Permitted Use Policy

What Sentinel is for

Counterparty due diligence — the kind of background research a reasonable person does before signing a contract, accepting money, granting access, or otherwise taking on real exposure with another party. Concretely:

• Pre-LOI screening of a target company or its principals
• Vendor and contractor vetting before NDA or SOW
• Major-donor and grant-recipient verification for nonprofits
• Board-candidate workups
• Investigative journalism with a public-interest purpose
• Personal-safety research (a subletter, a person you’re considering meeting)
• Litigation support, working with counsel
• KYC/AML investigation by a compliance professional or licensed institution

What Sentinel is NOT for

The U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and comparable laws in other jurisdictions tightly regulate the use of background reports for certain consumer-protected decisions. Sentinel is not a Consumer Reporting Agency and Sentinel reports are not consumer reports. You may not use Sentinel reports as a basis for:

• Employment decisions (hiring, firing, promotion, retention) — unless you are operating as an FCRA-compliant CRA with a permissible purpose and adverse-action procedures
• Credit decisions (extending credit, setting credit terms, collecting on accounts)
• Insurance underwriting or rate-setting
• Housing decisions (tenant screening, eviction, rental approval)
• Government benefits eligibility
• Any other use that, under applicable law, requires a regulated consumer-report framework

Every paid run requires you to attest to a permitted purpose. We log that attestation. False attestations are a material breach of these terms.

Hard refusals

Some uses we won’t support regardless of attestation. Our agent is trained to refuse them and our team will reverse any run that slips through. These include:

• Investigation of minors. Anyone under 18, except by a lawful guardian for a guardianship purpose. We will not run vets on children.
• Stalking, harassment, or domestic-abuse facilitation. Building a profile to surveil, intimidate, or harm a person, ex-partner, or family member.
• Doxing. Aggregating a private individual’s personal information to expose them publicly.
• Discriminatory targeting. Using protected-class proxies (race, religion, national origin, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, political affiliation) as the basis for an adverse decision.
• Government surveillance of activists, journalists, or dissidents absent a court order from a jurisdiction with rule-of-law due process and independent judiciary.
• Counter-investigation of victims, witnesses, or whistleblowers (e.g., a defendant trying to dig up dirt on a sexual-assault accuser, an employer building a profile of a regulator-cooperating employee).

What happens when you submit a prohibited request

The agent declines and logs a refusal with a stated reason. You don’t get a report and your quota isn’t consumed. Repeated attempts can trigger account suspension. We don’t pretend the refusal was a technical error.

If you believe a refusal was wrong, reply with context and we’ll review. Most reversed refusals come from misunderstandings of the relationship — e.g., a co-guardian researching their own ward, a lawyer with attorney-client privilege who didn’t spell it out.

Subjects of Sentinel reports

If you are the subject of a Sentinel report and believe a report exists about you that was generated for a prohibited purpose, contact lorenzo@perpetualcore.com. We take subject complaints seriously. If we conclude a report violated this policy we will purge it, sanction the requester, and notify you of the outcome.

Our customer is the controller of subject data they submit. If your concern is about the accuracy of a specific report rather than its purpose, we will route your request to the customer who commissioned it where lawful, or directly investigate where the customer is unresponsive or non-existent (e.g., anonymous Quick Vet). See our Privacy Policy.

Reporting concerns

If you suspect Sentinel is being used in a way that violates this policy — stalking, child investigation, FCRA evasion, anything — write to lorenzo@perpetualcore.com with as much specificity as you can share. We investigate every credible report and we will not retaliate against good-faith reporters.