Version 1.1. last updated October 2026

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Terms

Welcome to Tech Harms Check. By visiting or using this website or tool, you signify your agreement to these terms of use, which include our conditions of use and privacy policy. Global Partners Digital may modify these terms of use at any time and you agree to be bound by any such modifications. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not continue to visit or use the website or tool.

Tech Harms Check is developed and operated by Global Partners Digital Limited (company number 10573080), also referred to as 'we' or 'us', whose registered office is 167-169 Great Portland Street, Fifth Floor, London, W1W 5PF, United Kingdom. 'You' refers to the visitor or user of this website or tool.

What Tech Harms Check is
Tech Harms Check is a tool that works with your AI assistant to help identify potential human rights impacts of technology projects and interventions. In these terms, "Tech Harms Check" or "the tool" includes its knowledge base, frameworks, definitions, categories, scoring methodology, mitigation guidance, report templates, MCP server, prompts, and any related content, data or software we make available. All of these are owned by or licensed to Global Partners Digital.

Copyright
This website and tool contain material which is owned by or licensed to us, including the design, layout, look, appearance, graphics, and the underlying knowledge base framework. Materials owned by us will specify the terms of licence under which they are available. Reproduction is prohibited other than in accordance with the copyright notice or terms of licence, which forms part of these terms and conditions.

All trademarks reproduced in this website which are not the property of, or licensed to, the operator are acknowledged on the website.

Using Tech Harms Check
Unauthorised use of this website or Tech Harms Check, including its MCP server, knowledge base and other components, may give rise to a claim for damages and/or be a criminal offence.

The content of this website and Tech Harms Check is for your general information and use only. It is subject to change without notice.

Who can use it
Individuals: Tech Harms Check (Beta) is available for individual use. Access tokens are issued to individuals for their own use only. Tokens must not be shared with, transferred to, or used on behalf of any other person or organisation.

Organisations: Use of Tech Harms Check by or within an organisation, including integration into organisational systems or AI environments, is only permitted with our prior written agreement. Please contact us to discuss organisational use.

Global Partners Digital reserves the right to suspend or revoke access at any time, including if these terms are breached.

Permitted use
Tech Harms Check is intended to be used as a first-step screening tool to identify and reflect on potential human rights impacts of technology, digital and digital-for-development (D4D) projects, as part of a wider due diligence process.

You may not use Tech Harms Check, or any reports or other outputs it produces, for commercial purposes, including resale, paid services or inclusion in commercial products, without our prior written permission. To request permission, please contact us.

Prohibited use
You must not misuse or abuse Tech Harms Check. In particular, you must not:

• Manipulate the tool, its prompts, or your AI assistant to produce results that are misleading or more favourable than the information provided would support;
• Present reports as independent verification, certification or approval of a project;
• Copy, extract, scrape, modify, adapt or reproduce any part of the tool, including its knowledge base, frameworks, scoring or templates, for use elsewhere;
• Use the tool to develop, train or improve any other product, service or AI model;
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, interfere with, overload or bypass any security or access controls of the tool.

Your AI assistant and compatibility
Tech Harms Check works with an AI assistant that you choose and access under your own account. Your AI assistant is a third-party service, and Global Partners Digital does not own, operate or control it. We are not responsible for your AI assistant, including its availability, performance, usage limits, costs, how it handles your data, or the content it generates, including report text.

Tech Harms Check (Beta) has been developed and tested for use with Claude, and works best on a paid Claude plan. It can in principle connect to other AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), but it has not been tested with them, and they may not work as intended.

If you use Tech Harms Check with an AI assistant other than Claude, or with a free plan, you do so at your own risk. Global Partners Digital is not responsible for the performance, availability or outputs of the tool in untested environments, or for any reports that are incomplete, inaccurate or not generated as a result.

Your use of your AI assistant is governed by its provider's own terms and privacy policy, which you should review.

Approved organisational environments, such as Microsoft Copilot, are covered by separate agreement.

