Acceptable Use Policy

Everyone who uses LotHook: towing operators, property managers, their staff, and residents. It forms part of the Terms of Use and of every Subscription Agreement.

A licence plate check must have an enforcement purpose at a property you are engaged to enforce. That is the only reason to run one.

You may not run a plate check:

• On a vehicle at a property your organization does not service.
• To find out where someone lives, works, or parks.
• Because of a personal dispute, a relationship, or curiosity.
• As a favour to someone outside your organization, whoever they are.
• To build a list, a dataset, or a history of any person's movements.
• On behalf of anyone who is not your customer for that property.

Every check is logged with the plate searched, who searched it, when, and at which property. That log is kept for 24 months and it is not editable by anyone, including us. It exists so that a tow can be reconstructed — and it works just as well for reconstructing a lookup that should never have happened.

Texas restricts the disclosure and use of motor vehicle records under Tex. Transp. Code ch. 730, and the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. §2721, does the same. LotHook does not give you access to those records — the Service only knows what your own properties have registered in it — but the principle behind those statutes is the principle behind this section. Do not look someone up because you can.

Do not record a tow that did not happen. Do not record a reason you do not believe. Do not alter a photograph before uploading it, or upload a photograph of a different vehicle, a different place, or a different day.

Tow records are append-only. If you got something wrong, add an amendment saying so. That is the correct fix and it costs you nothing; falsifying a record costs you the account and may cost you a great deal more.

Do not share your login. Do not use anyone else's. Do not give a unit access code to someone who does not live in that unit, and do not use one you were not given.

Staff accounts and resident accounts are deliberately separate: a manager cannot hold a resident login for their own building, because the audit trail would stop being able to say who issued what. Do not try to work around that.

Do not scrape it, automate against it outside any API we give you in writing, probe it for vulnerabilities without our written permission, attempt to reach another organization's data, upload malware, or interfere with anyone else's use of it.

If you find a security flaw, tell us at Matthew.Maldonado@innovationsapplab.com. We will not pursue you for a good-faith report that stops at the point of discovery, does not access anyone else's data beyond what is needed to demonstrate the problem, and gives us a reasonable chance to fix it before it goes public.

Do not use the Service to harass, threaten, stalk or intimidate anyone. Do not use it to retaliate against a resident for a complaint. Do not use it to discriminate against a resident on any basis protected by law.

Depending on what happened, we may warn you, suspend the account, remove access for a particular user, terminate the agreement, or report the matter to a licensing authority or to law enforcement.

We investigate by reading the logs the system already keeps. We do not need new surveillance to enforce this policy, and we will not build any.

If we suspend for suspected misuse of plate checks, we will tell the operator's administrator what we saw and give them a chance to explain, unless doing so would obstruct an investigation or put someone at risk.

If you believe someone is misusing LotHook — including a resident who believes their plate has been looked up without cause — email us with "AUP" in the subject line. Tell us the property and the approximate dates. We can see who ran which check, and we will look.