What you cannot use a chat analysis for, and why
Section 5 of Portraitor's terms of service lists the uses you agree not to make of a portrait, including decisions about employment, housing, credit and insurance, and access through scripted tools. This page reports what each clause says.
Portraitor’s terms of service name the uses you agree not to make. Section 5 forbids using a portrait, or anything derived from one, to make or support a decision about a person’s employment, education, housing, credit, insurance, immigration status, or access to any service or benefit, and separately forbids surveillance, harassment, unlawful or infringing content, reverse-engineering, and access through browser automation.
That list is specific, and it is dated. The version history at the foot of the same page records that the prohibition on using a portrait for decisions about employment, education, housing, credit, insurance or similar matters arrived in version 1.1, in effect from 16 September 2026, three days after the first published version of those terms.
Everything below reports what that page says, section by section, at version 1.3, dated 30 September 2026. It does not say what any clause means for your situation.
This page describes clauses and names the section each one sits in. It does not interpret them, and nothing here is advice about your own position.
The one purpose the terms name for it
Section 5 opens with a single sentence: Portraitor is built for understanding yourself. Section 2 says the same thing from the other direction, closing with the statement that the Service is built for reflection on your own relationships and is not designed to assess anyone for any other purpose.
Section 2 also describes the object those clauses are about. It says a conversation export from a supported messaging application is analysed and a written portrait of one participant is generated, covering their communication patterns, attachment and conflict style, emotional regulation, and patterns of concern where the analysis finds them. One export, one named participant, one document. The page on analysing your own messages goes through what picking yourself changes and what it does not.
Those two sentences are the frame for the rest of section 5. Each item that follows is a use outside that frame.
Six named decisions, and a seventh left open
The clause reads that you agree not to use a portrait, or anything derived from one, to make or support a decision about a person’s employment, education, housing, credit, insurance, immigration status, or access to any service or benefit.
Three details in that sentence carry weight. The object is the portrait or anything derived from it, so a quotation, a summary or a note taken out of one sits inside the clause along with the document itself. The verb pair is make or support, which reaches a decision the portrait contributed to and not only one it settled. And the last item, access to any service or benefit, is written as a category rather than as a named field, which is what makes the list six named decisions and a seventh left open.
The clause gives its own reason in the next sentence: the Service is built for personal reflection and is not designed, tested or suitable for any such purpose. Not designed, not tested and not suitable are three separate statements, and the second of them is about what has not been done rather than about what the product is for.
The same version history entry that dates the decisions list also dates the automation clause, which is the subject of a later section on this page. Both arrived together in version 1.1.
The permission you confirm, and who carries it
The first item in section 5 is about the file rather than the output. You agree not to submit a conversation you do not have permission to analyse. The next sentence says that before payment you confirm that you have that permission, and the sentence after it says you are responsible for that confirmation being true.
Section 5 then says that where the law of your country requires the consent of the other participants before their messages are analysed, you must have obtained it, and that you must not submit a conversation that was obtained without the knowledge of the people in it. The terms do not say which countries those are, and neither do the other three published pages.
On the Portraitor home page that confirmation is visible as a tick box on the step before payment, reading that you have permission to analyse the chat. What the other person’s position is, and what the services in this market write down about it, is the subject of uploading a chat someone else is in. A thread with several people in it raises the same question several times over, which is covered in group chat analysis.
Surveillance, harassment and unlawful content
Three further items in section 5 are about conduct. You agree not to use the Service to surveil, stalk, harass, or harm anyone. You agree not to use it for any unlawful purpose, or to submit illegal, defamatory, or infringing content. You agree not to circumvent security, reverse-engineer the Service, or extract the underlying models.
Read next to the decisions clause, these attach to a different object. The decisions clause restricts what may be done with a portrait once it exists. These three restrict the use of the Service itself, and the third of them is about the code and the models rather than about anybody in a conversation.
Scripted access is barred, and the reason is the masking
Section 5 ends with two items about automation, and they are not the same item. The first is about load: you agree not to access the Service with automated systems in a way that overloads it. The second is about the protections: you agree not to access the Service through browser automation or scripted tools, because the privacy protections that run on your device assume an ordinary browser, and the terms say Portraitor cannot guarantee them otherwise.
