The words this library uses, defined once. Every definition says what a thing is and what it can be used for, and none says how it is computed. Each term has a stable anchor, so you can link to a definition from your own documentation or your own privacy notice and it will still point at the same place next year.
- Check
- One request from a shop about one order, sent from the shop server at the moment the order is about to go to the payment provider. A check is answered with a score and a list of reasons, and it is always anchored to a real order or session reference.
- Corroboration
- The rule that network heat needs more than one accuser. A fraud label makes the buyer’s device and IP hot for every Pro shop at once, and e-mail and phone carry full weight elsewhere only once they are verified or tied to that same device. Network heat needs the same identity labelled by two independently owned shops. An operator cannot write network heat.
- Degraded
- The fixed response shape a shop receives when Heatrail did not answer inside the 800 ms budget. It means no signal for this order. It never means low risk, and it is never an error the checkout has to handle.
- Heat
- The state a trail is in after confirmed harm was labelled on an order that touched it. Heat raises the score of later checks that touch the same trail. It is created only by fraud and chargeback labels, and it is cooled by time or by the trail no longer being touched.
- Incident
- A labelled order together with the evidence around it: the label, who applied it, when, and the ledger entries that record it. An active incident is what allows a record to be held beyond the normal retention window.
- Label
- The shop’s own verdict on an order after the fact: fraud, chargeback or real. One label is active per order at a time. A newer label supersedes the older one, and a real label creates no heat of any kind.
- Network heat
- The network tier of heat, reached only after corroboration, and corroboration is two independently owned shops. A single shop’s label also reaches other Pro shops through the buyer’s device and IP, but that is not network heat.
- Operator
- A Heatrail staff member working in the operator console. Operators approve shops, decide whether two shops are independently owned, and draft the memo to the authorities. Every operator read and write is recorded in an append-only audit log. An operator cannot write network heat.
- Reason
- One of the short evidence lines returned with a score, written for a person to read: what was seen, with counts and recency, in the words the shop’s own team receives them. Reasons are what a shop shows the reviewer, keeps in its own log and argues with, while the score is the field it routes on. A response carries only the reasons relevant to the order in front of the shop. A reason may say how many shops a match spans and how long ago in coarse units, and it never carries an identifier, a hash, another shop’s evidence or any shop’s identity.
- Score
- A number returned with every check, produced by rules that evaluate the order’s signals together with the shared network state. The score is advisory: the shop decides what to do with it.
- Trail
- The set of traits that appeared together across orders, linked because they co-occurred, not because anyone asserted they belong to one person. A trail is what heat attaches to. Each shop sees a trail under its own opaque alias.