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ATDbbeta

Terms of Service

Effective Date: October 13, 2026

Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using theatdb.com (the “Service”), operated by Jon Holm (“we,” “us,” or “our”), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service (“Terms”). If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Description of Service

ATDb — The AdTech Database — is a knowledge graph of advertising technology companies, people, events, and industry news. The Service provides directory listings, company profiles, relationship mapping, AI-enriched data (powered by Anthropic's Claude), AI-powered question answering (Ask ATDb), and AI-generated industry insights for research and professional use. It also offers search, side-by-side comparison of records, interactive relationship maps (the Graph and Explorers), a one-page Sales Brief for each company, and short explainers on industry terms and regulations (Learn). Registered users with a confirmed account may follow companies, people, events, and news on a watchlist, report problems, vote on the accuracy of entity profile sections, and submit feedback and feature requests via our integrated feedback platform (Canny.io). With beta access, they may also contribute edits and additions to the database (subject to editorial review) and use Ask ATDb. Anyone, with or without an account, can use the “Spotted an error?” form on a profile page, or the submission form, to send us a correction or suggest a company or person to add; these go to an editorial review queue.

User Accounts

You may browse the Service without an account. Certain features (such as watchlists and contributing edits) require account registration. Registration is open, and a confirmed account can use watchlists, account settings, reporting, accuracy voting, and feedback; suggesting edits, adding records, and Ask ATDb need beta access (see Beta Access below). When creating an account, you agree to:

  • Provide accurate and complete information
  • Maintain the security of your account credentials
  • Accept responsibility for all activity under your account
  • Notify us promptly of any unauthorized use
  • Not create multiple accounts to circumvent restrictions or bans

You may use a pseudonym or display name. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account or use the Service. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts at our discretion, including for violations of these Terms or our Community Guidelines. You can ask us to delete your account at any time from Settings; deletion requests are handled by us, and contributions we have already accepted remain on the Service (see the Privacy Policy).

Beta Access

Certain features of the Service (including contributing edits, adding new records, Ask ATDb, and instant watchlist alerts) require beta access via an invite code. Ask ATDb is also limited to 20 questions per account per day, and may be paused when our monthly AI budget is used up. Beta features are provided as-is and may be modified, restricted, or discontinued at any time without notice. Beta access does not guarantee continued access to any specific feature.

Email Communications

We send four categories of email:

Transactional emails are required for account operation and are sent without separate opt-in. These include account verification and password resets. You cannot opt out of transactional emails while maintaining an active account.

Submission and correction acknowledgment emails are sent one time to signed-in members who use the submission form or the “Spotted an error?” form on a profile page, and only to the verified address on their account. An email address typed into those forms is not sent an automatic email; our editors may use it once to follow up if they have a clarifying question. The email field on these forms is optional, and there is no recurring list to subscribe or unsubscribe from.

Waitlist confirmation emails are sent one time when you join the waitlist on the beta page, and we email an invite code when a spot opens. Joining the waitlist does not create an account.

Notification emails are strictly opt-in. We will never send you notification emails unless you explicitly enable them in your account settings. These include watchlist alerts (immediate for beta members, or as a daily or weekly digest), notifications when an edit of yours is reviewed or your trust level changes (optionally bundled into a daily digest), and, for administrators, operations reports. All notification emails are disabled by default. The optional welcome step shown after you confirm your account offers a weekly watchlist digest with an unticked box; it is sent only if you tick it and follow at least one company. You may enable or disable any notification email at any time from your settings.

Cookies and Analytics

We use cookies for authentication and, with your consent, for analytics and product analytics. When you first visit ATDb, a consent banner lets you accept or reject analytics cookies. Essential cookies (required for authentication and core functionality) cannot be disabled. For full details, see our Cookie Policy.

Permitted Use

The Service is intended for research, professional reference, and informational purposes. You may not:

  • Scrape, crawl, or systematically download data from the Service beyond what is reasonably necessary for personal, non-commercial use
  • Use data from the Service to build a competing database or commercial product
  • Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any part of the Service, other accounts, or systems connected to the Service
  • Use the Service to transmit harmful code, spam, or any material that is unlawful, defamatory, or infringing
  • Interfere with or disrupt the Service or servers/networks connected to it

User Contributions

Registered users may submit edits, additions, accuracy votes, and other content to the Service (“User Contributions”). User Contributions include database edits, entity submissions, accuracy votes and associated notes, and any other content you submit through the Service. Content submitted through the Service’s forms without an account — including company submissions, “Spotted an error?” reports, and “Is this you?” requests — is also a User Contribution, and these Terms (including the representations below and the License Grant) apply to it. By submitting a User Contribution, you represent and warrant that:

  • You have the right to submit the content and it does not infringe any third-party rights (including copyrights, trademarks, and privacy rights)
  • The content is accurate to the best of your knowledge
  • The content complies with our Community Guidelines
  • The content does not contain unlawful, defamatory, obscene, fraudulent, or otherwise objectionable material

License Grant

By submitting a User Contribution, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, display, distribute, and create derivative works from that content in connection with the Service and any successor services. This license survives deletion of your account.