That reason is checkable against the rest of the product rather than being a bare prohibition. The privacy policy says that before anything is transmitted your browser removes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials, and that the process takes place entirely on your own device. The page on what happens if you close the tab covers what else depends on the browser staying where it is. A clause barring scripted access is, in that light, a clause about where the masking runs.
What section 9 says the output is not
Section 9 is headed AI limitations, and it is a set of statements about the portrait rather than about your conduct. It says AI output can contain errors, biases or fabrications, and that no warranty is made as to its accuracy, completeness or suitability. It says the same input can produce different results at different times, and that output is probabilistic rather than deterministic. It says Portraitor does not control the provider’s models, its training data or its outputs. And it says the confidence figures shown in a portrait are the model’s own estimates, not measurements, and should be read as such.
Those four statements sit behind the decisions clause. A document whose publisher writes that it can come back differently from the same input, and that its stated confidence is an estimate rather than a measurement, is described in its own terms as a reading and not as an instrument. What a chat analysis cannot tell you goes through the capability limits the privacy policy sets out, and why personality descriptions feel accurate covers the older reason a reading can feel exact while being about nobody in particular.
Section 2 adds one further limit on using a portrait as a record. It says the portrait is shown to you on screen, sent once to the email address you gave at checkout, and can be saved as a file produced on your device, and that Portraitor keeps no copy of it and cannot reissue it if you lose it.
Where these clauses stop, and what they leave open
The clauses say what you agree not to do. They say very little about what follows if someone does it. Section 13 says access may be suspended or ended without notice where you breach the terms or use the Service unlawfully, and across the four published pages that is the whole of the stated consequence.
The privacy policy explains why there is not more to say. It states that the conversation is held only for as long as generation requires and is discarded once the portrait has been produced, and that conversation text is never written to the database, the backups or the logs. What a court could get works through the same absence from a different direction.
Two questions this page cannot answer from the four published pages. They do not say whether any particular use falls inside access to any service or benefit, because the clause is written as a category and no examples are listed. And they do not say what becomes of a portrait that has already been produced if a breach is found afterwards. Those are gaps in the published text rather than positions taken in it, and this page stops where the text stops.
The prices are on the Portraitor home page: $10 for a single portrait, with no account and no renewal, or $19 a month for ten portraits that refill and are shared from one pool. Section 3 adds the one requirement that applies before any of it, which is that you must be at least 16 years old.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
Can a chat analysis be used in a hiring decision?
No. Section 5 of Portraitor’s terms says you agree not to use a portrait, or anything derived from one, to make or support a decision about a person’s employment. The same sentence names education, housing, credit, insurance, immigration status and access to any service or benefit, and the sentence after it says the Service is not designed, tested or suitable for any such purpose.
Can you analyse a chat the other person has not agreed to?
Section 5 says you agree not to submit a conversation you do not have permission to analyse, that before payment you confirm you have that permission, and that you are responsible for that confirmation being true. It adds that where the law of your country requires the consent of the other participants, you must have obtained it. The terms do not list which countries those are.
Can someone under 16 use Portraitor?
No. Section 3 of the terms says you must be at least 16 years old to use Portraitor, and that by using it you confirm you meet that requirement and have the legal capacity to accept the terms.
Can a script or a bot run a chat analysis?
No. Section 5 says you agree not to access the Service through browser automation or scripted tools, and gives the reason in the same item: the privacy protections that run on your device assume an ordinary browser, and the terms say Portraitor cannot guarantee them otherwise. A separate item covers automated systems that overload the Service.
Does Portraitor keep a copy of the portrait for later?
No. Section 2 says the portrait is shown to you on screen, sent once to the email address you gave at checkout, and can be saved as a file produced on your device, and that Portraitor keeps no copy of it and cannot reissue it if you lose it. Where the copies you do have end up is covered in where your portrait is saved.
Every clause described here is on the terms of service page at version 1.3, dated 30 September 2026, and the version history at the foot of that page records when each one was added.
The scope is written down
Portraitor states what a portrait is for, and what it may not be used for, on a terms page that carries a version number and a date.
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