Terms of Use

Last updated 28 August 2026

These terms govern your use of the Geronimo IoT platform (“the Service”) and its public pages, operated by Geronimo Engineering (“we”, “us”). By using the Service you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. The Service

The Service collects, stores, checks and displays environmental sensor data — water level, flow, temperature, rainfall, air quality and similar — and sends alerts when rules you configure are met. Parts of it are public (the landing page, the open map and analytics, sensors their owners have made public); the rest requires an account.

2. Accounts

• Accounts are created by invitation from an existing member or operator. You must give accurate details and keep them current.
• You are responsible for everything done under your account. Keep your password private, enable a second factor when offered, and tell us promptly if you believe your account has been used without your permission.
• The shared guest account is read-only and is for looking around. Do not rely on it for anything you need to keep.
• You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account.

3. Your sensors and your data

• You own the data your sensors produce. By uploading it you grant us the right to store, process, check, display and back it up in order to provide the Service, including to the other members of the groups you place it in.
• Public is public. Marking a sensor public, listing it on the open map, sharing a map, dashboard or analytics page by link, or publishing a group site makes that data available to anyone, including through the open data API, and it may be copied or cached by others. You can withdraw the setting at any time, but we cannot recall copies already taken.
• Readings, quality-control decisions and rating curves are treated as a permanent scientific record and are not automatically deleted. Corrections are kept alongside originals rather than overwriting them.
• You are responsible for having the right to publish any data, coordinates or images you upload, including any obligation to a landowner, agency or partner.

4. Community content

The Community board and other places where you can write text or upload pictures are for members to share notes and builds. You keep ownership of what you post and grant us a licence to display it within the Service. You must not post content that is unlawful, infringes someone else's rights, contains personal data about others without their consent, or contains malware or credentials. We may remove content or suspend accounts that break these rules. Image metadata (location, camera details) is removed from uploads.

5. Acceptable use

You must not: attempt to access accounts, groups or data you have not been granted; probe, scan or overload the Service or its API beyond published limits; interfere with alert delivery; upload readings you know to be false as if they were measurements; or use the Service to send unsolicited messages.

6. What our alerting is

We are civil engineers and we have been building monitoring and alerting systems for five years. The Service is an alarm system and it is engineered as one.

Readings are quality-controlled on the way in against the QARTOD test suite — gross range, spike, flat line, moving band, rate of change and multivariate — and every reading carries the flag it was given and the test that set it. The platform runs on redundant hosts with streaming replication and automatic failover. The evaluation pass is itself watched: if it stops running, that raises an alarm, because a silent alerting system is the failure that matters most. Every notification is recorded with its destination and its outcome, deduplicated so one condition cannot page you twice, and retried under a bounded budget. Changes to rules, thresholds and quality-control verdicts are written to an audit trail.

What it is not a substitute for. The Service is not a designated warning system of record. That term means something specific — the National Weather Service, a dam operator’s own notification system, a county emergency alerting authority — and it carries a statutory designation we do not hold. For decisions affecting life, safety or property, keep an independent means of observation alongside it.

The delivery chain. An alert travels from your sensor, through your rules, across third-party networks and a message carrier before it reaches you, and parts of that chain are outside any vendor’s control. Sensors fail. Carriers delay and drop messages. Statistical and language-model rules are wrong some of the time. We instrument every one of those links and publish what we measure rather than assume it worked — that is the difference between an alarm system and a notification feature — but nobody can guarantee that chain end to end, and you should be wary of anyone who says they can.

7. Availability and changes

We aim for high availability but the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of it, and may perform maintenance without notice. We will try to give notice of changes that affect your data.

8. Intellectual property

Geronimo IoT is not open source. The platform it is built on is open source under the licence published with that platform's source code; Geronimo IoT itself, and the Geronimo Engineering and Geronimo IoT names and marks, are ours. Nothing in these terms transfers any rights in the software or marks to you beyond what the licence and these terms say.

9. Privacy

How we handle personal data is described in the Privacy Policy, and the small number of cookies we use in the Cookie Policy. Both are part of these terms.

10. Disclaimer and liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and accuracy of data, and we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for any loss arising from reliance on data or alerts, from a sensor or network failure, or from unauthorised access resulting from your own credentials being compromised. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the claim, or US$100 if you paid nothing.

11. Termination

You may delete your account from your profile page at any time; the Privacy Policy explains what is removed and what is kept. We may suspend or close accounts that break these terms or that create a security risk, and will tell you why where we reasonably can.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute will be brought in the courts located there.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the current version. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept the new terms; for material changes we will notify account holders by email or a notice in the Service.

14. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected].