Acceptable use policy

What this policy covers

This policy applies to everyone who uses Bludge — the business that holds the account, every person it gives access to, and anyone it lets load leads on its behalf. It forms part of our terms of service, and the definitions there apply here.

It is short on purpose. If something you want to do is not obviously allowed by it, ask us first at [support email].

What the service is for

Calling back the people who inquire with your own business, about that inquiry, soon after they made it, so you can qualify them and book a meeting.

That is the whole permitted use. Everything below is a consequence of it.

Where your leads may come from

Every person you load must have contacted your business and consented to be contacted back — on the number you give us, by phone and by text, including by an automated or artificial voice. Your web forms, your CRM, your phone, your ads: those are the sources.

You must not load:

cold lists — anyone who has not contacted your business;
purchased lists, rented lists, or data from a list broker or lead aggregator, however it is described and however the seller says it was collected;
scraped data — numbers taken from directories, social networks, review sites, public registers, other people's websites or anywhere else you did not collect them yourself;
appended or enriched numbers — a phone number added to a record by a third-party data service, rather than given to you by the person;
numbers a partner or affiliate collected, unless the person consented to be contacted by your named business and you hold the record of that consent;
Inquiries that are too old to be a live consent, or that were made to a different business you have acquired or bought data from, unless the consent covers you by name;
anyone under 16;
numbers you have not washed against any do-not-call or preference register the law requires you to check;
emergency, government, hospital, or premium-rate numbers, or numbers you have any reason to believe are not the person's own.

"I bought the list but they opted in with the seller" is not consent. "It came from a partner" is not consent. If you cannot show us when, where and in what words a person agreed to hear from you, do not load them.

People who have opted out

When someone replies STOP to a text, asks on a call not to be contacted again, or is marked do-not-call in the admin, that number is suppressed across your entire account, for calls and for texts, permanently.

You must not:

remove or work around a suppression;
reach that person on a different number, from a different account, under a different business name, or through another channel that ignores what they asked for;
ask them to opt back in as a condition of anything;
load someone who has already opted out of hearing from you elsewhere.

If someone asks on a call not to be contacted again, that request is not detected automatically. Read your transcripts and record it. Ignoring it is a breach of this policy.

The AI disclosure

Every call opens by saying it is an AI, on whose behalf it is calling, and what it is calling about. That sentence is the single thing that makes this service honest.

You must not:

remove, shorten, bury or disable the disclosure, or try to defeat it through the prompt;
instruct the assistant to claim it is a person, to deny it is an AI, or to dodge the question when a caller asks;
give the assistant the name of a real member of your staff in a way that presents it as that person;
clone or imitate a real person's voice;
have the assistant claim to be from a business other than yours, or from a government body, a utility, a bank or anyone else it is not.

You may add to the disclosure. You may never take it away.

Calling hours and volume

The service will not call outside the hours set for the person's own country and time zone, and never on a Sunday or a public holiday. You can narrow those hours. You cannot widen them.

You must not:

attempt to defeat the calling window — by mislabelling a lead's country or state, setting a false time zone, backdating or forward-dating an inquiry, or any other workaround;
ask for an operator override you do not have a real, stated reason for, or keep one after the reason has passed;
call the same person again and again after they have not answered, beyond the retries the service makes on its own;
load the same person repeatedly under different records to get around a cap or a suppression;
use the service for high-volume dialling unconnected to real inquiries, or in a way that generates complaints to us, to a carrier or to a regulator.

Numbers you point at us

The assistant answers your Bludge number as well as calling out on it, and the caller has no way of knowing in advance that a machine will pick up. That puts two rules on which numbers you may send here.

You must not:

route a number you do not own or control to Bludge — somebody else's published number, a number you have not been authorised in writing to answer, a number belonging to a business you do not run, or one you have forwarded without the number holder's agreement;
use the assistant to screen a call you are legally required to answer in person — an emergency or safety line, an after-hours line a licence, permit or contract requires a person to staff, a line published as a way to reach a regulator, a complaints line where the rules require a human, or any number where the law where you operate says a person must take the call.

