Terms of Use

1. Who we are and what these Terms cover

1.1 The Envoy is operated by Tal Zelinger, or by any company established by him or on his behalf to which the operation of the Service is transferred under section 18.4 ("The Envoy", "we", "us", "our").

1.2 "The Service" means everything we provide under the name The Envoy: the website at politicsenvoy.com, the application, the reference pages on the institutions, offices and people of the State of Israel and of any other country we add, the Daily Brief, the Elections module, the coalition builder, the simulators and other tools, and any email or notification we send as part of the Service.

1.3 These Terms of Use ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and us. Our Privacy Policy at politicsenvoy.com/privacy explains how we handle personal information and forms part of these Terms.

1.4 You accept these Terms by ticking the acceptance box, by creating an account, or by using the Service. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1.5 If you use the Service for an embassy, consulate, international organisation, government body or other organisation (a "Mission"), you confirm that you are authorised to accept these Terms for it, and "you" includes the Mission. Where a Mission has signed a subscription or other written agreement with us (a "Mission Agreement"), that agreement prevails over these Terms for that Mission and its users to the extent of any conflict.

1.6 The Service is intended for professionals. You must be at least 18 years old to use it.

1.7 These Terms are written in English. Any translation is for convenience only; the English text governs.

2. What The Envoy is, and what it is not

2.1 The Envoy is a reference and news service. It describes how a state is built, who holds office, what the local press reports and what published opinion polls show.

2.2 The Envoy does not give legal, financial, security, political or diplomatic advice. Nothing in the Service is a recommendation to act, an assessment of the merits of any person or party, or a prediction that any event will occur.

2.3 The Envoy is independent. We are not affiliated with the State of Israel, the Knesset, the Government, any ministry, court, authority, political party, candidate, pollster or news outlet, or with any of the people the Service describes. We are not affiliated with any foreign government or international organisation. The Service takes no political position.

2.4 The Envoy is not an official source. Original records, official publications, court decisions and the outlets we cite are the authority. Where the Service and an original source differ, the original prevails.

3. How the content is made, and its limits

3.1 Reference pages. Pages on institutions, offices and people are compiled from public records and published sources, including Knesset records, official publications, court publications and the press. We aim to support each fact with at least two independent sources and to name the sources where practical.

3.2 Daily Brief. The Daily Brief is prepared with the help of automated tools, including artificial-intelligence systems, that read Israeli news outlets, translate their reports into English and summarise them. An item is included only when at least two outlets carry it. The outlets are named and linked on each item. Items are generated automatically and published without prior human review. The Daily Brief is marked as generated by artificial intelligence.

3.3 Elections module. The Elections module shows election polls as they were published by others. Each poll is shown with the outlet that commissioned and published it, the body that conducted it and its date, and, where they were published, the fieldwork dates, the sample size and the margin of error. Trend lines, seat averages, the coalition builder and the simulators are our own arithmetic on those published figures, or on figures you choose. They are not polls, they are not forecasts of the result, and they are not an endorsement of any list or coalition. A figure that is not based on recognised statistical methods, including any figure you create in a simulator, is marked as such.

3.4 Poll restrictions. Israeli law restricts the publication of election polls during the election period, and prohibits it from the end of the Friday before polling day until the polls close. Other countries have similar rules. We may suspend, freeze or restrict any part of the Elections module where we consider this necessary to comply with such rules, without notice. You must not use the Service to publish or circulate poll results in breach of any such rule.

3.5 People pages. A page about a person records that person's public role: offices held, parliamentary terms, party or list affiliation and a short biography. Portraits of people in the Service are illustrations created for The Envoy. We do not publish private information about these persons beyond their public role. Any person described in the Service may ask us to correct information about them under section 12.

3.6 Limits. Despite this care, content can be incomplete, out of date or wrong. Automated translation and summarising can err. Political facts change quickly, and a poll is a snapshot of the days on which it was taken. Check anything important against the original source before relying on it, and tell us about any error so that we can correct it.

3.7 Artificial intelligence. You acknowledge that parts of the Service, including the Daily Brief, are produced with artificial-intelligence systems that translate, summarise and classify text, and that such systems can misstate, omit or invent facts, names, figures and dates. You accept the Service on that basis. You agree not to rely on the Service as the sole basis for any decision, report or publication, and to verify any fact that matters to you against the original source. Your sole remedy for an inaccuracy in the Service is to request a correction under section 12.

