Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) sets the rules for using the Cloutly platform (the “Service”) when you access it through a white-label partner. It applies to the partner (“Partner”) and to every business the Partner sets up on the Service (each a “Client”), and to their staff and users. “You” means whichever of them is acting. The Partner is responsible to Cloutly for its Clients’ compliance (Partner Terms 7.3).

The AUP is written in plain English on purpose. If a rule is unclear, ask partners@cloutly.com before acting. Capitalised terms not defined here have the meaning given in the Partner Terms or the Customer Terms.

1. The short version

• Message only people who agreed to hear from the business, say who the message is from, and make it easy to stop.
• Ask every customer for a review the same way. Never filter who gets asked by how happy they are, and never buy, fake or pay for reviews.
• Be who you say you are.
• Do not use the Service for anything illegal, deceptive or harmful, or for the industries listed in section 5.
• Use Front Desk honestly, on websites you control, and do not use it to collect information it was not designed for.
• Do not try to get around the limits, protections or opt-outs built into the Service.

2. Messaging: consent, identification and unsubscribe

2.1 The law you must follow. Every email and SMS sent through the Service is a commercial electronic message. In Australia it must comply with the Spam Act 2003 (Cth), which requires consent, sender identification and a functional unsubscribe facility, and with the ACMA’s rules and guidance under it. Messages to other countries must comply with that country’s law, including the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 in New Zealand, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and CAN-SPAM in the United States, and the GDPR and PECR in the UK and EU. You, not Cloutly, are the sender for the purposes of those laws.

2.2 Consent. You may only message a person who has given consent to receive messages from the Client. Under the Spam Act consent can be express (they ticked a box, gave their number for this purpose, or asked to be contacted) or reasonably inferred from an existing business relationship and the person’s conduct, for example a customer who gave their mobile number when booking or paying. Consent to be contacted about a purchase is not consent to marketing. You must keep a record of the basis for each contact and produce it on request. The Service cannot check consent for you; it relies on you.

2.3 Lists you must not use. You must not upload or sync purchased, rented, scraped or shared contact lists, contacts collected by another business, or contacts whose relationship with the Client has ended. Every contact in a Client’s workspace must be that Client’s own customer or genuine prospect.

2.4 Identify the sender. Every message must clearly identify the Client as the business sending it and give accurate contact details for the Client. Messages go out under the business name, sender identity and reply address configured in the Client’s workspace; you must set those truthfully and must not use a name, sender or address that belongs to someone else or that hides who is sending.

2.5 Unsubscribe. Every email sent through the Service carries an unsubscribe link, and every SMS can be stopped by replying STOP. You must not remove, hide or disable those, or tell customers to ignore them. A reply of STOP, or a listed equivalent such as UNSUBSCRIBE, automatically unsubscribes that number in the Client’s workspace. Other wording from a customer who clearly wants no more messages is shown to you in the inbox, and you must honour it promptly and must not message that person again. Unsubscribes must be honoured within five business days as the Spam Act requires; the Service does so immediately.

2.6 Frequency and timing. The Service caps review-request SMS to a person and sends them inside a business-hours window in the Client’s time zone. You must not work around those caps by importing the same person under different details, running parallel campaigns to the same people, or using another tool alongside the Service to send more. Reminders must stop when a person reviews, replies, or asks you to stop.

2.7 Content of messages. Messages must be truthful, must relate to the Client’s genuine relationship with the person, and must not contain content prohibited by section 5. Do not use review requests as a cover for marketing or sales offers.

2.8 Calls. The Service does not make phone calls. If you use a customer’s number to call them, the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth) applies and is your responsibility.

3. Reviews: genuine only, never gated

3.1 No review gating. You must not ask only happy customers for reviews, or route customers to a public review site or to a private feedback form depending on how they rated their experience. The ACCC treats that as misleading, because the resulting rating does not reflect the real customer experience, and Google and other Review Platforms prohibit it. The Service is designed so that every customer who is asked for a review gets the same request and the same path to the public platform, and you must not configure it, combine it with another tool, or instruct staff so that it does otherwise.

