• Bribe, threaten, or intimidate any member of the combine Out of Character for any purpose or reason.
• Sell, trade or give away classified information gained by you on a previous character.
• Collect or share out of character personal information that does not pertain to interactions with the game, for any purpose beyond voluntary community social activities. For example, you may not collect real names, addresses, photographs or hardware footprints of players for counterintelligence. You may store IP addresses of accounts that access your website, forums etc.
• Impersonate a member of the Combine for any reason. This means you may not pretend to be another member over any communication mediums such as e-mail, IRC, message boards, MSN, etc.
• Directly access the private accounts of other members on group or faction websites (including message boards, wiki projects, databases, etc.) for the intent of gathering information, even if granted permission by that member.
• Intercept the private communications of other members such as e-mail, IRC, MSN, private messages on forums, etc.
• Join a private protected chat channel for the sole purpose of getting a faction's member count and member names, or retrieve a channel's access list for the same purpose.
• Hack or exploit software weaknesses in web pages, chat rooms, or any other areas of a group or faction.
  
  • Note: This includes misconfiguration when a clear effort was made to secure the web site (such as being private but accidentally left open to search crawlers).
• Obtain files from any storage medium of another player or faction through the use of hacking, worms, trojans or other software infiltration methods.
• Manipulate the game engine in order to hide or change your current in-game status. For example, you may not use a Star Destroyer custom picture on a Y-Wing or use an avatar picture showing you are under arrest if you are not.
• Use faction privileges to betray your faction beyond providing information (includes inventory actions on things assigned to you by your faction).
• Intentionally destroy assets of your own Faction.
• Create a new character at respawn with the goal of joining a faction to spy on it.

• Access all publicly accessible areas of group or faction (websites, message boards, IRC channels etc.) to gather information.
• Defect to another group, then reveal to your new group information you know about your old group. However, be aware that people do not like traitors, and defectors are frequently mistrusted in their new group.
• Trade or sell information that you have gathered within the confines of the spying rules to another member, group or faction.
• You may agree to a deal with another member and receive their side of the payment but not contribute your own. For example, you may advertise to sell a ship you do not have and take payment for it, but provide no ship in return. Be aware that people who do this will quickly become noted as scammers within the trading community.
• Place members within or in the vicinity of a target to gain information about it and its surrounds prior to a military strike.
• Spread either true or false information about any member, group, or faction (including yourself) for any reason. For example, propaganda turning a military defeat into a victory, or lying about the actions of another member..
• Use faction access as "read-only" to provide information to an enemy.
• Enter areas to which you are given access as long as it does not take any extra actions from you or another spy.
• Use a Faction Advisory Panel or full ownership powers to loot a faction or otherwise betray its members.

The following examples show proper and improper ways of sending spies to an enemy faction.

The following examples show proper and improper uses of faction privileges.

The following examples show proper and improper methods of data recording.