Acceptable use

A photograph of a sock, or of another light-coloured knitted garment, laid flat, that you own or have permission to photograph. That is the whole of it.

The service is built to read one thing and reads nothing else usefully. A photograph of something other than fabric will simply fail, and repeatedly submitting them will use your allowance for nothing.

• Photographs of people. Not a person wearing the sock, not a face in the background, not a child’s foot in a child’s sock. Photograph the garment on its own.
• Anything you do not own or have permission to photograph.
• Anything sexual, anything depicting a minor in any state, anything violent, and anything that would be unlawful to hold.
• Material belonging to someone else — a photograph taken from a listing, a catalogue or a review.
• Anything containing personal data of another person.

Material of the kind in the third bullet is removed and reported to the authorities where the law requires it, and the account is closed without refund.

You may not use a reading as evidence in a return, a complaint, a warranty claim, a chargeback, a review, or any assertion about the quality of a product or the conduct of a brand or a retailer.

This is the most important line on this page, so here is the reason. The four causes this service distinguishes lie overwhelmingly on the use and laundering side. It has no way of establishing anything about how a garment was made, and it reaches no conclusion about product quality — so a reading cannot support a quality claim, and presenting one as though it could would be unfair to whoever made the garment as well as misleading to whoever received the claim.

You also may not present a reading as a laboratory result, as a chemical test, or as professional advice of any kind.

• Work around the allowance, the rate limits or the sign-in, or open several accounts to get more free readings.
• Scrape the site, or run automated traffic against it.
• Resell access, or put the service behind your own paywall.
• Reverse engineer it, or try to extract the parts of it that are not published.
• Impersonate Greyback or anyone working on it.

The distribution table is published deliberately and you are welcome to read it, quote it and argue with it. That is not scraping.

Yes. Do not use this service for or in connection with medical, legal or financial decisions, safety-critical systems, or decisions affecting employment, credit, insurance, housing or access to justice. It reads discoloration in knitted fabric; that is the whole of its competence, and the notice on how the reading is produced explains why.

For most of them: a warning, and an explanation of what would put it right. For repeated breaches: suspension. For the unlawful categories: immediate closure without refund, and a report where the law requires one.

We tell you what happened and why. If you think we have it wrong, write to support@simplyhosieryonline.shop and a person will look at it again.