Legal, licence & acceptable use

Last updated 2026-06 · WayTrace

1. What WayTrace does

WayTrace reconstructs the public history of a domain from snapshots stored by archive.org. It fetches a representative sample of those archived pages and extracts signals (technologies, endpoints, links, identifiers, etc.) with the dates they were seen. All source data was already public and archived by a third party before any scan. WayTrace is independent and not affiliated with the Internet Archive.

2. Permitted use

WayTrace is intended for lawful purposes only, including:

• education and learning about open-source intelligence;
• authorised security research and defensive security (your own assets, or with permission);
• due diligence, journalism, and fraud / threat investigation you are entitled to conduct;
• historical and academic research on the public web.

3. Prohibited use

You must not use WayTrace to:

• stalk, harass, intimidate, dox or endanger any person;
• attempt unauthorised access, credential abuse, or to circumvent authentication;
• violate privacy, data-protection or anti-hacking laws in any applicable jurisdiction;
• conduct surveillance or profiling that infringes another person's rights;
• any other illegal or abusive activity.

Accounts used to facilitate any of the above may be suspended or terminated.

4. Your responsibility

You are solely responsible for how you use WayTrace and its results, and for complying with all laws that apply to you and to the subject of your research, including in the subject's jurisdiction. Where results contain personal data, you act as the data controller for any further processing you perform.

5. Personal data (GDPR / RGPD)

Archived pages can contain personal data (for example email addresses or names). There is no general exemption for publicly available personal data under the GDPR. WayTrace minimises exposure by design: it processes only data already archived publicly, performs no enrichment beyond those pages, retains finished scans for a limited period (7 days on the hosted service), and relies on a legitimate-interest basis (security research and web transparency). Data subjects may request removal of a published scan (see Contact). The hosted service requires an account to run a scan; viewing a scan by its link and the public feed remain open.

6. Source data & third parties

All snapshots originate from the Internet Archive. Their availability, accuracy and completeness are outside WayTrace's control; results may be partial or out of date (archive gaps). Please also respect the Internet Archive's terms.

7. Licence

WayTrace is open source under the MIT Licence. You may self-host it; the self-hosted build has no hosted-service snapshot ceiling and can scan a domain in full. The software is provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind; see the LICENSE file in the repository.

8. Disclaimer of liability

WayTrace is provided as a research aid without warranty. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for any use, misuse, or reliance on the tool or its output, nor for the content of archived pages.

9. Contact / abuse / removal

Abuse reports and removal requests: legal@waytrace.org. We review legitimate requests and can unpublish or delete a scan.