H · Compliance Notes
This appendix records the compliance posture of the system. It complements, and does not replace, the disclaimer of Section 13.6.
H.1 · Data, legal, and source governance
The system is a research-oriented social-influence evaluation system, not a commercial financial-information or rating service. The framing of the public artifacts — “real-time sequence,” “periodic review-and-release,” “pause and resume” — is chosen to describe a measurement regime, not a securities quotation or a credit-rating opinion. The disclaimer (Section 13.6) states explicitly that the published values are not financial information, not investment advice, not a credit rating, not a reputation judgment, and not a basis for individual decisions. The pricing of this posture is that the system renounces the “market quotation” framing entirely. Public-information processing. The FA input layer consumes public, non-personal or de-aggregated information from third-party open platforms. The general privacy regime for processing already-public personal information in reasonable scope is relied upon, with three operational obligations honored: (i) a refusal and correction channel for any data subject whose information enters an aggregate, (ii) aggregation before publication so that no individual decision is made from any single record, and (iii) no transfer or resale of personal information. The GitHub terms of use, which permit research use of public, non-personal repository metadata while prohibiting the sale of personal information or the resale of the platform as a service, were reviewed and the system's use of repository counts, stars, and forks conforms to them; the arXiv API, which is open and requires acknowledgment, is used for bibliographic verification and is acknowledged in Section 13.2. Platform terms change; this record is reviewed at each parameter governance review (Section 10.1). Reputation and trademark. The real-harm adjustment is fed only by officially confirmed incidents, each with a source and a correction channel, and is capped at (Appendix B); the system does not adjudicate contested facts. The system does not use product logos, and public artifacts carry a statement that the evaluation is that of an independent third-party system and is not an endorsement of any organization. Source governance and openness. The “sources are friends” (Section 13.1) posture and the circuit-breaker redundancy (Section 6.2) mean the system is replaceable at every source and does not sell, block, or privilege any underlying data. The openness posture is deliberately modest: the system aims to describe the method and to keep hard-to-manipulate artifacts observable over time, without promising a specific open scope or a specific release schedule (Section 13.5). The residual compliance risks that remain under active review are the precise legal classification of the publication language in some jurisdictions and the exact terms of certain platform data policies that could not be re-verified at writing. Neither is a hard obstacle to the research use described here; both are tracked in the governance log.