Disclaimer – accuracy and limitations of AI-generated content
Tech Harms Check is an AI-assisted screening tool designed to help identify potential human rights impacts and risks associated with technology projects and interventions. It is intended as a first step in a due diligence process only.

Tech Harms Check is not:

• A full human rights impact assessment or fundamental rights impact assessment;
• A legal assessment or seal of approval of any kind;
• A substitute for expert judgement.

Harm scores are calculated by a rule-based scoring engine and indicate the likelihood of harm only, not its certainty, severity or magnitude. Reports do not account for any mitigation measures already in place within your programme or organisation. Reports identify potential human rights impacts based on the information you provide and the tool's knowledge base; they do not reflect actions already taken to address those impacts.

Report text is written by your AI assistant. Content is labelled by source within reports, so you can see which statements come from the knowledge base and which are AI-generated. While Tech Harms Check is designed to make AI-generated human rights due diligence more accurate and reliable by grounding outputs in an expert-built knowledge base, AI systems can and do produce inaccurate, incomplete, or contextually inappropriate outputs. You should always verify, interrogate, and apply your own expert judgement to any content generated by the tool, particularly where it informs decisions affecting individuals or communities.

Global Partners Digital and its partners make no warranty or guarantee as to the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or suitability of tool outputs for any particular purpose. We expressly exclude liability for any inaccuracies or errors in AI-generated content to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Your use of any reports, recommendations, or other outputs generated by this tool is entirely at your own risk, and you are responsible for any decisions you make based on them.

Project data and inputs
When using Tech Harms Check, you may share descriptions or documentation relating to your projects or programmes with your AI assistant. You are responsible for ensuring that any information you share does not contain personal data belonging to third parties without appropriate authorisation, and that you have the right to process and share it. Please follow our tips for responsible use.

Tech Harms Check is designed to work with MCP-compatible AI assistants. Your prompts and any documents you share stay with your AI assistant and are not sent to Tech Harms Check. They are processed by your chosen AI provider under its own terms. You should consult your AI provider's privacy policy and terms of service. Global Partners Digital is not responsible for the processing of your data by third-party AI providers.

Knowledge base
The knowledge base underlying Tech Harms Check has been developed by Global Partners Digital and the Danish Institute for Human Rights, with input from practitioners and partners in the digital rights field. It is subject to ongoing review and development. Global Partners Digital retains ownership of the knowledge base framework. The knowledge base is made available for transparency and reference purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such.

Third party websites
This website may include links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience only and do not signify that we endorse those websites. We have no responsibility for the content of linked websites.

Jurisdiction
Your use of this website and tool, and any dispute arising out of such use, is subject to the law of England and Wales.

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Privacy Policy

Global Partners Digital is strongly committed to protecting your privacy and aims to collect as little personal data as possible. All personal data collected from you is stored and processed in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act 2018, the UK General Data Protection Regulation and, where applicable, the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

This policy applies to all online systems offered by Global Partners Digital through www.techharmscheck.org and any other websites we operate in connection with this tool.

Global Partners Digital is the data controller to which this policy refers. This policy is reviewed and, where relevant, updated every 12 months.

Data protection contact
You can contact our Data Protection Officer using our contact form or by post at the address above, marked for their attention.

Privacy by design
Tech Harms Check is designed to keep your project information with you:

• Your prompts stay with your AI assistant. What you type and any documents you share are not sent to Tech Harms Check. When your AI assistant uses the tool, it sends only the tool name and structured inputs (such as indicator codes or scoring inputs).
• No access to your accounts. Tech Harms Check cannot see your files, email or other systems.
• Encrypted reports. To produce your PDF report, your AI assistant sends us the report text it has written (project name, date, assessment text and scores). The PDF is generated on our servers and immediately encrypted with a password you choose. Only the encrypted version is stored, and your password is never saved. Your report is decrypted in your own browser, so the readable version only exists on your device. We cannot recover your password.
• Reports are deleted after 24 hours. No personal details are stored with them.
• Nothing is used for training. We do not record the content of your assessment or use it to train any AI model.

