Legal, licence & acceptable use

Last updated 2026-07 · 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);
• journalism, investigation, and threat / fraud research 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.

Access used to facilitate any of the above may be blocked, and abuse may be reported to the relevant authorities.

4. Your responsibility

You alone decide what to scan and what to do with the results, and you bear sole responsibility for that use. You must comply with every law that applies 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. WayTrace only surfaces data a third party had already made public; it does not make that use lawful in your hands.

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 on the hosted service, and relies on a legitimate-interest basis (security research and web transparency) balanced against the rights of data subjects. Data subjects may request removal of a scan (see Contact).

6. Source data & the Internet Archive

Every snapshot comes from the Internet Archive. WayTrace neither hosts nor controls that data, and its availability, accuracy and completeness are outside WayTrace's control; results may be partial or out of date (archive gaps). Your use of the archived data is also governed by the Internet Archive's Terms of Use, which you accept by using WayTrace: do not flood requests or attempt to bypass rate limits. To have a page removed from the archive itself, contact the Internet Archive directly.

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, express or implied; see the LICENSE file in the repository.

8. Disclaimer & limitation of liability

WayTrace is provided as a research aid, "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and operator disclaim all liability for any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damage arising from the use of, misuse of, or reliance on the tool or its output, and for the content of archived pages. You use WayTrace at your own risk.

9. Contact / abuse / removal

Abuse reports and removal requests: housset.thomas@pm.me. Legitimate requests are reviewed, and a hosted scan can be deleted on request.