01 Lawful use only
Open-source intelligence is legal in most jurisdictions — but what you do with it may not be. You are responsible for knowing the law where you operate and where your subject is located, including computer-misuse, data-protection, and surveillance statutes.
If a technique requires deception, unauthorized access, or bypassing technical controls, it is out of scope for this workspace and for lawful OSINT generally.
02 Consent and privacy
Public availability is not moral license. A person's scattered public traces, aggregated, can be far more invasive than any single datum. Collect the minimum needed to answer your investigative question, and treat incidental data about third parties as out of bounds.
Apply proportionality: the intrusiveness of your collection should match the seriousness of what you're investigating.
03 No harassment or stalking
These tools must never be used to locate, monitor, or profile individuals for personal reasons — exes, neighbors, online adversaries, or anyone else. That is stalking, and in most places it is a crime.
If a submission's primary use case is targeting private individuals, we reject it. If you see a listed tool being abused this way, report it.
04 Respect platform terms
Many platforms restrict scraping, automation, and bulk collection. Violating terms of service can carry legal consequences and can burn the access your whole team depends on. Know the terms before you automate, and prefer official APIs and archives where they exist.
05 Verify before you conclude
OSINT data is noisy: name collisions, stale records, spoofed metadata, and coordinated disinformation are all routine. Corroborate across independent sources before treating anything as fact, and record how you reached each conclusion.
State confidence levels explicitly. 'Probable, based on three independent matches' is a professional finding; an unhedged assertion is a liability.
06 Professional standards
Keep a collection log. Minimize and secure the data you store. Set retention limits and honor them. Separate your investigation infrastructure from your personal accounts — for your safety and your subjects'.
If you work under an editorial, legal, or institutional framework, its rules supersede anything written here. When in doubt, escalate before you collect.