Infrared Explorer Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of Infrared Explorer — the mobile app for Android and iOS (shown on your device as “IR Explorer”) and the website at ie.intofuture.org (together, the “Service”) — operated by Institute for Future Intelligence, Inc. (“IFI”, “we”, “us”), a non-profit educational research organization in Massachusetts, USA. By using the Service you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. What the Service is, and is not

Infrared Explorer is a scientific instrument for thermal imaging with a FLIR ONE camera attached to your phone, and a citizen-science tool for capturing and sharing thermal street views. It is intended for science education, scientific exploration, and raising awareness of energy efficiency.

It is not a medical device. Do not use it to measure body temperature or for any medical, health, or veterinary purpose. Temperature readings depend on the camera, its calibration and warm-up, the emissivity of surfaces, distance, and ambient conditions; they are estimates for learning and exploration and must not be relied on for safety-critical, regulatory, commercial, or professional decisions without independent verification.

2. Camera hardware and FLIR software

The app requires a compatible thermal camera from Teledyne FLIR (FLIR ONE series). We do not sell, supply, or support the camera hardware. The app contains camera software provided by Teledyne FLIR under license; your use of the camera and its software is also subject to Teledyne FLIR’s own terms. Without a camera the app can still be used to browse, play back, and analyze existing recordings.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You may use the app without an account. To upload content, join class activities, or use the website’s signed-in features, you must create an account by signing in with Google or, on iOS, with Apple. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account, or older where your jurisdiction requires. Users between 13 and the age of majority must use the Service under the supervision of a parent, guardian, teacher, or institution that agrees to these Terms on their behalf. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your sign-in credentials secure. Your use of Google’s or Apple’s sign-in is also subject to their terms.

4. Your content

You keep ownership of the recordings, street views, photos, descriptions, comments, annotations, and other material you create or upload (“Your Content”). By uploading Your Content you grant IFI a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, process, reproduce, display, and transmit it in order to operate, maintain, secure, and improve the Service, to display it to the audience you chose, and to use it in aggregate or de-identified form for education research and reporting. This license ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies other users have lawfully made under the sharing rules below and for backups that cycle out in the normal course.

You understand and agree that:

• a street view you upload is public on the shared Infrared Street View map, together with its precise location, your display name, and its capture time. You can make it private again, or delete it, in the app under Account › Street View › My street views. It may also be hidden automatically if another user reports it, and removed by us if the report turns out to be right — see section 5;
• a recording you upload is link only by default — anyone with the link can open it — and you may make it private or public on the website;
• other users may copy, clip, and annotate experiments that are public or link-only, creating their own experiments that reference the same underlying recording; and
• IFI may feature public content on the website and in its educational and outreach materials, with the author name shown as you set it.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• upload or share content that is unlawful, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, or that infringes another person’s intellectual-property or privacy rights;
• capture or publish thermal images or street views of people, private property, or interiors in ways that violate the law or the reasonable privacy expectations of the people involved; when in doubt, obtain permission;
• use the Service to identify, track, surveil, or profile individuals;
• use the Service for medical, health, or veterinary assessment of people or animals;
• post comments or class content that harass, threaten, or solicit personal information from others, particularly minors;
• attempt to bypass authentication, visibility settings, rate limits, or other technical controls, or to access content or accounts that are not yours;
• upload malware, or scrape, resell, or rebrand the Service except as expressly permitted by law.

There is no tolerance for objectionable content or for abusive users. The Infrared Street View map is published by the people who use it, with no review before anything appears on it, so what keeps it usable is that anyone looking at it can act:

• Report it. In the app, open a street view and choose Report street view or Report this author from the ⋮ menu. On the website, the same menu is in the viewer’s bar. In the app, an experiment someone else shared has Report experiment, and where a person (not IFI) published it Report author, in the menu on its card: tap ⋮, or press and hold a featured or ranked card in the Showcase. Inside a class, the same two rows are on the teacher’s materials and on classmates’ work in the class showcase (a teacher looking at a submission gets Report experiment and Report student), each person on the roster has Report, and a student finds Report this class in the class’s own ⋮ menu. You do not need an account to report something, except inside a class, which only its signed-in members can see. You can also write to xiaotong@intofuture.org.
• A report acts immediately. A report from an established account takes the street view off the map, or the experiment off the site and into its owner’s trash, at once, before any of us has looked at it; a street view’s image files also stop being publicly reachable.
• Block the person. Hide this author, in the same menu on a street view or on an experiment card outside a class, removes everything that author has published from what the app shows you, permanently and without telling them: it leaves your map and the experiment lists, and inside a class their work no longer opens. Undo it in the app under Account › Street View › Blocked authors, or under “Hidden authors” on the website’s map.
• We act within 24 hours. We look at every report we receive, and where a violation is confirmed we remove the content and bar the account that posted it from uploading anything further. While a report you filed is still open, reporting the same thing again is kept as an addition to that report rather than counted as a new one; after ten additions, or if you repeat word for word what you said last time, it is not stored, and you should write to xiaotong@intofuture.org.
• If we got it wrong — your street view was hidden or removed and it should not have been — write to xiaotong@intofuture.org quoting its title, and we will put it back if the report was unfounded.

