Data Use Policy

Prolific Tea is a community-owned opinion platform for Prolific participants. All content on this site is user-submitted experience reports - subjective reviews, ratings, and comments about researchers whose studies participants have completed.

We are not a data provider. We do not offer a data API, a bulk export, or a licensing program. The content exists to help individual participants make informed decisions.

The following uses of our content are permitted and encouraged:

• Personal reading by humans - browse, search, and read as much as you like.
• Search engine indexing - Google, Bing, Apple, and other search engines may crawl and index all public pages.
• AI live-retrieval citations - ChatGPT (GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot), Gemini (Google-Extended), Perplexity (PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User), Claude search (ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Claude-Web), and Bing Copilot (Bingbot) may retrieve and cite our content when answering user questions, provided they link back to the source URL.
• Linking and short attributed quotation under fair use or fair dealing - you may quote brief excerpts with attribution and a link back to the original page.

The following uses of our content are not permitted:

• Custom AI model training on bulk-scraped content - no fine-tuning, no embeddings dataset extraction, no model distillation from this site's data.
• Common Crawl (CCBot) and other archival or training corpora ingestion.
• Bulk scraping, systematic extraction, or page-by-page enumeration of content.
• Republishing reviews verbatim on other sites or products.
• Commercial reuse without prior written permission.
• Reverse engineering, framing in iframes, mirroring, or rebranding the Platform.
• Any data API access - we do not provide a data API and will not grant bulk access to our content.

We use multiple layers: robots.txt (advisory, respected by well-behaved bots), the Acceptable Use clause in our Terms of Service (binds registered users contractually), copyright (authors retain copyright in their reviews; the Platform retains a license to display and aggregate), and DMCA takedown notices to hosts of republished content.

Violations by registered users may result in account suspension and IP blocking. Violations by external parties may result in DMCA notices, cease-and-desist letters, and other available legal remedies.

The Terms of Service bind only registered users. Non-registered scrapers are not in privity of contract with us.

robots.txt is advisory. Well-behaved bots respect it; malicious actors ignore it. We cannot technically prevent a determined scraper from accessing public pages.

The realistic legal tool against US-hosted scraper sites is a DMCA takedown notice, not breach-of-contract litigation. We cannot prevent a determined human from copy-pasting a review into a model. This policy is a public statement of intent, not a technical guarantee.

For permissions requests, email [email protected]. For DMCA takedown notices regarding republished content, email [email protected].