Concerns about useage of 3rd party applications

[Risvertasashi]

This may be a silly question because I'm getting conflicting stories in the game about the useage of ACT and Cactbot which I'm pretty sure counts as a 3rd party application which could result in being banned if someone has been suspected and later proven being used, so I really need to know what SE's stance is on Cactbot being used for tracking elite marks. I've tried arguing against a hunt community over whether or not a player suspected of using it to instantly locate and kill elite marks could be reported for cheating or not and all I'm hearing is stuff like this:

"never will happen, since the tool doesnt not interupt game as itself or interfere with server"
"havent heard about anybody who got banned by using radar, you cant ever prove anybody is using radar, SE dont care about cactbot usage at all, nobody got reprimanded since 2.1"
"all those modders who mod ffxivs 3d models, only those who boasted about using them on social media got their temp bans, everybody else still lives on"
"if he shames someone by boasting it himself of using said 3rd party software, then maybe, otherwise nothing will ever happen"

I'm only asking because I strongly suspect someone on our datacenter is using Cactbot to locate elite hunt marks and is deliberately griefing players by instantly killing them on arrival whether he spawned them or not, and if it's a bannable offense to be using it then I want to report him for cheating. Can I really get someone investigated if I reported that I strongly suspected they were using cheats to disrupt other peoples' gameplay?

Sadly, the usual video interview with Yoshida I liked to link for this seems to have been marked private... but it basically goes like this.

The official line from dev teams will be to not use any third party apps/addons/mods/tools with FFXIV, and if you do and they find out about it, they will take action against your account.

In practice, it's a don't ask don't tell policy. Something passive/informational can't be detected without SE installing a scanner on your computer, which they don't want to do, so as long as you never talk about it in game, nothing will ever happen to you.

Now a "bot" program that autonomously sends input to the server can theoretically be detected and get you banned if SE notices certain patterns to the bot's inputs that distinguish it from a player. In practice this seems to be hit and miss - some people on the forums will claim they never get banned, but they do and get removed from pvp or crafting rankings - but probably some get away with it, but to use it at all is a big risk to the user's account. Whereas for a parser/raid callouts/etc, all they have to do is keep their mouth shut.

Still, the absolute safest thing is to not use any at all per the policy. But if you're hoping the silent masses of parser users and so on have a ban coming... Well, the anti-parser crowd has been waiting for that for 8 years and counting.