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Terms of Use

Effective: Version: 1.0

Welcome to ABS AI ("we", "us", "the service"). These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of the website at absai.com.au and the AI assistant that answers questions about the 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census. By creating an account or using the service you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the service.

1. What this is

ABS AI is a free, civic-tech tool that helps anyone explore the publicly-released 2021 Census of Population and Housing (Australian Bureau of Statistics). It uses large language models (LLMs) and structured queries against a copy of the ABS DataPacks to produce natural-language answers, with charts and source citations where possible.

It is a community-driven public-data project intended to grow into a curated library of high-quality Q&A about the Census, freely searchable and indexable by people and AI models alike. Every question you ask and every answer you receive is stored. Some of them — once reviewed — may be published publicly at absai.com.au/answers. Don't put personally identifiable information into a question if you don't want it stored or potentially published.

ABS AI is a portfolio / learning project run by an individual (Peter Dimakidis). It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

2. Acceptable use

You agree to use the service only for lawful purposes. You agree NOT to:

  • Attempt to circumvent rate limits, authentication, or access controls.
  • Submit questions that contain personal information about identifiable individuals, hate speech, threats, or otherwise unlawful content.
  • Scrape, mirror, or systematically harvest the service via automation outside the rate limits.
  • Use the service to harass, defame, or discriminate against any person or group.
  • Attempt to extract or reverse-engineer the underlying model, prompts, or training data.
  • Use the service to generate content that infringes third-party intellectual property.

We may rate-limit, suspend, or terminate accounts that violate these terms, at our sole discretion and without notice.

3. Your content; storage; published answers

You own the questions you submit. By using the service you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual licence to store, process, review, and (subject to the publishing rules below) publish your questions and the corresponding AI answers for the purposes of operating, improving, analysing, and growing the public Answers library.

3.1 Storage — applies to everything you submit

Every question and every AI answer is stored on our servers, indefinitely. This applies whether or not you ever flag an answer for publishing. We use the corpus to improve the agent, debug bad outputs, and identify high- quality Q&A pairs that could enrich the public Answers library (see §3.3).

3.2 Flagged-for-publish answers

When you click "Make this answer public" on any answer, you grant us an additional, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to:

  • Edit the question wording for clarity, brevity, or to remove personal information;
  • Publish the question + answer + chart + source citation on the public Answers section of the site (at absai.com.au/answers);
  • Make the published answer indexable by search engines and AI crawlers;
  • Retain the published answer indefinitely, even after you delete your account.

3.3 Admin-promoted answers (curator surface)

The site admin may also promote a previously-asked question and its AI answer into the public Answers library even if you did not flag it yourself — provided the content is non-personal and contributes to the library. Admin-promoted answers go through the same review and editing process as flagged ones, and the same licence in §3.2 applies.

3.4 Your responsibility — no personal information

The onus is on you, the user, to make sure you do not include personally identifiable information (PII) in any question you submit — your name, address, phone, ID numbers, anyone else's PII, or anything that could identify a living person. We make reasonable effort to surface only non-personal content publicly, but responsibility for what goes into the system in the first place is yours, not ours.

Published answers are attributed to "the community" by default; you may opt in to attribution under your display name via your account settings.

4. Accounts, tiers, and why we ask you to sign in

The reason we require sign-in is simple: to prevent abuse and to enable higher rate limits for trusted users. We're not building a profile of you, we're not selling anything, and we don't use the account for advertising — it exists so that one bad actor can't drain the AI quota for everyone else and so we can lift caps for users who've demonstrated good citizenship.

Accounts are free and may be created via email + password, magic link, or Google sign-in. We currently offer two tiers:

  • Free — 20 questions/day, 8/hour. The default for everyone with an account.
  • Premium — 500/day, 60/hour. Currently invite-only and granted manually to users who'd benefit from higher caps. We may offer paid Premium tiers in the future.

Anonymous (signed-out) callers may make up to 10 questions/day, 5/hour, keyed by IP address — enough to try the service before deciding whether to sign in.

5. Accuracy and disclaimers

The service is "as-is". Answers are generated by AI models translating your question into SQL against a local copy of the 2021 Census. The model can misinterpret questions, pick wrong columns, or produce inaccurate numbers — particularly for complex multi-step queries.

Answers are not financial, medical, legal, or planning advice. Verify any number against the original source (every answer includes a citation to the relevant ABS publication) before relying on it for any decision, report, application, or formal document.

We make no representations or warranties about the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or fitness for purpose of any answer. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we exclude all liability for any loss arising from your use of the service.

6. Source attribution

The underlying data is the 2021 Census of Population and Housing published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, used in accordance with the ABS data licence (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) at the time of access. We acknowledge the ABS as the source. We are not the source. For authoritative figures, consult the ABS directly at abs.gov.au.

7. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be communicated by a prompt the next time you sign in; you will need to accept the updated terms to continue using the service. The version and effective date at the top of this page reflect the current version.

8. Termination

You may stop using the service at any time and may request account deletion via the contact email below. We may terminate or suspend access for any user for any reason, including violations of these terms, with or without notice. Sections 3 (Content ownership; published answers) and 5 (Accuracy and disclaimers) survive termination.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia. Any dispute will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria.

10. Contact

Questions about these terms, requests for account deletion, or reports of misuse: please connect with me on LinkedIn and message me there.

These terms work in tandem with the Privacy Policy. Together they form the complete agreement between you and ABS AI.