Why we collect your personal data
Global Partners Digital only collects personal data via this website and tool:

• to issue, manage and revoke tool access;
• to keep the tool secure and prevent misuse;
• to respond to contact form enquiries;
• to send you updates about the tool, its development and launch, if you have opted in;
• to fulfil any legal obligations.

Our lawful basis
Contract: to issue, manage and revoke tool access, which is needed to provide the tool to you.
Legitimate interests: to keep the tool secure, prevent misuse, and respond to enquiries. These interests do not override your rights, and you can object at any time.
Consent: to send you updates about the tool. You can withdraw consent at any time by unsubscribing or contacting us.
Legal obligation: where we must process data to comply with the law.

Your name and email address are needed to provide you with access. Without them, we cannot issue a token.

Tech Harms Check does not make automated decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects.

Types of personal data collected
When you request access to the tool via the token request form, we collect:

• First name and last name;
• Email address;
• Your agreement to these terms;
• Your agreement to use in an individual capacity only;
• Your understanding of the limitations of AI;
• Whether you have opted in to receive updates.

When you submit the contact form, we collect:

• First name and last name;
• Email address;
• Message content;
• Whether you have opted in to receive updates.

Both forms use Altcha, a privacy-focused captcha system, to verify that submissions are made by humans. Altcha processes a cryptographic challenge locally in your browser and does not collect or store personal data.

When you use the tool, each request records a timestamp, token ID, HTTP method and path, along with standard transport data such as IP address and user agent. This is used for security and usage metering only. The content of your assessment is not logged.

Hosting and third-party data processors
The Tech Harms Check tool and reports are hosted on Hetzner servers in Germany and operated by DOT • STUDIO, which acts as a data processor on behalf of Global Partners Digital. Application data, logs and backups remain within the EU.

Personal data submitted through the token request and contact forms is stored by Brevo (Sendinblue SAS), a third-party email and contact management platform, within the EU, for the purposes of managing access and communications. Brevo processes this data on our behalf as a data processor under a data processing agreement. You can review Brevo's privacy policy at https://www.brevo.com/legal/privacypolicy/.

Data stored in the EU is covered by the UK's adequacy regulations for the European Economic Area.

No personal data is shared with any other third parties except as described in these terms or as required by law.

Access and sign-in
Sign-in uses short-lived access keys that expire after a short time. When you use the tool, the Tech Harms Check server operated by DOT • STUDIO sees only an internal user ID and whether your access is valid. It does not receive your name or email address. Access token data (token identifiers and hashed token values) is stored in the Tech Harms Check content management system as cryptographic hashes (SHA-256), which cannot be reversed to recover the original token.

For approved organisational users, sign-in may be linked to the organisation's own identity provider, as agreed contractually.

Data retention
Your personal data is held only for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it was collected:

• Encrypted reports are deleted automatically after 24 hours;
• Tool request logs are deleted after 24 hours;
• Access data is retained for 6 months after the end of the beta period or after your access is revoked, whichever is sooner. It is then deleted or retained in anonymised form for research and analytical purposes only;
• Contact form enquiries are retained for 12 months after the enquiry is resolved;
• Updates opt-in data is retained until you unsubscribe.

Retention for organisational users is agreed contractually.

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Use of cookies

This website does not use cookies for analytics or tracking purposes. Essential cookies may be used for basic website functionality only.

Your rights and access to your personal information
The personal data we hold about you is yours. You have the following rights over your personal information:

• to be informed how your data is being processed;
• to access your data;
• to rectify any data that is inaccurate;
• to instruct us to delete your data;
• to restrict how we process your data at any time;
• to object to your data being stored;
• to move your data;
• to withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on your consent.

Contact and complaints
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, or have any questions about these terms or this policy, you can contact us using our contact form or by post at the address listed above. We aim to respond within four weeks.

If you wish to lodge a complaint about our handling of your personal data, please contact us at the details above.

The Information Commissioner's Office is the UK regulator for data protection and privacy enforcement: https://ico.org.uk.