4. Your account

4.1 Signing in. You sign in with a Google account or a Microsoft account. Access is for named individuals. The Envoy does not create anonymous sessions.

4.2 One person per account. An account is for one named person and may not be shared, lent or transferred. Keep your sign-in details secure and tell us at once at contact@politicsenvoy.com if you suspect unauthorised use. Activity under your account is your responsibility until you tell us.

4.3 Accurate details. The details you give us, including your Mission and role, must be accurate and kept up to date. We may verify your affiliation before granting or continuing access, and may suspend access while we do so.

4.4 Missions. Access is granted to named individuals. Where a Mission asks us to grant access to its staff, the Mission is responsible for its users' compliance with these Terms, and must tell us when a user leaves the Mission or no longer needs access, so that we can close that account.

4.5 Free trial. We may grant an account a free trial. A trial lasts seven days from the account's first sign-in, unless we state another period when we grant it. During a trial, access may be limited, changed or withdrawn at any time. When the trial ends, access continues only under a subscription or another arrangement agreed with us in writing.

5. Licence and acceptable use

5.1 Licence. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to access and use the Service for the internal work of you and your Mission.

5.2 What you may do. You may view, search, print and save individual pages for your own and your Mission's internal use. You may quote short extracts in internal reporting, such as cables, briefings and memoranda, with the attribution "Source: The Envoy (politicsenvoy.com)". You may share links to the Service with colleagues who have their own accounts.

5.3 What you may not do. You may not:

• copy, reproduce, republish, distribute or make available the Service or any substantial part of its content outside your Mission;

• sell, license, rent or otherwise commercialise the Service or its content;

• access the Service by automated means, including scraping, crawling, bulk downloading, scripts, bots or artificial-intelligence agents, except through an interface we expressly provide for that purpose;

• use the content to train, fine-tune, test or improve a machine-learning or artificial-intelligence model;

• build a product, database or dataset that competes with or substitutes for the Service;

• circumvent or test the security or access controls of the Service, or try to reach data or accounts you are not given;

• reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of the Service, except to the extent the law allows;

• remove or alter any copyright notice, attribution or source link;

• use the Service in breach of any law, including election laws, or to publish, circulate or broadcast election polls in breach of applicable restrictions;

• use the Service to harass, defame, threaten or intrude on the privacy of any person, including any person described in the Service;

• present the Service as an official source, or as speaking for us, for any government or for any person described in it.

5.4 We may monitor use of the Service to the extent described in the Privacy Policy, and may act under section 15 on any breach of this section.

6. Intellectual property

6.1 Ours. The Service, including its software, design, texts, illustrations, graphics, images we created, the Daily Brief, our data and the selection and arrangement of all of it, belongs to us or to our licensors. It is protected by the copyright, database and other intellectual-property laws of Israel and of other countries. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of these rights to you. Any use not expressly permitted is prohibited.

6.2 Marks. "The Envoy", the Envoy logo and the politicsenvoy.com name are our marks. You may use them only to attribute content to us as section 5.2 allows.

6.3 Others'. News reports remain the property of the outlets that published them. Polls remain the property of the bodies that conducted or commissioned them. Official records and data published by public bodies remain subject to the terms under which they were published, and the Service names their sources. The Service summarises, attributes and links to these materials. The original is always the authority.

6.4 Feedback. If you send us ideas, suggestions or feedback about the Service, we may use them without restriction or payment, and you waive any claim in them, to the extent the law allows.

6.5 Rights complaints. A rights holder who believes that content in the Service infringes its rights may notify us under section 12.

7. Content you submit

7.1 You may submit content to us through the request for access form, correspondence, correction requests, feedback and any feature that accepts input, such as settings in a simulator ("Your Content").

7.2 You confirm that you have the right to submit Your Content and that it does not infringe anyone's rights or any law.

7.3 You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free licence to use Your Content to operate, secure, support and improve the Service, and for the purposes set out in the Privacy Policy. We do not publish Your Content, other than a correction or response you ask us to publish under section 12.

7.4 The Service is not a secure channel for sensitive government communications. Do not submit classified, restricted or otherwise sensitive official information through the Service.

