Terms for Listed Companies
1. Who these terms are for
These terms apply to any company that appears on the Trooth Network without having created an account. A company with an account is governed by its customer agreement instead, and these terms do not apply to it.
They exist because Trooth publishes information about companies that have not signed anything with it. That is a real thing to do and it carries real obligations, and the honest way to carry them is to state them publicly rather than to rely on nobody asking.
2. What is published about an unclaimed listing
For an unclaimed listing, only two categories are published.
Factual identity, as the company publishes it about itself. The company name, domain, logo and description, taken from the company's own website or its own public profile on a public developer registry. This is recorded as declared and attributed to the company. Trooth does not write a description of a company it has not spoken to.
An outside-in observation of publicly reachable configuration. Whether transport security is enforced, which security response headers are returned, whether DNSSEC is present, whether mail records exist, and whether a security contact is published.
What is not published
No score, no rating, no rank, no grade, and no comparative judgment appears on an unclaimed listing.
A score exists only where a company has connected its own systems and consented to being observed. This is a standing rule of the network enforced in code, not an assurance in a document, and it is the line between a directory and a rating agency.
3. How the information is gathered
Only by requesting publicly available resources the way any visitor's browser would.
| Rule | Statement |
|---|---|
| Rate | Polite. One fetch per domain per observation wave |
robots.txt | Honoured |
| Authentication | Never attempted |
| Non-public services | Never probed |
| Credentials | None are used that were not given by the company |
| Access controls | Never bypassed or circumvented |
Nothing is read that a member of the public visiting the site would not receive.
Purchased contact and firmographic data is used for outreach only, under its own licence, and never becomes listing content. The two systems meet at a domain name and nowhere else.
4. Accuracy, and what happens when Trooth is wrong
Every observation carries the time it was made and the method used. Public configuration changes, and an observation is a record of a moment rather than a permanent statement about a company.
To correct a listing, file at trooth.co/network/dispute. Filing requires no account and no relationship with Trooth.
| Commitment | Term |
|---|---|
| Acknowledgement | The form issues an on-screen receipt naming the address that will respond |
| Response | Within 10 business days of filing |
| Correction | Anything Trooth cannot substantiate is corrected or removed |
| Record | A correction is applied to the live listing and recorded against the case |
| Who decides | A Trooth operator. Never the company the fact concerns, and never the company that filed |
A company cannot read, edit, close or erase a case filed about its own listing. The database enforces this rather than a policy: the application role holds insert rights on the dispute table and no read policy at all. That constraint is what makes this section mean something.
5. Right of reply
A listed company may submit a response to any observation on its listing.
An accepted response is displayed alongside the observation, not instead of it, and is attributed to the company. Trooth does not edit responses for content.
A right of reply is not the same as a correction. A correction changes what is published because it was wrong. A reply leaves the observation standing and adds the company's account of it. A company may use either, or both.
6. Claiming a listing
A listing may be claimed by demonstrating control of the domain, either by publishing a DNS TXT record or by verifying an email address at that domain.
On claim, the company gains editorial control of the descriptive fields and may choose whether to connect systems for observation.
Claiming does not create a paid relationship and is not conditioned on one. A company may claim its listing, correct its description, and connect nothing, at no cost and with no further obligation.
7. Opting out
A listed company may request permanent removal, at trooth.co/network/dispute, by filing a removal request.
On removal, Trooth deletes the descriptive content and retains only the domain and the fact of the opt-out, so that the listing is never recreated by a later observation wave.
This is permanent and it is enforced in the data model. A domain that has opted out is not re-listed. Opting out does not require a reason and Trooth does not ask for one.
8. Trademarks
Company names and logos are used nominatively, to identify the company being described. No affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement is implied in either direction.
A trademark owner may request that a logo be removed, and Trooth will comply. Removal of a logo does not remove the listing; the two are separate requests.
9. What a listing is not
The Network is provided as-is. A listing is a record of what was observed and when.
It is not certification, accreditation, audit, assurance, endorsement or a guarantee, and it must not be represented as any of those by anyone, including the listed company.
Nothing on the Network should be the sole basis for a procurement, investment or security decision. It is intended to make diligence cheaper and better targeted, not to replace it.
10. Changes to these terms
Changes are posted here with an effective date. Claimed listings are notified at least 30 days before a material change takes effect.
A change that alters what a published fact means is announced with a release note before it takes effect, stating what changed, what it means for a listing, and what a company should do if they disagree.
11. Questions for counsel at first review
Recorded so that the first legal conversation starts from a list rather than a blank page. Their presence does not qualify anything above; these terms are in force as written.
- Whether publication of an unclaimed listing is defensible in each jurisdiction where Trooth operates, and in particular under GDPR Article 6(1)(f) legitimate interests where a listed company is an EU entity and any published field touches an identifiable person.
- Whether outside-in observation as described in section 3 stays within the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and its equivalents. The scans read only what a public visitor's browser receives, which appears to be the right side of the line, but that should be counsel's conclusion.
- Defamation and trade-libel exposure on adverse observations, and whether the right of reply in section 5 together with the correction commitment in section 4 is sufficient to rely on.
- Whether 10 business days is the right response commitment, and whether it should be shorter for a claim that a published fact is affirmatively wrong than for a request to change a description.
- Whether the permanent opt-out in section 7 is the right remedy, and whether retaining the domain and the fact of the opt-out, which is what makes the permanence enforceable, is itself defensible as a retention.
- Whether these terms should be presented to a listed company at first contact, or whether publication plus a link from every unclaimed listing is sufficient notice.
12. Publication
These terms belong on the site, not only in this folder. They are published at trooth.co, linked from the Network footer and from every unclaimed listing. The legal pages are generated into lib/legal/content.generated.json and routed by lib/legal/index.ts; a listed-companies key in the same shape as the existing entries is what publishes this.
The permanent opt-out described in section 7 already exists in the ghost handling code, so this document describes behaviour that is already true, which is the only kind of policy worth publishing.