Terms of Service

1. Who you are contracting with

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") form a binding agreement between you and Counterscope Technologies FZ-LLC (in formation) ("Counterscope", "we", "us", "our"), and govern your access to and use of the Counterscope website, platform, data, and related services (together, the "Service").

Important disclosure: Counterscope Technologies FZ-LLC (in formation) is in the process of being established in the United Arab Emirates. It is not yet registered and does not yet hold a commercial licence. Until its registration is complete, the Service is provided by the founding undertaking operating under the name "Counterscope", and references in these Terms to Counterscope mean that undertaking. Nothing in the Service or in these Terms should be read as a statement that the company is currently registered or licensed.

Upon registration of the company, this agreement transfers to it automatically and in full, and the company adopts and ratifies these Terms as if it had been a party from the outset. No further action by you is required, and your rights under these Terms are not reduced by that transfer.

By creating an account, or by accessing or using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that organisation, and "you" means both you and that organisation.

2. What the Service is — and what it is not

Counterscope collects records that are already publicly available from UAE courts, regulators, registries, and official gazettes; links those records to the companies they concern; and presents them, together with an indicator of risk, alongside the underlying evidence. It is a research and analysis tool.

The Service is expressly NOT, and must not be represented, resold, or relied upon as, any of the following:

• a credit bureau, credit information agency, or provider of credit information services. Counterscope is not Al Etihad Credit Bureau, is not connected with it, and is not licensed under Federal Law No. 6 of 2010 concerning Credit Information or any successor law;
• a credit rating agency, or a provider of credit ratings, credit limits, or creditworthiness determinations;
• a provider of know-your-customer (KYC), customer due diligence (CDD), anti-money-laundering (AML), sanctions, or politically-exposed-person (PEP) screening. Counterscope does not screen against any sanctions or watchlist;
• a background-check, investigation, or employment-screening service;
• legal, financial, tax, investment, insurance, or compliance advice, or a substitute for professional advice or for your own due diligence.

3. Our regulatory status

We hold no licence, authorisation, registration, or approval from the Central Bank of the UAE, the Securities and Commodities Authority, the UAE Data Office, or any other UAE federal or local regulator, and we do not carry on any activity that requires one. We do not hold ourselves out as regulated. If and when the Service changes such that a licence is required, we will obtain it before offering the activity.

4. Early access: free, provisional, and without service commitments

The Service is currently offered as a free early-access preview. We grant you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to access and use the Service for internal business evaluation, subject to these Terms. No fee is charged, and no fee is payable.

Because the Service is a preview, it may be incomplete, may contain errors, and may change, break, be suspended, or be withdrawn at any time, in whole or in part, without notice and without liability to you. We give no undertaking as to availability, uptime, response time, support, or continuity, and no service-level agreement applies.

If we introduce paid plans in future, we will give you advance notice and you will choose whether to subscribe. You will never be charged for the Service without your express prior agreement, and nothing in these Terms obliges you to pay anything.

We may limit, suspend, or withdraw your access at any time, with or without cause and with or without notice. Where we can reasonably do so, we will tell you why.

5. Eligibility and your account

The Service is offered for business use by persons aged 18 or over. It is not directed at children, and you may not use it if you are under 18.

You must give accurate registration information and keep it current. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for all activity under your account. Accounts are personal: you must not share credentials or allow another person to use your account. Tell us promptly at support@counterscope.ae if you believe your account has been compromised.

6. Decision support only — you must not rely on the Service alone

The Service supports your own enquiry. It does not replace it. Any risk band, score, indicator, summary, or classification the Service presents is our opinion, formed by automated means from the public sources we disclose, as at a particular point in time. It is not a finding of fact, not a determination by any court or regulator, and not a statement that any person or company has done anything wrong.

In particular: the absence of a record is not evidence that no risk exists — it may mean only that a source is not covered, is delayed, or did not publish. The presence of a record is not evidence of wrongdoing or liability — proceedings may be pending, defended, settled, appealed, overturned, or discontinued, and a party may be named for reasons unrelated to fault.

You must independently verify, against the primary source, anything you intend to act upon. You are solely responsible for your decisions and for their consequences. You must not use the Service as the sole or decisive basis for any decision that produces legal effects concerning an individual, or that similarly significantly affects them — including decisions on credit, employment, tenancy, insurance, or access to services.

7. Accuracy, and the limits of it

Records are gathered from public sources by automated collection, and facts are extracted from them by automated means, including large language models. Entity matching — deciding that a name in a record refers to a particular company — is also automated and probabilistic.