You retain any copyright you hold in your contributions. However, because contributions are integrated into a collaborative database, you acknowledge that individual contributions may be edited, merged, or built upon by other users and by automated systems (including AI). You waive any right to require attribution for individual edits.

Editorial Review

All User Contributions are subject to editorial review. We reserve the right to accept, reject, modify, or remove any contribution at our sole discretion and without notice. We are under no obligation to publish any contribution. Rejection of an edit does not imply that the content is unlawful or infringing — it may simply not meet our editorial standards.

No Compensation

User Contributions are made voluntarily. You will not receive compensation, credit beyond your display name in edit history, or any ownership interest in the Service for your contributions.

Community Source Confirmations

Some entity pages display a “Help confirm” affordance inviting community members to suggest an edit or, where the option is available to your account, provide a corroborating source for a specific fact (a URL to a press release, regulator filing, trade-press article, etc.). When you submit a confirmation source, you represent and warrant that the URL points to publicly accessible content you are authorized to share, and you grant ATDb the same license described above for any text or metadata you submit alongside the URL. Source confirmations are subject to the same editorial review as other User Contributions; submitting a source does not guarantee that it will be accepted or that the entity's “Verification” label will change.

Intellectual Property

The ATDb name, logo, and the compilation, organization, and presentation of data on the Service are owned by or licensed to us. AI-generated content (profile summaries, relationship analysis, category descriptions), produced using Anthropic's Claude, is part of the Service and subject to these Terms. The compiled database, including the selection, coordination, and arrangement of content, is our property.

Individual facts (e.g., a company's headquarters or founding year) are not copyrightable. The creative expression, organization, and curation of those facts within ATDb is protected.

Copyright Infringement (DMCA)

We respect the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that content on the Service infringes your copyright, please send a notice to our designated agent at admin@theatdb.com with the following information:

  • Identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed
  • Identification of the infringing content and its location on the Service
  • Your contact information (name, address, email, phone number)
  • A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
  • A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on their behalf
  • Your physical or electronic signature

Upon receiving a valid DMCA notice, we will remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing content and notify the contributor. We may terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

Data Accuracy Disclaimer

ATDb contains data from multiple sources, including AI research, automated collection, and user contributions. While we strive for accuracy through editorial review and automated quality checks, information on the Service may contain errors, omissions, or outdated details. You should independently verify any information before making business decisions based on it. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any data on the Service.

ATDb is a reference and research tool only. Nothing on the Service constitutes legal, financial, investment, tax, or other professional advice, and you should not rely on it as a substitute for advice from a qualified professional. Any decisions you make based on information from the Service are your sole responsibility.

AI-Powered Features

The Service uses artificial intelligence (Anthropic's Claude) for several workflows:

  • Profile research — expanding company, person, and event profiles using public sources.
  • Source discovery — automated agents that find independent sources corroborating entity facts. A free structured tier queries Wikidata; a paid tier sends search queries built from public company names to the Serper Google-search API, then uses an automated stance check to confirm each result is about the right company before recording it. A similar process checks the career history of people profiled on ATDb: it searches the web for a person's publicly reported name and employers and uses an automated judge to confirm that each source is about the right person. These agents process entity-level business data only — not personal data about users.
  • Industry insights — periodic generation of trend analyses for the public Insights surface.
  • Ask ATDb — a question-and-answer feature that combines your query text with retrieved database excerpts to generate answers. It is available to beta members, and is limited to 20 questions per account per day.
  • M&A research agents — automated daily and periodic agents that scan public RSS feeds, press releases, and structured research manifests to detect acquisitions, IPOs, shutdowns, and related deal events. Detected events are added to entity metadata (with audit-log trail and admin review) and may surface in public UIs (for example, the “Pending acquisition” badge on company pages). These agents process entity-level business data only — not personal data about users.
  • Semantic search — entity content (and your Ask ATDb queries, when used) is embedded via Cohere for similarity matching.
  • Verification & hallucination scoring — an automated system scores the headline facts on each entity for confidence using public sources, source-class weighting (regulator filings, primary corporate disclosures, trade press, press wires, tertiary references), an automated stance classifier, and a hallucination scorer. The result drives the “Verification seal” chip you see on entity pages, which shows whether the facts are verified or corroborated and how many sources back them, or Unverified, and when they were last checked. See /help/verification for the user-facing explainer and the Privacy Policy for processing details. The seal is a confidence indicator, not a guarantee of factual accuracy.
  • News-article entity extraction — an automated process reads ingested news articles and extracts mentioned companies, people, and M&A events. Newly-mentioned people and events are queued for internal review before being added to entity pages.

