GIDS Service Terms and Privacy Notice

1. Acceptance and Scope

These Service Terms and Privacy Notice govern access to and use of GIDS, including the public website, disease and country pages, generated reports, charts, downloadable or machine-readable data, and subscription-related services.

By browsing the website, using published data, submitting a subscription form, or otherwise interacting with GIDS, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service or submit subscription information.

2. Service Purpose

GIDS is a Global Infectious Disease Surveillance project built to make official infectious disease surveillance data easier to find, compare, visualize, and monitor across jurisdictions.

The service may include automated data collection, parsing, disease-name normalization, public-health source attribution, AI-assisted bilingual summaries, report generation, alert or digest subscriptions, and open-source project materials.

GIDS is provided for research, education, journalism, open-data exploration, and public-interest monitoring. It is not a substitute for official public health systems, clinical judgment, professional epidemiological review, or emergency communications.

3. Not-for-Profit Nature and Commercial Use Restrictions

The public GIDS website and subscription service are operated on a not-for-profit, public-interest, research-oriented basis. Unless GIDS expressly states otherwise, access to the public website and public subscription features is provided without charge.

This statement describes the operating purpose of the public service. It does not represent that GIDS is a registered charity, tax-exempt organization, foundation, or other regulated non-profit legal entity unless a separate official notice expressly says so.

Without prior written authorization from GIDS, you may not use the GIDS website, public data views, generated reports, charts, summaries, subscription system, name, logos, or branding for commercial products or services, resale, paid monitoring, proprietary datasets, advertising, lead generation, model training, automated commercial scraping, or any other revenue-generating activity.

Permitted non-commercial uses include personal learning, academic citation, classroom use, public-interest journalism, non-commercial research, and internal evaluation, provided that you preserve attribution, do not misrepresent the data, and comply with source-specific terms.

Commercial authorization must be explicit and in writing. Silence, lack of technical blocking, public availability, repository visibility, or receipt of subscription emails does not grant commercial permission.

This commercial-use restriction applies to the public service and GIDS-created content. It does not override any separate open-source software license published in the project repository; code reuse is governed by the repository license, while third-party source data remains governed by the original providers' terms.

4. Informational Use Only

GIDS content does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, treatment advice, legal advice, policy instruction, travel advice, or an official public health directive.

For personal medical questions, consult qualified healthcare professionals. For official case counts, reporting definitions, outbreaks, travel restrictions, public-health measures, or emergencies, consult the relevant government or health authority directly.

Do not use GIDS as the sole basis for clinical decisions, emergency response, procurement, legal compliance, investment, insurance, employment, school closure, border control, or other high-impact decisions.

5. Data Sources and Methodology

GIDS aggregates and republishes derived views of public infectious disease information from official health authorities, open-data portals, public dashboards, reports, APIs, and other source materials identified on the website.

The project normalizes names, countries, time periods, cases, deaths, and related fields into a shared data model. This improves comparability but may also introduce mapping assumptions, aggregation choices, or temporary inconsistencies.

Source data may be delayed, corrected, withdrawn, preliminary, incomplete, revised, or subject to different case definitions. GIDS may update records when source materials change, but it cannot guarantee real-time synchronization or complete historical correction.

6. AI-Assisted Reports and Automated Processing

Some summaries, insights, translations, labels, or reports may be generated or assisted by automated systems, including language models, based on database-backed surveillance records and source metadata.

AI-assisted content may contain omissions, outdated interpretations, translation issues, unsupported inferences, or reasoning errors. Users should verify important statements against cited sources and official publications.

GIDS may use review workflows and quality checks, but publication does not mean every automated statement has been independently reviewed by a licensed physician, attorney, public-health authority, or regulator.

7. Subscriptions and Email Communications

When you submit a subscription request, GIDS records your email address, selected lists, country and disease preferences, language, delivery frequency, timezone, source page, confirmation status, and related delivery metadata needed to provide the requested updates.

Subscriptions may require email confirmation before activation. Confirmation messages, digests, reports, alerts, resubmission notices, or service messages may be sent by GIDS Alerts or another sender published by GIDS.

Every subscription delivery is intended to include an unsubscribe or preference-control mechanism where technically available and legally required. You may stop future subscription emails by using the signed unsubscribe link or the contact channel published by GIDS.

Subscription emails should accurately identify the sender and should not use materially deceptive subject lines or routing information. Where a message is promotional or otherwise requires additional disclosures, GIDS should include the legally required sender, contact, and opt-out information.

Email delivery is not guaranteed. Messages may be delayed, filtered, blocked, duplicated, or fail because of provider limits, recipient settings, security checks, or third-party infrastructure.

8. User Responsibilities

You are responsible for evaluating whether GIDS content is suitable for your use case, confirming information against primary sources, and complying with laws, professional duties, institutional review requirements, and source-specific terms that apply to your use.

You must not submit another person's email address without authorization, interfere with the service, bypass security controls, misrepresent GIDS output as an official government publication, remove source attribution, or use the service to send spam, malware, deceptive content, or unlawful material.

Automated access, scraping, mirroring, or bulk download should respect robots directives, published API guidance, rate limits, cache headers, source terms, and reasonable load constraints.

9. Intellectual Property, Attribution, and Reuse

The GIDS software project, website design, generated views, documentation, and original text are protected by applicable intellectual property laws and any license published in the project repository.

