Acceptable Use Policy

What jhint is for

Conversations you are part of, and audio you are entitled to listen to on your own computer: calls and meetings in a language you are still learning, technical discussions, customer and vendor conversations, lectures and talks, webinars, recordings and videos you are watching.

Everything below follows from one idea: the app is an aid to the person using it, not a tool against the person on the other end.

Exams and assessments

Do not use jhint in an exam, certification, or any assessment where outside assistance is not allowed. That includes remote-proctored tests, screenings with a no-assistance rule, language certifications and academic work submitted as your own.

Do not use it to defeat, evade, disable or interfere with proctoring, invigilation or monitoring software, and do not combine it with tools whose purpose is to do so.

This is not a disclaimer we hide behind — it shaped what we built. jhint has no hidden window, no invisible overlay, no mode that removes it from screen sharing, and we will not add one.

Assessing other people

Do not use jhint to evaluate, screen or rate another person — a job candidate you are interviewing, an employee under review, an applicant, a student being examined. jhint helps you in your own conversation; it is not a tool for judging someone else, and we do not build it to be used that way.

This is the mirror image of the rule above. There, the concern is a candidate who hides that they are being helped. Here it is the other side of the table: a person being assessed by software they cannot see, on a decision that affects their life.

Why there is no stealth mode

The overlay is a normal macOS window. It appears in screen sharing and screen recording like anything else on your desktop, it does not inject itself into other applications, and it does not hide from software that looks at what is running.

People ask for the opposite, and the answer is no. A product that quietly whispers answers to someone pretending to know them is a different product, with a different ethics and a different set of victims. Working around this behaviour — patching the app, wrapping it, scripting around it — is a breach of this policy and of the Terms of Use.

Other people

You are responsible for the legality of listening to and transcribing a conversation. Rules differ: some places require every participant to consent, some require notice, some require nothing. Find out which applies to you, and say so when you should.

Regardless of local law, do not use jhint to:

• monitor, surveil or profile someone without a lawful basis, including employees, family members or partners;
• capture conversations you are not a participant in and have no right to hear;
• harass, stalk, intimidate or blackmail anyone;
• collect other people’s personal data in breach of data-protection law, or feed such data to an external model without a lawful basis;
• impersonate a person or organisation, or present generated text as someone’s authentic words in a way that misleads.

The app is built to reduce the damage of careless use: audio is never written to disk, the transcript is not kept by default, and screenshots are only taken when you ask. That is not a substitute for your judgement about the person you are listening to.

If you switch saving on, what the other people said is kept on your computer — encrypted, for the period you choose, and never sent to us. Before enabling it the app asks you to confirm that you will only save conversations where you are legally permitted to do so; that confirmation is part of this policy. Laws differ depending on where you and the other participants are, and in some places transcribing or keeping a record of private words is treated like recording them. Give any notice and obtain any consent the law requires of you, do not keep such a record of people who would object to it, and delete it when it has served its purpose.

Searching the web from your computer

The built-in model can be allowed to search the web. That search is made from your computer, over your connection and from your IP address — not from our servers — and the query is written by the model out of what it was given, which can include what other people said in your conversation. It is off until you turn it on, and turning it on asks you to accept that.

When you use it:

• respect the search engine’s terms — using this feature within them and within the law where you are is your responsibility, and the app tells you so before you switch it on;
• do not try to defeat what a site or a search engine does to control automated access. jhint does not do that either: it reads only what a site allows, stops when a site refuses, and never works around a block or a CAPTCHA. Patching or scripting around that behaviour is a breach of this policy;
• remember what a query carries. The app shows you every query it makes; if you see something in one that should not leave your computer, turn the feature off.

Model providers and keys

When you connect an external model, you do it with your own account and your own API key, and that provider’s terms apply to what you send. Respect them: do not use jhint to work around a provider’s rate limits, pricing or content rules, and do not connect credentials that are not yours to use.

Which providers exist, what is sent to them and what we deliberately never do is set out in the Third-Party Provider Disclosure.

The product itself

• Do not share, resell or publish your licence key, and do not run jhint as a service for other people.
• Do not work around the licence check, the device limit your plan carries, or the disclosure the app shows before the first external send.
• Do not decompile, reverse-engineer or repackage the app, except where the law expressly allows it.
• Do not attack our licence service — no brute forcing keys, no flooding, no probing for other people’s data.

If this policy is broken

Depending on what happened, we may ask you to stop, suspend the licence, or end it. Where the problem can be fixed, we will tell you what it is and give you the chance to fix it first; where the use is one of those ruled out above under exams, assessing other people, or other people generally, we may act immediately.

If we end a licence for a breach, the subscription stops without a refund for the current period. If we were wrong, tell us — we would rather reverse a mistake than defend it.

Reporting abuse

If you believe jhint is being used against you or someone else, write to support@jhint.ai. Describe what you saw; we read every message like this and answer it.

Note what we can and cannot do: we have no access to anyone’s conversations, transcripts or prompts — none of it reaches us, by design. What we can do is act on the licence behind the behaviour.