AI-generated content is provided for informational purposes only and may contain errors, omissions, or hallucinations — including in the verification scoring itself. The “Verified” label means our automated system found supporting evidence; it does not mean ATDb guarantees the underlying claim is true. You should independently verify any information before relying on it for business decisions. See our Privacy Policy for details on how your data is processed by these services.

Content Removal

We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor, edit, or remove any content on the Service at our sole discretion, including User Contributions. We may remove content that we determine, in our sole judgment, violates these Terms, our Community Guidelines, or applicable law, or is otherwise objectionable. We are not liable for any action or inaction regarding content posted by users.

Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR SECURE. WE DO NOT ENDORSE, VERIFY, OR GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF ANY USER CONTRIBUTION OR AI-GENERATED CONTENT.

Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY CALIFORNIA LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL WE BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DAMAGES ARISING FROM USER CONTRIBUTIONS, DATA INACCURACIES, OR RELIANCE ON INFORMATION PROVIDED THROUGH THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM (WHICH, FOR FREE USERS, IS $0).

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from any claims, losses, damages, or expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising from: (a) your use of the Service; (b) your User Contributions; (c) your violation of these Terms or our Community Guidelines; or (d) your violation of any third-party rights, including intellectual property or privacy rights.

Class Action Waiver

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, YOU AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE RESOLUTION PROCEEDINGS WILL BE CONDUCTED ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT AS A CLASS, CONSOLIDATED, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. YOU WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT OR CLASS-WIDE ARBITRATION AGAINST US.

Dispute Resolution

Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service that cannot be resolved informally shall be resolved through binding arbitration administered under the rules of JAMS in effect at the time of filing. Arbitration shall take place in California and be conducted by a single arbitrator. The arbitrator's decision shall be final and binding. Each party shall bear its own costs and attorneys' fees, unless the arbitrator determines that a party's claim or defense was frivolous, in which case the arbitrator may award reasonable fees to the prevailing party.

Small Claims Exception. Notwithstanding the above, either party may bring an individual action in small claims court for disputes within the court's jurisdictional limits.

Third-Party Services and Links

The Service integrates with third-party services to provide functionality:

  • Supabase — database hosting and user authentication
  • Vercel — application hosting and edge delivery
  • Anthropic — AI-powered data research, industry insights, and question answering via Claude (record data and, when using Ask ATDb, your query text are processed; see our Privacy Policy for details)
  • Inngest — background job orchestration, including sending notification emails and digests (processes the account IDs, email addresses, usernames, and edit content needed to send them; see our Privacy Policy)
  • Canny.io — feedback and feature requests (receives your user ID, display name, and email address when you use the feedback feature)
  • Logo.dev — company logo images served from a third-party CDN
  • Google Analytics & PostHog — analytics in your browser, activated only with your consent (see our Cookie Policy). Separately, PostHog receives server-side telemetry about our AI requests, including Ask ATDb question text, which is not linked to your identity (see our Privacy Policy)
  • Sentry — error monitoring and performance tracking
  • Resend — transactional and notification email delivery
  • Cohere — vector embedding generation for semantic search (processes entity data and, when using Ask ATDb, your query text; see our Privacy Policy for details)
  • Serper — Google-search API used for source discovery and person-fact verification (receives search queries built from public company names and the public names and employers of people profiled on ATDb; no user personal data)
  • Internet Archive & archive.today — source-page archival. To preserve the public source pages that back entity facts, ATDb submits those source URLs to web-archiving services so a snapshot survives if the original page changes or disappears. Only public source URLs are sent — no user personal data
  • Cloudflare Turnstile — bot and spam prevention (usually invisible) on sign-in, registration, password-reset, submission, error-report, and contact forms

Each third-party service is governed by its own terms of service and privacy policy.

The Service may also contain links to third-party websites (company websites, news sources, etc.). We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, or availability of any third-party sites. Linking does not imply endorsement.

Force Majeure

We shall not be liable for any failure or delay in performing our obligations under these Terms to the extent caused by circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including but not limited to natural disasters, acts of government, internet or infrastructure outages, third-party service disruptions, cyberattacks, pandemics, or other events of force majeure.

Modifications

We reserve the right to modify these Terms or the Service at any time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the effective date. Your continued use after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. We may also modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time without liability.

Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict of law principles. Subject to the Dispute Resolution section above, any disputes not subject to arbitration shall be resolved in the courts located in California.

Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.

Contact

If you have questions about these Terms, contact us at admin@theatdb.com.