Legal Notice & Crisis Disclaimer

01 / CRISIS DIRECTORY

Emergency & Immediate Safety Notice

If you are experiencing domestic violence, relationship abuse, digital harassment, sexual assault, or stalking, free and confidential support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year from trained, trauma-informed advocates:

02 / SURVEILLANCE RISK

Monitored Devices and Digital Footprint Warning

Technology-facilitated abuse often involves covert monitoring of digital communications and browsing patterns. If an abusive individual has physical access to your phone, tablet, or computer, or has administrative access to your home Wi-Fi network, cloud accounts, or cellular family plan, they may be capable of tracking your digital actions:

• Browser History & Cache: Viewing pages related to domestic violence, legal aid, or safety planning can alert an abuser. Even “Incognito” or “Private” browsing does not conceal activity from keyloggers, network packet inspectors, or stalkerware applications installed on the operating system.
• The “Sudden Behavior Change” Hazard: According to guidance from the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) Safety Net Project, abruptly clearing your entire browsing history, deleting long-standing search caches, or suddenly resetting shared passwords can alert an abuser that you are seeking help or preparing to leave, triggering suspicion and accelerating violence. If an abuser regularly inspects your phone, consider leaving routine browsing history intact or visiting harmless websites (e.g. recipes, weather, sports) after browsing, while conducting all safety planning on a safer, unmonitored device.
• Shared Cloud Accounts: If your Apple ID (iCloud), Google Account, or Microsoft Account is shared, linked via Family Sharing, or accessible by an abuser, your search history, opened browser tabs, and app downloads may automatically sync across devices.
• Cellular & Wi-Fi Logging: Home routers and cellular carrier billing portals log domain-level DNS queries. Evaluating tools on home broadband or cellular networks may create an observable record on billing statements or administrative routers.
• Quick Exit Technical Limits: Every page on Survivor Tech Review includes a Quick Exit escape button in the top navigation bar. Clicking this button (or pressing the Escape key twice in rapid succession) immediately navigates away to an innocuous site (weather.com) and attempts to replace the immediate browser history entry. However, Quick Exit cannot erase router logs, carrier records, or keylogger recordings already captured on a compromised device.

03 / SCOPE & BOUNDARIES

Non-Advice Disclaimers & Professional Boundaries

Survivor Tech Review is developed and published by Prosocial Coding, LLC for educational, informational, and research purposes. The service operates under strict professional boundaries:

1. Not Legal Advice

Survivor Tech Review, its underlying automated codebases, and any reports, matrices, checklists, or handouts generated by the tool do not constitute legal advice, legal interpretation, or legal representation. No attorney-client relationship is created or formed by your use of this service. The legal status of surveillance tools, wiretapping laws, cyberstalking statutes, protection order requirements, and digital evidence rules vary substantially across federal, state, tribal, and municipal jurisdictions. For legal advice regarding your specific situation, custody proceeding, or protective order, consult a licensed attorney or a certified legal aid clinic in your jurisdiction.

2. Digital Evidence Spoliation & Forensic Integrity Warning

Reports and finding summaries generated by Survivor Tech Review are analytical research summaries, not certified chain-of-custody digital forensic extractions. If you are an advocate, legal aid attorney, or survivor seeking evidence of unauthorized surveillance or stalkerware for use in ex parte protective orders, civil litigation, or criminal prosecution, do not attempt to uninstall, modify, or factory-reset a suspicious device before consulting a certified digital forensics investigator or trained tech abuse specialist. Deleting applications, running consumer anti-malware cleaners, or modifying device logs can inadvertently spoliate digital evidence required under state or federal rules of evidence.

3. Not Clinical, Psychological, or Medical Counseling

The service does not provide clinical therapy, medical advice, psychological evaluation, or psychiatric crisis counseling. Information provided through Survivor Tech Review should never supersede the clinical judgment of licensed social workers, professional counselors, physicians, or accredited victim advocates.

4. Not a Formal Cybersecurity Audit or Warranty of Security

Evaluations conducted by Survivor Tech Review are based strictly on automated passive analysis of publicly observable endpoints, vendor terms of service, published privacy notices, app store descriptions, and open-source intelligence (OSINT). An evaluation does not constitute a formal penetration test, source-code audit, hardware reverse-engineering inspection, or ISO/NIST certification. Survivor Tech Review cannot and does not guarantee that any evaluated software is free from unpatched vulnerabilities, undocumented backdoors, unauthorized third-party tracking, or malicious code.

04 / CORE ARCHITECTURAL INVARIANT

The “Never Safe” Invariant

This design decision is grounded in survivor-informed threat modeling and digital safety jurisprudence:

• Dual-Use Technology Realities: The vast majority of technologies weaponized in domestic abuse and stalking cases are not specialized malware, but standard commercial features—such as device tracking (Apple Find My, Google Family Link), shared smart home hardware (smart doorbells, thermostats), cellular account sharing, and parental management software (Bark, Life360, Qustodio). These tools are marketed for legitimate family coordination or security, but become instruments of surveillance when an abusive party possesses coerced, physical, or credentialed access.
• Context-Dependent Safety: A tool that is safe for an individual living independently may be acutely dangerous for a survivor living with an abuser who monitors home Wi-Fi or demands phone passcodes. Safety is not a static property of software code; it is a relational dynamic defined by the survivor’s living environment, custody arrangements, and threat model.
• Refusal of False Assurance: Declaring a product “safe” can create lethal complacency, leading advocates or survivors to relax security hygiene. Survivor Tech Review documents observable facts, vendor promises, technical gaps, and verified risks, leaving all safety determinations to the human advocate and survivor.

