Terms of Use

What this site is

This site is published by Bill Hartzer of Hartzer Consulting as general information about how online reputation attacks against businesses work, what platform operators do and do not do about them, and what a business can find out about the effects. It is written for a general readership and not for any particular company's situation.

By reading it you accept the terms below. If you do not, the appropriate response is to stop reading rather than to rely on it.

No legal advice, and no engagement

I am not an attorney. Nothing here is legal advice, and no page should be treated as a substitute for advice from a defamation attorney licensed where you are. Whether a statement is legally defamatory, whether to bring a claim, and what to do in a proceeding are questions for counsel.

Reading this site, writing to me, or receiving a reply does not create a professional engagement. An engagement exists only when it has been agreed in writing after a conflict check, and until then nothing said either way should be relied on as work product.

Accuracy, and the dates on everything

Where a page describes what a platform does, it quotes the operator's own published wording and gives the date that wording was read, alongside the operator's own update date where the page carries one. Operators revise these policies frequently and without notice, so a quotation here is a record of what a page said on a date rather than a statement of what it says today. Verify anything you are about to act on against the operator's current page.

The same goes for everything else: rules, regulations and published research are cited as they stood when read, and the law changes. No page here is maintained as a live index of any operator's terms.

No outcome is predicted

Nothing on this site should be read as a prediction that particular content can be removed, suppressed, deindexed or corrected. Those decisions belong to platform operators, publishers and courts, none of whom I control. Descriptions of what a policy provides for are descriptions of a process, not forecasts of a result in your matter.

Using the content

The text, structure and design of this site are mine unless stated otherwise. Quotations from operators, regulators, courts and researchers belong to their sources and are reproduced here for reference with attribution.

You are welcome to quote a short passage with attribution and a link to the page it came from. Republishing pages in whole or in substantial part, or reproducing them behind another name, is not permitted. Platform, company and product names appearing here belong to their owners and are used to identify the services being described.

Links, and the sites at the other end

External links point to primary sources: an operator's policy page, a regulation, a court opinion, a named study. A link is not an endorsement of the organization behind it, and what those sites contain, and whether they still contain it, is outside my control.

No warranty, and limits

This site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind, and I make no representation that it is complete, current or fit for any particular purpose. To the fullest extent the law allows, I am not liable for any loss arising from reliance on it. Acting on general information rather than on advice about your own facts is a decision you make yourself.

These terms may be revised as the site changes, and the version published here is the one that applies.