8. Confidentiality and security

8.1 Who uses the Service. We know that our users work for foreign missions and similar bodies. We treat the identity of our users and of their Missions as confidential. We do not publish, sell or disclose the list of Missions or users, and we do not name a Mission as a user without its written consent, except as the law requires.

8.2 What we record. The Service does not keep a record of which pages or items an individual user reads, and does not run analytics on individual users. We keep only the account information, the items you choose to save, and the short-lived technical records needed to run and secure the Service, as set out in the Privacy Policy. We do not sell them, and we do not disclose them to any third party except as the Privacy Policy describes.

8.3 Legal demands. If we receive a court order, subpoena or other legally binding demand for information about a user or a Mission, we will, where the law permits, notify the affected Mission before complying, and will disclose no more than the demand requires.

8.4 Security. We apply technical and organisational security measures appropriate to the Service, as described in the Privacy Policy. No system is completely secure. The Service is not designed, certified or approved for classified or restricted information, and must not be used for it.

8.5 Reporting. If you discover a security weakness in the Service, tell us at security@politicsenvoy.com. Do not exploit it or disclose it to others until we have had a reasonable opportunity to fix it.

9. Fees

9.1 A free trial is free of charge. It does not renew automatically and does not become a paid subscription unless the Mission agrees to one under section 9.2.

9.2 Any paid subscription will be offered under a Mission Agreement or an order form agreed in writing before it begins, stating the fees, the term and the number of users. Nothing is charged without that agreement.

9.3 Fees stated in a Mission Agreement are exclusive of VAT and other taxes unless stated otherwise. If we become required by law to charge VAT on the fees, it will be added to them at the rate then in force.

10. Availability and changes to the Service

10.1 We may add, change, suspend or remove features of the Service, and may change the countries and institutions it covers.

10.2 We aim to keep the Service available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation. We may suspend the Service for maintenance, security or technical reasons, and will give notice in advance where we reasonably can.

10.3 We may discontinue the Service or any part of it. Outside a free trial we will give at least 60 days' notice, and any fees prepaid for the period after discontinuation will be refunded.

10.4 Content, including the Daily Brief and the Elections module, may be delayed, suspended or withdrawn, including under section 3.4.

11. Third-party services and links

11.1 Sign-in with Google is provided by Google, and sign-in with Microsoft by Microsoft, each under its own terms and privacy policy. We receive from them only the information described in the Privacy Policy.

11.2 The Service links to news outlets, official records, pollsters and other outside sites. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content or practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

11.3 The Service is hosted and delivered using third-party providers, including Supabase and Cloudflare, and the Daily Brief is prepared using artificial-intelligence services of Google and Groq, as described in the Privacy Policy.

12. Corrections, complaints and takedown

12.1 Errors. If you believe that a fact shown in the Service is wrong, write to corrections@politicsenvoy.com. Your request must identify the page and the passage, state what is wrong and what the correct fact is, and attach the references that establish it, such as an official record, a court decision, a Knesset publication or a published report, with a link or a copy. We review each request against the references provided and against the original sources. We aim to review a request within five business days, to correct the content where the request is well founded, and to note material corrections on the page concerned. A request that identifies no page, states no correct fact or attaches no references may be returned for completion before it is reviewed.

12.2 Persons described. If you are described in the Service and believe that information about you is inaccurate, incomplete or misleading, you may ask us to correct it or to publish a short response. Write to corrections@politicsenvoy.com, identify the page and the passage, state what is wrong and why, and attach the references that support the correction. We aim to respond within 14 days. Where the request is well founded we will correct the content, or publish a correction or your response, promptly and with appropriate prominence. Requests about personal information are handled under the Privacy Policy.

12.3 Rights holders. If you believe that content in the Service infringes your copyright or other rights, write to legal@politicsenvoy.com with: identification of the protected work; the location of the content in the Service; a statement that you own the rights or act for the owner; and your contact details. We will review the notice and remove or disable access to the content where appropriate.

12.4 Other complaints. Any other complaint about the Service may be sent to contact@politicsenvoy.com. We will acknowledge it within five business days.

12.5 We may decline a request that is unfounded, abusive or repetitive, and will tell you why.

13. Disclaimers

13.1 The Service and its content are provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent the law allows, we give no warranty, express or implied, of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

13.2 In particular, we do not warrant that any fact, figure, date, name, translation or summary in the Service is correct, that any poll, trend, seat projection or coalition scenario shown in the Service will be borne out by any election result, or that the Daily Brief reflects every report or every view in the Israeli press.

