Terms of Service

Last updated 2026-11-01. Draft pending legal review.

Pingen ("the service") is operated by Dawson Geist, a sole proprietor doing business as Pingen ("we", "us"). By creating an account or using the service you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, don't use the service.

1. What the service is

Pingen is a research tool that searches news articles by the opinion they express, maps the people and organizations they mention, shows related public records, and lets you collect findings on research boards. Results come from automated systems, including machine-learning models. They can be wrong, incomplete or out of date. Stance labels, summaries, suggested links, matches between names and entities, and assistant answers are aids to your own research, not statements of fact, and not legal, financial or professional advice. Check the original sources before relying on anything.

Public records (court cases and opinions, company filings, sanctions and foreign-agent registrations, campaign and lobbying records, and others) are matched to people and organizations automatically, by official IDs or by name, and can be matched to the wrong one. Being named in a court case, an opinion, a filing or a list is not a finding of wrongdoing, and the absence of a record doesn't mean there isn't one. Pingen is not a sanctions-screening, background-check or due-diligence service: for compliance decisions use the official sources, such as OFAC's Sanctions List Search.

2. Who can use it

• Pingen is offered to people in the United States only. You must be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live.
• New accounts may wait on a waitlist, and we may decline or close sign-ups at any time.
• You're responsible for keeping your password secret and for activity under your account. Tell us at once if you think it has been misused.
• One account is for one person. Don't share it or resell access.

3. Plans and payment

• Paid plans renew automatically each month or year until you cancel. Prices are shown before you buy; sales tax is added where it applies.
• Payments are processed by Stripe and sold through Link, Stripe's merchant of record, which issues receipts and handles payment questions, refunds and disputes under its own terms. Your card statement shows LINK.COM*.
• You can cancel at any time from your account page (Manage billing). You keep the plan until the end of the period you paid for; we don't refund partial periods except where the law requires it or Link grants a refund.
• A one-time board unlock lifts the waiting period on one locked board. It doesn't raise your plan's limit on active boards.
• We may change prices or plan features with at least 30 days' notice by email or on your account page; a price change applies from your next renewal.
• If a payment fails and isn't fixed, or a plan ends, your account moves to the free plan. Boards beyond the free plan's limits are locked, not deleted.

4. Acceptable use

Don't:

• scrape, bulk-download or systematically copy the service or its data, or use it to build a competing dataset;
• republish or redistribute excerpts, results or generated text from the service in bulk, or present them as your own original reporting; quoting reasonable portions with credit to the original source is fine;
• try to get around plan limits, rate limits, authentication or other protections, or probe or attack the service;
• use the service to harass, threaten, defame or target anyone, or to compile information about a private individual;
• use the service, or anything from it, as a factor in deciding a person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing or any other purpose covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act; Pingen is not a consumer reporting agency;
• put material on the service that you don't have the right to use, or that is unlawful;
• overload the service, for example with automated queries, or use it for anything unlawful.

We may remove content and suspend or close accounts that break these rules.

5. Content and copyright

• Articles belong to their publishers. Pingen collects only openly available pages and respects publishers' crawling rules. It shows short excerpts (a few sentences, at most 250 words from one article) to explain why an article is in a result, with a link to the original; read and cite the original.
• Public records and Wikidata: entity facts come in part from Wikidata (CC0). Records come from public sources, credited where they appear: CourtListener (Free Law Project) for court records and opinions, SEC EDGAR, the Treasury's OFAC, the Federal Register, the Justice Department's FARA records, Congress.gov and the congress-legislators project, Open States, the FEC, lobbying disclosures (LDA), the IRS, GLEIF (CC0), USAspending.gov and openFDA.
• Your content (boards, pins, notes, questions): it stays yours. You give us a limited, non-exclusive permission to store, copy and process it, including with the language models that run on our own computer, only to run the service for you (for example to write a board story you asked for). We don't sell it, show it to other users, or use it to train models. The permission ends when you delete the content or your account, apart from copies in backups until they age out.
• Generated text (summaries, stories, assistant answers) is provided for your research. You may use it, subject to the publishers' rights in anything it quotes and to section 4.

6. Copyright complaints

If you believe something on Pingen infringes your copyright, send a notice to dawson@pingen.ai with:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. the work you believe is infringed;
3. where the material is on Pingen (a link or a description precise enough to find it);
4. your name, address, phone number and email;
5. a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorized by the owner, its agent or the law;
6. a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

We'll remove or disable the material promptly and, where it came from a user, tell them. A user who believes it was removed by mistake may send us a counter-notice (the material, a statement under penalty of perjury that it was removed by mistake, their name, address and phone number, and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal courts for their address); we may then restore it after 10 business days unless the complainant tells us they've filed a lawsuit. We close the accounts of repeat infringers. Publishers who simply prefer not to be included can email us and we'll stop collecting their site and remove its excerpts.

7. Availability

Pingen is run by a small operator on modest hardware. We aim to keep it available but don't guarantee uptime; the service can be slow, interrupted or unavailable, for example during maintenance or busy times. Features may change.

8. Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time from your account page (see the Privacy Policy). We may end or suspend the service, or your account, with notice where practical; if we end a paid plan for reasons other than a breach of these terms, we'll refund the unused part of the period.

9. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.

10. Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: (a) we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits or data, or for losses from relying on the service's results; and (b) our total liability for all claims about the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose and US $100.

These limits don't apply to liability that can't be limited by law, such as liability for fraud, for gross negligence or willful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and they don't take away rights you have under consumer protection law that can't be waived. Some states don't allow some of these limits, so they may not all apply to you.

11. Your responsibility to us

To the extent the law allows, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) from a third party's claim that arises from your breach of section 4, from content you put on the service, or from your violation of someone else's rights or of the law through the service. This doesn't apply to the extent the claim was caused by us. We'll tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take part in its defense.

12. Changes and law

We may update these terms; we'll say so on this page and, for material changes, by email or on your account page at least 30 days ahead. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

13. Contact

Dawson Geist, a sole proprietor doing business as Pingen
dawson@pingen.ai