If a line is one people ring when something has gone wrong, do not put an AI in front of it without checking what your own rules require of you. If you are not sure, ask us at [support email] before you point the number at us.

Industries and content we do not allow

Some uses are off the table regardless of consent. You must not use Bludge for:

debt collection, arrears chasing, or contacting anyone about money they owe;
political calling of any kind — campaigning, canvassing, polling, fundraising, referendum or advocacy calls;
adult content, sexual services, or dating services with a sexual component;
gambling, betting or lottery promotion, and speculative or high-risk investments, cryptocurrency schemes, forex, binary options and "get rich" offers;
payday and high-cost credit, debt consolidation, credit repair, and financial products marketed to people in hardship;
health claims the law requires a licensed professional to make, prescription medicines, and unproven treatments;
firearms, weapons, drugs, tobacco, vapes, and anything else whose sale is restricted where you are calling;
charitable or religious solicitation, unless we have agreed to it in writing and you hold the registrations local law requires;
anything unlawful where you are, where we are, or where the person you are calling is;
anything deceptive — a bait offer, a false claim about price or availability, a fake urgency, a survey that is really a sale, or a pretext for collecting information you did not say you were collecting;
collecting payment card numbers, passwords, government identifiers or bank details on a call;
seeking sensitive personal information — health, race, religion, sexuality, union membership, criminal history — beyond what your service genuinely needs and the person expects to be asked.

If your business is close to one of these lines, tell us before you start rather than after. Some of them we can discuss; several we cannot.

How the assistant must behave

You write what the assistant says. What you write must not:

harass, threaten, pressure, shame or abuse the person on the phone, or refuse to let them off the call;
keep asking after someone has said no, or treat a refusal as an objection to be handled;
mislead about who you are, what you sell, what it costs, or what happens next;
impersonate another business, a regulator or a public authority;
discriminate against anyone on a ground protected by law;
be indecent, or aimed at distressing the person;
promise something you cannot deliver, or book meetings you have no intention of keeping.

If a caller asks to speak to a person, the assistant must say how, and you must actually be reachable that way.

Testing

Test on numbers you control. Your own mobile, your staff's with their agreement, a number your business owns.

Do not test on a customer, a friend who has not agreed, a competitor, a random number, or a number you found somewhere. Do not use the service to check whether a number is live, to fingerprint a network, or to work out who owns a number.

Security and technical limits

You must not:

probe, scan or test the security of the service, or try to get at another account's data;
share your API keys, webhook secrets or login access outside your business;
send us traffic designed to overload the service, or exceed the rate limits on your account deliberately;
reverse engineer, decompile or copy the service, or use it to build a competing product;
resell the service, or run calls for another business, without a written arrangement with us;
use automated means to extract data from the service beyond the exports and interfaces we provide.

Found a security problem? Tell us at [support email]. We will not pursue you for a good-faith report that did not damage anything or touch anyone else's data.

What happens if you break this

We monitor for complaints, opt-out rates, carrier reports and patterns that look like a cold list. Depending on what we find, we may:

Ask you about it. Most problems are a misunderstanding and get fixed in an email.
Pause an assistant or a lead source while we look, so the calls stop but your account stays.
Suspend the account immediately, without notice, where the breach is serious or continuing — a purchased list, a defeated disclosure, calls to people who opted out, or anything unlawful.
Terminate. Fees for appointments already booked stay payable.
Report it where the law requires us to, and cooperate with a regulator or a carrier that asks.

Under our terms you also indemnify us for what a breach of this policy costs us — including a regulator's penalty and the legal costs of answering it.

We may update this policy as the law changes and as we learn what goes wrong. Material changes are notified the way our terms describe.

Reporting a problem

If you got a call from Bludge that you did not ask for, tell us. We will suppress your number for that business straight away and look at how it got there. You do not need an account, and you do not need to explain yourself twice.

An unwanted call, or a business misusing the service: [support email]
Privacy, access and deletion: [privacy contact email], and our privacy policy
By post: [Company legal name], [registered address]

See also our terms of service and the calling rules the service enforces by default.