Community & legal

Terms, privacy & cookies

A reader's guide to the three legal pages: who sees what, how long things are kept, your data and your account.

The three pages

The site footer: three links reading Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, separated by vertical bars, above the Geronimo Engineering mark.
The three pages are linked from the footer of every page on the site, signed in or not.

Three pages, linked from every footer and from both registration forms, say what this deployment does with what it holds: the Terms of Use (what the service is, what is public, your responsibilities, community content), the Privacy Policy (what is collected, who sees it, how long it is kept, your rights) and the Cookie Policy (the four cookies, all strictly necessary, so there is no consent banner). Creating an account through either registration form records the moment you agreed to the Terms. This page is a reader's guide to them, not a substitute: the policies are the text that counts.

Who sees what, in one table

ThingWho can see it
A private sensor (the default) and its readings, rules, maps and pagesMembers of its group, as far as their permissions reach; a holder of the sensor's read token for the readings.
A sensor marked PublicAnyone, through the public analytics page, the open data API and any map, page or dashboard it is placed on.
A sensor listed on the open mapAnyone, including search engines — name, coordinates, notes, variables, health and a week of readings.
A map, analytics page or dashboard shared by linkAnyone holding the link (and the password, when one is set); shared pages ask search engines not to index them.
A group's public siteAnyone; it lists only the group's publicly shared pages.
Community posts, comments and picturesAnyone on the internet, with your username — the board is a public page and search engines are allowed to index it. Writing needs an account; reading needs nothing.
Alert recipients' addresses and numbersMembers who can edit the rule; never public, never sent to a language model.
Your account details, second-factor and phoneYou and the operators of this deployment.

How long things are kept

Sensor readings, QC decisions and rating curves are the record and are kept until the owner deletes the sensor. Operational records age out on a schedule the privacy policy states: alert delivery records after 180 days, incidents and alert events after two years, assistant conversations and the audit log after a year, model diagnostics after 90 days. Backups are encrypted and replicated to a second server.

Your data and your account

The Data & privacy panel on the profile page. Its text reads "You control your data. Download a copy of everything held about your account, or delete your account and personal data entirely. Download my data returns a JSON file; deletion removes your name, email and second-factor details and cannot be undone. The monitoring records you created stay as an anonymized part of the scientific record, and the security audit log keeps that the change happened." Beneath it a red "Delete my account" disclosure. Above it the Groups list shows Willow Creek Watershed with an owner badge, and above that the Two-step login card.
Data & privacy, on your profile. The panel states in the product what the policy states on paper: what leaves with you, what leaves with your account, and what stays because the record depends on it.

Your profile → Data & privacy has Download my data (a JSON file of everything held about your account) and Delete my account (removes your name, email, phone and second-factor details; your community posts, comments, pictures and votes are deleted with the account, while the monitoring records you created — sensors, rules, QC decisions, notes — stay, re-attributed to an anonymous placeholder, because the group's record depends on them). The guest account can do neither. Questions go to the contact address on the policies.