05 / EVALUATION METHODOLOGY

Risk Taxonomy and Canonical Statuses

Every finding generated by Survivor Tech Review is classified under standardized Rubric criteria (currently Rubric 0.3.0) and assigned one of seven canonical finding statuses and four concern levels:

Findings are tagged with concern ratings: High (critical safety risk, covert tracking capability, or credential harvesting), Medium (unclear retention, account linking, or third-party analytics sharing), Low (minor operational concern), or Info (neutral contextual information). In accordance with system invariants, high-concern risks are never softened or downgraded, even when a vendor provides an explanation.

06 / INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Nominative Fair Use & Third-Party Trademark Notice

In conducting comparative safety evaluations, Survivor Tech Review references various commercial products, mobile applications, software vendors, and standardization bodies:

• Third-Party Trademarks: All product names, logos, brands, service marks, and registered trademarks referenced on this website—including but not limited to Apple, App Store, iCloud, Find My, Google, Android, Google Play, Family Link, Microsoft, Meta, WhatsApp, Signal, Life360, Bark, mSpy, Qustodio, CISA, NIST, OWASP, and the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV)—are the property of their respective trademark holders.
• Nominative Fair Use Doctrine: The use of these trademarks, product titles, and organization names is made strictly for nominative, descriptive, comparative, and identification purposes pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(3)(A) and established First Amendment jurisprudence. Referencing an application or vendor is strictly necessary to identify the specific tool being audited for survivor safety.
• No Endorsement or Affiliation: Neither Survivor Tech Review nor Prosocial Coding, LLC is affiliated with, sponsored by, authorized by, certified by, or endorsed by any of the software vendors, app developers, or commercial entities evaluated on this platform.
• Original Content & Methodology: The Survivor Tech Review evaluation rubric, scoring logic, analytical architecture, visual emblems, and underlying software code are copyright © 2026 Prosocial Coding, LLC.

07 / RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Passive OSINT and Cryptographic Source Integrity

Our technical research boundaries include:

• No Active Penetration Testing: The system never executes port scans, exploit payloads, credential-stuffing attacks, session hijacking, or unauthorized penetration attempts against any host or server.
• No Account Creation or Paywall Bypassing: The crawler never creates automated accounts, bypasses paywalls, or circumvent user authentication mechanisms. It observes strictly what a standard web browser or search engine crawler is served publicly.
• Public Registry Heuristics: Research leverages public authoritative registries:
  • ICANN / ARIN RDAP: Direct network queries for domain registration dates, registrar names, and IP network blocks.
  • ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API: IRS Form 990 tax records for accredited 501(c)(3) entities.
  • Public DNS Records: DNS SPF and DMARC text records to evaluate public email authentication posture.
• Verifiable Cryptographic Citations: To eliminate synthetic hallucination, every quotation presented in a finding card is programmatically verified against the raw fetched document text using SHA-256 cryptographic hashes via verifyCitations. Any quotation that cannot be verified character-for-character against the original raw snapshot is automatically discarded.

08 / CONTRACTUAL DISCLAIMERS

Disclaimer of Warranties & Limitation of Legal Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW, PROSOCIAL CODING, LLC, ITS MEMBERS, MANAGERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, FELLOWS, AND OPEN-SOURCE CONTRIBUTORS EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO:

1. THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
2. ANY WARRANTY THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY DEFECTS IN SOFTWARE BEHAVIOR WILL BE DETECTED OR CORRECTED.
3. ANY WARRANTY THAT AN EVALUATION CONDUCTED VIA THIS TOOL WILL GUARANTEE THE PHYSICAL SAFETY, DIGITAL CONFIDENTIALITY, OR EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING OF ANY INDIVIDUAL OR PREVENT DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE OR HARASSMENT BY THIRD PARTIES.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL PROSOCIAL CODING, LLC OR ITS AFFILIATES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR ACCESS TO, USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE SURVIVOR TECH REVIEW, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO RELIANCE ON ANY FINDINGS, HARDWARE MALFUNCTION, PRIVACY BREACHES BY THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS, OR LEGAL DISPUTES.

09 / GOVERNANCE & INQUIRIES

Corporate Entity & Legal Communications

Survivor Tech Review is a public-benefit civic technology project owned and maintained by:

If you are an academic researcher, legal aid organization, domestic violence coalition, or software developer with inquiries regarding our evaluation methodology, or if you believe an evaluation contains a factual or cryptographic citation error, please submit detailed documentation and supporting evidence to hello@prosocialcoding.com.