Usage Policy

This policy sets out what you may and may not do with our services, what happens if the rules are broken, and how to report a security problem. What we do with your personal data is in the Privacy Policy.

It applies to everyone who touches makers.ngo — applicants, makers, students, companies, partner organisations and our own team — and it forms part of the Terms and Conditions.

Do not:

• Give us false information. Inventing experience, certificates or references, or applying under a name or email that is not yours, ends your application.
• Try to reach data that is not yours. That includes another person's application, draft, profile, deliverable or learning account, a CV, a company request, or any admin page. Guessing, altering or replaying an identifier or a token to get at a record counts, whether or not it works.
• Attack or probe the services. No scanning, brute forcing, injection attempts, denial of service, or attempts to defeat rate limits, size limits or authentication — except under section 4.
• Scrape or automate. No bots, crawlers or scripts against our forms or endpoints, no bulk collection of profiles or contact details, and no reselling of anything you obtain from us.
• Impersonate anyone — a maker, our team, a company, or Makers itself.
• Spam. Mass, unsolicited messages using our name or a referral code are misuse of that code.
• Upload anything harmful or illegal, including malware and content you have no right to share.
• Harass anyone in our community, our team or a partner organisation.

Companies have two rules of their own, in section 9 of the Terms: profiles we share stay confidential, and a profile we presented to you stays attributed to us.

Depending on what happened, we may disqualify an application, cancel a referral code and the referrals attached to it, decline or close a company request, withdraw dashboard access, block an address or an IP, delete the offending content, or report the matter to the authorities. We do not owe a warning first, and for a serious breach we will not give one.

If you find a vulnerability, tell us at team@makers.ngo. We will not pursue you for a report made in good faith, provided you:

• stop as soon as you confirm the problem, and prove it with the minimum needed;
• do not read, copy, alter or keep anyone's personal data — if you reach it accidentally, stop and say so in the report;
• do not degrade the service for anyone else, and do not run automated scans;
• give us a reasonable window to fix it before you tell anyone else.

We do not run a paid bug bounty. We do read every report, and we act on the ones that are real.

What we hold on applicants, makers, students, companies, partners and our team — why we hold it, who else handles it, how we protect it, how long we keep it and how to exercise your rights — is in the Privacy Policy.

We update this policy when the services change. Every version carries the date it took effect, shown at the top of this page, and significant changes follow the notice rules in section 3 of the Terms.