what the service needs, and nothing else. A Companion Topic works on how a piece of work is made. It almost never needs the sensitive content inside it, and redacted material is usually served just as well as unredacted material. Quality Audits is the clearest case: an audit of how an artefact is built rarely turns on the customer names in it.

1. Do not send these

Special category and criminal offence data. Data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic or biometric data, health data, or data about sex life or sexual orientation. Data about criminal offences, convictions, or allegations.

Payment card data. Card numbers, security codes, or cardholder data of any kind.

Credentials and secrets. Passwords, API keys, tokens, private keys, certificates, connection strings, or anything else which grants access to a system. If your material contains one, redact it before sending, and treat it as compromised.

Government-classified or export-controlled material. Anything carrying a national security classification, and anything whose transfer is restricted by export control law. Do not send it, and do not send a redacted version either.

Material you are not entitled to disclose. Anything covered by an obligation of confidence, a non-disclosure agreement, or a licence which prevents you sharing it with a third party. Section 3 of the Confidentiality and Materials document (You must be entitled to send it) explains why this is the one to watch.

Privileged material, where sending it to us would waive that privilege. Take advice first.

Personal data the work does not need. Customer lists, employee records, and contact databases. Material which names its author and its approver is normal and expected. Material whose purpose is to carry personal data is not something we should be holding.

Anything unlawful, or anything whose possession by us would be unlawful.

Malicious files. Anything containing malware, or a document built to exploit the software which opens it. Macros in a workbook are fine where they are part of the model; a macro which does anything else is not.

2. Do not send links into your systems

We work on the material you send us, not on live systems.

Do not send credentials to a portal, a link which requires an account, a VPN profile, or anything which asks us to connect to your environment. We will not use them.

Sending a working file is not the same thing. In Quality Audits, where a model is the artefact, the live workbook sent as a file is exactly what the model path needs.

3. Redaction is welcome

Redacting material before sending it does not weaken the work in the way people expect.

We assess whether a claim is supported, whether a structure works, whether a register is complete against its source, and whether a diagram answers its question. Those judgements survive a redacted customer name, a masked figure, or a removed appendix.

Where a redaction does prevent us assessing something, we say so in the deliverable and mark that area unverified. We never treat a redaction as a defect of your material.

4. Conduct

Do not use a Topic to obtain an assessment you then present as an endorsement, a certification, or an assurance. The Service Description for the Topic sets out what we never claim, and you should not claim it on our behalf. For Quality Audits that is Section 13 of the Quality Audits Service Description (What we never claim).

Do not attempt to obtain the internal standard, the criteria, the weightings, or the thresholds behind a result by submitting material designed to probe them, and do not use what we return to reconstruct them. Those are our confidential information and our intellectual property, governed by sections 13 and 21 of the Service Terms.

Do not resell the service, or submit artefacts on behalf of an undisclosed third party without telling us.

5. What happens if something prohibited arrives

We may, at our discretion and without giving notice:

• delete the material immediately, without completing the work;
• suspend or decline the request, and any other open request from you;
• refuse future requests; and
• where the law requires it, report the matter.

Where we delete material under this section we will tell you what we deleted and why.

Where we decline a request for which you have paid, and the reason is not your breach of this document, we refund the fee in full.

6. Tell us if you get it wrong

If you realise you have sent something you should not have, tell us straight away at security@apexedgesalesengineering.com. We will delete it and confirm that we have.

Telling us promptly is always better than hoping we did not notice. We would rather delete a file quietly than discover the problem later.

7. Changes

We may change this document. The version which applies to a request is the version published when we accepted that request. The date at the top is the date it last changed.

Questions: legal@apexedgesalesengineering.com.