The short version: it has to be you, it has to be yours to say, and it has to be about your work. Almost nobody has ever had to think about this page — you are talking about a project you did, and that is the whole product. It exists so that the rules are written down where you can read them rather than discovered when something is taken down.
1Who this applies to
Everyone who records a session or publishes a page on Firsthand. These rules are part of the Terms of Service — section 6 of that document is this one — so breaking them is breaking the agreement, not just this page.
People who open a published link are not covered by any of this. They are not asked to sign in, not identified, and not agreeing to anything. That is the point of the product.
2It has to be you
Record as yourself. Do not sit a session as somebody else, do not publish a page under another person’s name, and do not present someone else’s work as your own. A recorded answer is worth something to a recruiter precisely because of whose voice it is; there is no version of this product that survives that being uncertain.
One account is one person. Do not share an account, and do not sell or transfer one. If you are recording on behalf of an employer or a school, you are confirming you are allowed to.
3It has to be yours to say
Confidential work is not publishable. Do not publish information belonging to an employer, a client or a school that you are not free to disclose. We cannot know what you signed, so this one is genuinely on you — and the review screen exists so that the decision is made answer by answer, before anything is public, rather than in the moment you are talking.
Other people did not agree to be here. Do not publish other people’s personal information, and take care naming colleagues. Describing what a team did is normal and fine; putting a named person’s conduct on a public page is not yours to do.
Nothing unlawful, harassing or deliberately deceptive, and nothing that infringes somebody else’s rights.
4What the interviewer will not be used to make
The interviewer is a language model that asks about your work and speaks its questions aloud. It is not a general-purpose generator, and it may not be used as one.
No sexual or sexually suggestive content, in a session or on a published page. Firsthand produces spoken questions, your recorded answers and their transcripts — there is no image or video generation here, and no prompt box that would make this a close call. It is written down because a policy that only covers the misuse somebody already attempted is not a policy.
No impersonation of a real person, in voice or in claim, and no using a session to produce audio meant to be passed off as somebody else. The recording is a record of a conversation that happened; anything that makes that untrue defeats it.
No attempts to make the interviewer misbehave — to have it produce content unrelated to an interview, reveal its instructions, or act as a general assistant. It is not a jailbreak target with a prize behind it; it is fifteen minutes of live model time that costs real money to run.
5What the interviewer actually is
Not a rule, but the place this belongs: the interviewer is a third-party language model, integrated by us. Firsthand is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of the companies whose models it uses. We train no model of our own, and we do not use your recordings to train anyone else’s.
Which model, and what it receives, is set out in section 3 of the Privacy Policy. A model can misremember what you said, ask a clumsy question, or get something about your résumé wrong — that is stated in the Terms too, and it is why nothing is published without you choosing it answer by answer.
6Do not attack the service
No scraping the site, no probing it for holes, no automating sessions, and no attempting to reach accounts, links or recordings that are not yours. Do not resell access, and do not use Firsthand to build a competing dataset.
If you have found a security problem, that is a different thing entirely and we would like to hear about it — write to us and you will get a person, not a form.
7What happens if you break these
We may take a page down, and in serious or repeated cases close the account. Where the situation allows it we will tell you first and explain why, because most of what looks like a violation is a misunderstanding and the rest is usually fixable by editing what is shared.
Taking a page down is not deletion: it becomes the same tombstone a lapsed page becomes, at the same address, and your recordings stay yours and stay exportable. Closing an account is covered in section 8 of the Terms.
If you think we got it wrong, write to us. These documents get edited when somebody is right.