3.2 No fake, bought or incentivised reviews. You must not write, buy, trade or commission reviews; post reviews of a business you own, work for or are paid by without disclosing that; ask staff, family or friends to post reviews; offer a payment, discount, gift, prize or other benefit for a review or for a particular rating; or use AI to generate reviews. Under the Australian Consumer Law, fake or misleading reviews and undisclosed incentives are misleading or deceptive conduct, and the ACCC has taken enforcement action and obtained substantial penalties for them. Review Platforms also remove incentivised reviews and can suspend the business’s listing.

3.3 No suppression. You must not use the Service, false reporting, legal threats or any other means to remove, hide or bury genuine negative reviews. You may report a review to a Review Platform only where you honestly believe it breaches that platform’s policies, and you must not report a review because it is unfavourable. You must not edit a customer’s review or feedback before it is published or displayed.

3.4 Display honestly. Where the Service displays reviews on your website, widget or public page, the display must not misrepresent the reviews: no hiding ratings below a threshold, no altering text, no selective display presented as a complete record. The Service’s public pages and widgets show what the Review Platform shows.

3.5 Responses. Responses you publish to reviews, including those drafted with AI features, are published in the Client’s name and are your responsibility. They must be truthful, must not disclose a customer’s personal information, and must not threaten or harass the reviewer.

3.6 Platform rules. You must comply with the terms and review policies of each Review Platform you connect, including Google’s prohibited and restricted content policies and its rules on solicitation and incentives. Where a platform restricts how its brand or content may be shown, those restrictions apply to your pages and widgets.

3.7 The Cloutly Fraudulent Review Policy applies in addition to this section.

4. No impersonation

4.1 You must not represent yourself as Cloutly, as a Review Platform, as Google or any other platform, as a government body, or as any business you do not act for. Workspaces, sender identities, brand assets, hosted addresses and public pages must belong to the business they name.

4.2 A Partner must not describe the Service as its own software, state or imply that it built the platform, or use the Cloutly name or marks, except as the Partner Terms allow.

4.3 You must not set up a workspace for a business without its knowledge, or send messages or publish content in a business’s name without its authority.

4.4 Automated conversations must not claim to be a human when a person asks. You must not give Front Desk a name, persona or instructions that present it as a named member of staff or deny that it is an automated assistant.

5. Prohibited content and industries

5.1 Prohibited uses. You must not use the Service to:

• send messages or publish content that is unlawful, defamatory, threatening, harassing, hateful, discriminatory, sexually explicit, or that promotes violence or self-harm;
• deceive or defraud anyone, including phishing, scams, pyramid or get-rich-quick schemes, or impersonation;
• distribute malware, or link to sites that do;
• collect or store information from people under 18 without the lawful consent a child’s data requires, or market to children;
• infringe anyone’s intellectual property, privacy or other rights;
• send or display content that a connected carrier or Review Platform prohibits, where that would put the Service’s sending reputation or platform access at risk.

5.2 Restricted industries. Because of carrier rules, Review Platform policies and legal risk, you must not use the Service for a business whose principal activity is: adult content or services; firearms, weapons or ammunition; tobacco, vaping or illegal drugs; cannabis, except where lawful and only with our prior written approval; gambling or betting; payday lending, debt collection or credit repair; cryptocurrency trading or investment schemes; multi-level marketing; or any activity that is illegal where the business or its customers are located.

5.3 Regulated professions. Health, legal, financial and other regulated businesses may use the Service but must comply with their own advertising and testimonial rules (for example the restrictions on testimonials in health advertising under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law). It is your responsibility to know whether the reviews you collect and display are permitted for your profession and to configure the Service accordingly.

6. Front Desk

Front Desk is the AI assistant a Client can place on its own website to answer visitors, capture enquiries and follow them up. When you use it:

6.1 Your own website only. Install it only on websites the Client owns or controls, and only crawl the Client’s own public pages as its knowledge source. Do not point it at a competitor’s site or at content you do not have the right to use.

6.2 Truthful knowledge. The business details, services, prices, hours and instructions you give it must be accurate and kept current. You must not instruct it to make claims the business cannot support, to disparage competitors, or to give professional advice the business is not licensed to give.

6.3 What it may collect. Front Desk is designed to collect a visitor’s name and a contact method so the business can follow up, plus the enquiry itself and any photo the visitor chooses to send. You must not configure it to ask for payment-card numbers, passwords, government identifiers, health information or other sensitive information, and you must not use the transcripts for anything other than answering the visitor’s enquiry and the business’s ordinary customer service.

