Acceptable Use

Effective: 3 October 2026

Last reviewed: 3 October 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. Each Topic's Service Description says what it needs. Where a Topic assesses how a piece of work is made, redacted material usually serves as well as unredacted. Where a Topic builds a plan from facts, such as who makes a decision, it needs those facts, and its Service Description names them.

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 the Service Description asks for a working file and they are part of it; 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. Where a Service Description asks for a working file, such as the live workbook behind a model, send the file itself.

3. Redaction is welcome

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

Where a Topic assesses how work is made, such as whether a claim is supported or whether a structure works, its judgements survive a redacted customer name, a masked figure, or a removed appendix.

Where a redaction does prevent us assessing or stating something, we say so in what we return and record it as not known, in the way that Topic's Service Description describes. We never fill the gap, and we never treat a redaction as a defect of your material.

4. Conduct

Do not use a Topic to obtain an assessment or a plan you then present as an endorsement, a certification, or an assurance. Section 11 of the Service Terms (What no Companion service does), and the Service Description for the Topic, set out what we never claim, and you should not claim it on our behalf.

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 Section 13 of the Service Terms (Confidentiality) and Section 21 of the Service Terms (Intellectual property).

Do not resell the service, or submit material 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, we refund the fee in full, as Section 5 of the Service Terms (Making a request) sets out.

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.