These methods are imperfect. Records may be misattributed to the wrong party, mistranslated between Arabic and English, misdated, duplicated, incomplete, superseded, or out of date, and sources themselves may contain errors. We do not warrant that the data is accurate, complete, current, or fit for any purpose.

If you believe a record we show is wrong, incomplete, or wrongly linked to you or your company, tell us. Our Data Accuracy, Corrections and Right of Reply Policy explains how we handle such requests, what we will do, and how quickly. We take these requests seriously and act on them.

8. Acceptable use

You may use the Service only for lawful business purposes, and only as these Terms allow. You must not:

• scrape, crawl, harvest, or extract data by automated means, or access the Service other than through the interfaces we provide;
• download, copy, or store data in bulk, or build, train, or enrich any database, index, model, or product from it;
• resell, redistribute, publish, sublicense, or otherwise make the data available to anyone outside your organisation;
• circumvent or attempt to circumvent any access control, rate limit, authentication, or paywall, or reverse engineer any part of the Service;
• attempt to re-identify any individual from aggregated or de-identified data, or combine our data with other data in order to do so;
• use the Service, or anything obtained from it, to harass, intimidate, threaten, blackmail, defame, or unlawfully discriminate against any person or company;
• use the Service for any purpose for which a licence is required that you do not hold, including credit reporting, credit decisioning, employment screening, or investigation services;
• represent any output of the Service as an official record, a court finding, a regulator’s determination, a credit report, or a certification of any kind;
• upload malicious code, probe or test the vulnerability of the Service, or otherwise interfere with its operation or security.

9. Intellectual property

The public records underlying the Service remain public records, and we claim no ownership of them. What is ours is everything we add: the compilation and structure of the database, our extraction, normalisation and entity-resolution work, our scoring methodology, our software, interfaces, text, and design, together with the Counterscope name and marks. These are protected by intellectual-property law and remain ours or our licensors’.

Your licence under clause 4 is a licence to use the interface, not a licence to the database. If you send us feedback or suggestions, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use them without obligation to you.

10. Personal data

How we handle personal data — both yours as a user, and the personal data contained in the public records we hold — is set out in our Privacy and Data Protection Policy, which forms part of these Terms. It explains our legal bases under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data (the "PDPL"), where data is processed and transferred, and how to exercise your rights.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the Service and all data in it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty or representation of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. We specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, completeness, and quiet enjoyment, and any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free.

12. Limitation of liability

12.1 To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive, or exemplary loss, or for any loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, opportunity, goodwill, reputation, data, or anticipated savings, however arising and whether or not foreseeable.

12.2 In particular, we are not liable for any decision you make in reliance on the Service, for any error or omission originating in a public source, for any mismatch between a record and the party it is shown against, or for any unavailability, suspension, or withdrawal of the Service.

12.3 The Service is provided free of charge. Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these Terms and the Service, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise, is limited to AED 1,000 (one thousand UAE dirhams).

12.4 Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded, including liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for gross negligence or wilful misconduct. If any part of this clause is held unenforceable, the remainder continues to apply.

13. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against any claim, demand, loss, liability, fine, or reasonable cost (including legal fees) arising out of your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, any decision you take in reliance on the Service, or any onward disclosure or use of data you obtain from it.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access immediately if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably suspect unlawful or abusive use, or if we are required to do so by law — and otherwise on reasonable notice. On termination your licence ends and you must stop using the Service and delete data obtained from it, except where you are required by law to retain it.

Clauses which by their nature should survive termination — including clauses 2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16 and 17 — survive it.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Every version carries a version number and an effective date, shown at the top of this page. Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give notice in the product or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the Service.

16. Language

These Terms are published in English and Arabic. The English version is the governing version, and in the event of any inconsistency the English text prevails — except where the applicable law or a competent court requires the Arabic text to be used, in which case the Arabic text applies for that purpose.

17. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them, the Service, or their subject matter — including non-contractual disputes — are governed by the federal laws of the United Arab Emirates and the laws of the Emirate of Dubai. You and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of Dubai.

18. General

These Terms, together with the Privacy and Data Protection Policy, the Cookie and Tracking Notice, and the Data Accuracy, Corrections and Right of Reply Policy, are the entire agreement between us on their subject matter. If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues in force. A failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it. You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms; we may assign ours, including on the incorporation of the company or in connection with a reorganisation or transfer of the business. Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

19. Contact

Questions about these Terms: legal@counterscope.ae. Privacy and data-rights requests: privacy@counterscope.ae. Corrections and right of reply: corrections@counterscope.ae.