6.4 Follow-ups. Follow-up messages Front Desk sends to a visitor rely on the visitor having given their contact details for that enquiry. They must stay about the enquiry. Do not add the visitor to marketing lists without separate consent, and honour any request to stop.

6.5 Disclosure. Any notice we place on the widget must stay in place, and you must not present Front Desk as a human (section 4.4). Your website must have a privacy notice that covers the chat and the follow-up messages it can send.

6.6 Misuse. You must not use Front Desk to generate content for use elsewhere, to test or probe the underlying model, to extract its instructions, or to run conversations that are not genuine visitor enquiries. Automated or scripted traffic to the widget is prohibited.

7. Rate limits and abuse

7.1 Built-in limits. The Service applies limits to protect customers and the platform, including: a cap on review-request SMS to one person within a rolling period, a business-hours send window for SMS, per-account and per-address rate limits on sign-ups and public forms, usage quotas on AI features, and caps on the number of partner workspaces that can be created from one organisation, domain or network address. The current values are shown in the product where they apply. We may change them with notice where practical, and without notice where needed to protect the Service.

7.2 No circumvention. You must not attempt to work around any limit, cap, opt-out, suppression list, verification step, security control or billing mechanism, whether by creating multiple accounts or workspaces, splitting lists, altering contact details, automating requests, or using another tool alongside the Service.

7.3 No scraping or bulk extraction. You may take your data out through the exports and APIs the Service provides. You must not crawl, scrape or bulk-download the Service, its public pages or widgets, or use its data to build a competing product or a dataset about businesses that are not your Clients.

7.4 No load or security testing of the Service without our prior written agreement.

7.5 Fair use of AI features. AI features are provided for the business’s own reviews, feedback, conversations and content. We may throttle accounts whose AI use is far outside normal patterns for a business of their size.

7.6 Complaint rates. Where a Client’s messages generate complaint, bounce or carrier-block rates that put the Service’s sending reputation at risk, we may throttle or pause that Client’s sending until the cause is fixed (Partner Terms 8.4).

8. Security and access

8.1 Keep credentials secret, use one login per person, remove people who leave, and tell us within 24 hours of a suspected unauthorised access (Partner Terms 11.4).

8.2 A Partner may open a Client’s workspace only to provide the services that Client has engaged it for, and must treat what it sees there as that Client’s confidential information (Partner Terms 7.6 and 11.3).

8.3 You must not probe, scan or test the Service’s security, or access data, accounts or systems you are not authorised to access. If you find a vulnerability, report it to partners@cloutly.com and do not exploit or disclose it.

9. What we do when the rules are broken

9.1 We may investigate any use we reasonably believe breaches this AUP, including by reviewing message content, contact lists, review activity and Front Desk configuration in the workspace concerned.

9.2 Depending on the seriousness, we may: warn you and require a fix within a stated time; throttle or pause messaging, publishing, Front Desk or AI features for a Client workspace or a whole Partner Workspace; remove content; suspend the workspace; or terminate the Partner Terms (clauses 8.4, 18.2 and 18.3). For urgent matters, including spam complaints, carrier or platform violations, fraud, or contact from a regulator or law-enforcement body, we act first and notify afterwards.

9.3 We will tell the Partner what we did and why, give a reasonable chance to respond, and restore service once the issue is resolved, unless the breach is serious or repeated.

9.4 Where the law, a carrier or a Review Platform requires it, or where we reasonably consider it necessary to protect others, we may report the activity and identify the Partner and the Client as the sender (Partner Terms 8.5). We cooperate with regulators including the ACMA, the ACCC and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

9.5 The Partner remains liable for fees during a suspension, and for any loss we suffer from a breach, as the Partner Terms provide.

10. Reporting

To report spam, a fake review, impersonation, a security concern or any other misuse of the Service, or to ask whether something is allowed, email partners@cloutly.com with the workspace or business concerned, what you saw, and when. If you are a message recipient who wants no further contact, reply STOP to the SMS or use the unsubscribe link in the email; that works without contacting us.

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Cloutly Co Pty Ltd (ACN 637 155 045)
WOTSO Workspace, Level 2, 194 Varsity Parade, Varsity Lakes QLD 4227, Australia
Email: partners@cloutly.com · Web: cloutly.com