Public health source data remains subject to the rights, licenses, disclaimers, and attribution requirements of the original source authorities or data providers. GIDS does not claim ownership of third-party source materials.

When reusing GIDS-derived datasets, charts, or reports, preserve source attribution, cite GIDS and the relevant primary sources, identify the retrieval or build date, and avoid implying endorsement by GIDS or any health authority.

You may not use GIDS names, logos, trade dress, screenshots, reports, charts, or data views in a way that suggests sponsorship, certification, partnership, official approval, or public-health authority status without express written permission.

10. Privacy Notice

GIDS collects only the personal information reasonably needed to provide subscriptions, maintain security, diagnose errors, prevent abuse, record consent and audit events, and operate the website.

Subscription records may include email address, hashed email lookup values, preferences, locale, timezone, confirmation and unsubscribe tokens, delivery status, recipient domain, technical logs, user agent, and hashed or otherwise reduced IP metadata.

GIDS does not sell subscriber email addresses and does not use subscription addresses for targeted advertising. Service providers such as hosting, database, security, email, analytics, or repository platforms may process information only as needed to support the service.

Data may be processed in countries other than where you live. GIDS applies reasonable technical and organizational safeguards, but no internet service can guarantee absolute security.

Subscription data is generally retained while your subscription is active and for a reasonable period afterward for audit, security, suppression-list, backup, legal, or operational purposes. Aggregated, de-identified, or security logs may be retained longer where appropriate.

Depending on your location, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, export, object to processing, withdraw consent, or lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Use the published contact channel to make a privacy request.

Where consent is used as the basis for subscription emails, withdrawing consent will stop future subscription delivery after the request is processed, but it does not affect processing already completed or information retained for lawful security, audit, suppression, or legal purposes.

11. Local Storage, Cookies, and Security Controls

The website may use local storage or similar browser features to remember language and theme preferences. These preferences are stored in your browser and can be cleared through browser settings.

GIDS may use cookies, anti-abuse tokens, rate-limit signals, security headers, email verification links, or third-party security services to protect the subscription system and public website.

The current public website is not designed around targeted advertising or behavioral ad tracking. If that changes, GIDS should update this notice before using subscription information for materially different purposes.

12. Children and Minors

GIDS is intended for researchers, students, journalists, public-health practitioners, developers, and general readers interested in surveillance data. It is not directed to children under 13 or to children below the minimum digital-consent age in their jurisdiction.

Minors should use GIDS only with permission and supervision from a parent, guardian, teacher, or other responsible adult. Do not submit personal information for a child unless you are authorized to do so.

If GIDS learns that it has collected subscription personal information from a child where parental consent or another lawful basis is required but not available, it may delete or disable the relevant subscription information.

13. Third-Party Services and Links

GIDS may link to official health authorities, source portals, GitHub, infrastructure providers, email providers, analytics tools, or other third-party services. These services are governed by their own terms and privacy practices.

GIDS is not responsible for the availability, accuracy, security, or policies of third-party websites or services. Links are provided for source transparency and convenience, not endorsement.

14. Availability, Maintenance, and Changes

GIDS may add, change, suspend, restrict, or discontinue features, countries, diseases, reports, subscription lists, datasets, or access methods at any time, including for maintenance, data-quality review, abuse prevention, legal compliance, cost control, or project priorities.

The service may be unavailable during rebuilds, deployments, source outages, security checks, infrastructure incidents, or upstream provider disruptions.

15. Disclaimers

GIDS is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, GIDS disclaims warranties of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, uninterrupted availability, or error-free operation.

GIDS does not warrant that published data reflects the latest official situation, that automated mappings are correct, that generated reports are complete, or that subscription alerts will arrive before a relevant public-health event changes.

16. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, GIDS, its maintainers, contributors, infrastructure providers, and related project participants will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, punitive, or reliance-based damages arising from use of or inability to use the service.

This includes, without limitation, losses related to medical, public-health, operational, business, academic, regulatory, travel, procurement, financial, or reputational decisions made using GIDS content.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable law.

17. Suspension and Enforcement

GIDS may block, rate-limit, suspend, remove, or refuse access, subscriptions, or automated requests that appear abusive, unlawful, security-sensitive, privacy-invasive, misleading, or inconsistent with these terms.

If you believe access was restricted in error, use the published contact channel and provide enough context for review.

Unauthorized commercial use may result in termination of access, withdrawal of permission, removal requests, attribution correction requests, suspension of subscriptions, and any other remedies available under applicable law.

18. Changes to These Terms

GIDS may update these terms as the project, data sources, subscription system, privacy practices, or applicable requirements evolve. The "Last updated" date indicates the latest published version.

Material changes may be announced on the website, repository, or subscription communications where practical. Continued use after an update means you accept the updated terms.

If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue to apply to the fullest extent permitted by law. Failure to enforce a provision does not waive the right to enforce it later.

19. Contact and Requests

For data-quality issues, source corrections, subscription problems, privacy requests, security concerns, or legal notices, use the project issue tracker or another contact channel published by GIDS.

When reporting data-quality or safety issues, include the page URL, source URL if available, disease or country, date range, a concise description, and any supporting evidence that helps reproduce the issue.

Project Links