13.3 We are not responsible for the content of the news outlets, pollsters, official records or other third parties that the Service summarises, cites or links to.

13.4 The Service is an aid to your own work. It does not replace your own verification, judgement or reporting.

14. Liability

14.1 To the extent the law allows, we are not liable to you or your Mission for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for loss of profit, business, data or goodwill, or for any decision, action or report made in reliance on the Service.

14.2 To the extent the law allows, our total aggregate liability to you and your Mission arising out of or in connection with the Service or these Terms, whether in contract, tort or otherwise, is limited to the fees your Mission paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim or, where no fees were paid, to USD 1,000.

14.3 Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law, including liability for fraud, for intentional wrongdoing, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

14.4 If your or your Mission's use of the Service in breach of these Terms gives rise to a claim against us by a third party, you will, to the extent permitted by the law that applies to you, compensate us for the losses and reasonable costs we incur as a result.

14.5 Inaccurate content. To the fullest extent the law allows, neither you nor your Mission will have any claim against us, and we will have no liability, for any loss arising from an inaccuracy, error, omission or out-of-date statement in the Service, whether produced by a person or by an artificial-intelligence system, including in a translation, a summary, a biography, a poll figure or a projection. Your sole remedy for such content is a correction under section 12. The Service is compiled with care but is not free of error, and you remain responsible for verifying any information before relying on it.

15. Suspension and termination

15.1 By you. You may stop using the Service at any time, and may close your account on the account page of the Service or by writing to contact@politicsenvoy.com. Closing your account deletes your account information immediately, as described in the Privacy Policy.

15.2 By us. We may suspend or close an account, or a Mission's access, if: these Terms are breached; we reasonably suspect a security risk or unauthorised use; the law or a competent authority requires it; a free trial or the relevant Mission Agreement ends; or the user is no longer affiliated with the Mission. We will give notice before acting where we reasonably can, and in any event promptly afterwards.

15.3 Effect. On termination your licence ends and you must stop using the Service. Sections 3.7, 5.3, 6, 7.3, 8, 13, 14, 17 and 18 survive termination, together with any other provision that by its nature should survive.

16. Changes to these Terms

16.1 We may update these Terms, for example to reflect changes in the Service, in the law or in our practices. The date of the current version appears at the top of this page.

16.2 If a change is material, we will tell you by email or in the Service at least 14 days before it takes effect, and will ask you to accept the new version before you continue to use the Service. If you do not agree, stop using the Service and close your account before the change takes effect.

16.3 Earlier versions are available on request.

17. Governing law, disputes and immunities

17.1 These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or the Service, are governed by the laws of the State of Israel, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

17.2 Subject to section 17.4, the competent courts in Tel Aviv-Jaffa have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute or claim.

17.3 Before starting proceedings, you and we will try in good faith to resolve the dispute by discussion for at least 30 days from written notice of it.

17.4 Immunities. Nothing in these Terms waives, limits or affects any immunity or privilege that a State, a diplomatic or consular mission, an international organisation or any of their staff enjoys under international law, including the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, or under the Foreign States Immunity Law, 5769-2008. Any waiver of immunity, and any arrangement for jurisdiction, arbitration or dispute resolution with a Mission, is made only in a Mission Agreement signed by the Mission.

18. General provisions and contact

18.1 Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and any Mission Agreement are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service, and replace any earlier understanding.

18.2 Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, it will be applied to the fullest extent the law allows, and the remaining provisions remain in force.

18.3 No waiver. A failure or delay by either side in exercising a right under these Terms is not a waiver of it.

18.4 Assignment and transfer. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms. We may assign or transfer these Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Service and all rights and information connected with them, at any time and without your consent, to any company established by or on behalf of the operator, or to a successor to the Service. We will record the change at the top of these Terms. Your rights under these Terms and the Privacy Policy continue unchanged against the transferee.

18.5 Notices. We may give you notice by email to the address on your account or by a message in the Service. You may give us notice at the address below.

18.6 Contact. General enquiries: contact@politicsenvoy.com. Corrections: corrections@politicsenvoy.com. Rights and legal notices: legal@politicsenvoy.com. Security: security@politicsenvoy.com. Personal information: see the Privacy Policy.