Reporting is not a voting system: reports that turn out to be unfounded stop carrying weight, and using the report button to silence someone is itself a violation of these Terms.

We may remove content, restrict features, or suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, and may report unlawful activity to the authorities.

6. Classroom features

Teachers who create a class are responsible for the class they run: for sharing the class number and password only with their students, for the assignments and materials they post, and for obtaining any consent their school or district requires before enrolling students. Class members can see one another’s names and email addresses on the roster, as described in the Privacy Policy. Deleting a teacher’s account deletes the teacher’s classes and everything inside them; students’ own experiments are not affected.

Anyone in a class can report what they see in it, and the people in it, to IFI from inside the app, as described in section 5; a student can also report the teacher, or the class as a whole. A report comes to us, not to the teacher, and we do not tell the person reported who made it. Reporting something in a class never hides it from the class — if you report a classmate’s work you stop seeing it yourself, and the class does not. Otherwise section 5 applies to class content as it does everywhere else.

7. IFI content and open-source components

The Service, including the Infrared Explorer name and logo, the software we wrote, the bundled lessons and sample videos, and the design of the app and website, is owned by IFI or its licensors and protected by intellectual-property law. We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service for the purposes contemplated by these Terms. The Service includes third-party and open-source components, including Teledyne FLIR’s camera software, which are licensed under their own terms.

8. Third-party services

The Service relies on third-party platforms — including Google Firebase, Google and Apple sign-in, Google Maps Platform, OpenStreetMap and Esri map services, and, for the app’s AI lab reports and the website’s AI analysis tools, third-party AI providers — as described in the Privacy Policy. Your use of those services through Infrared Explorer is also subject to their terms. We are not responsible for their availability or conduct.

9. AI-generated content

The app’s AI lab reports and the website’s AI analysis tools produce draft reports and answers generated by third-party AI models. Generated content may be inaccurate or incomplete, and you are responsible for evaluating it before relying on it. We make no representation that AI output is original or free of third-party rights. The AI features may be subject to usage limits, which we set and may change at any time.

AI output is subject to the same limits as the rest of the Service. It is not a medical assessment, and you must not use it to judge anyone’s body temperature or to make any medical, health, or veterinary decision about people or animals (see sections 1 and 5).

If an AI lab report is inappropriate, offensive, or misleading, you can flag it in the app from the report’s ⋮ menu (Report this report) while signed in. We may remove AI-generated content from an experiment, and may suspend an account’s access to the AI features, in addition to the measures described in section 5.

10. Funding acknowledgment

Development of Infrared Explorer is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 2054079 and 2329563. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the Service are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, OR UNINTERRUPTED OPERATION. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT TEMPERATURE READINGS, MEASUREMENTS, ANALYSES, OR AI-GENERATED CONTENT ARE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR SUITABLE FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

12. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IFI AND ITS DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, AND AGENTS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, REVENUE, OR PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE OR OF ANY CAMERA HARDWARE WITH IT. OUR AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM RELATING TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (US$100). SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW CERTAIN LIMITATIONS; THOSE LIMITATIONS APPLY TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

13. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless IFI from any claim arising out of Your Content, your violation of these Terms, or your misuse of the Service.

14. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account as described in the Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate your access at any time, with or without notice, for violation of these Terms or for operational reasons. Sections that by their nature should survive (ownership and licenses, disclaimers, limitations, indemnification, governing law) survive termination.

15. Changes

We may modify the Service and these Terms. Material changes will be reflected by updating the “Last updated” date above and, where practical, by a notice in the app or on the website. Continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

16. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Massachusetts.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms: xiaotong@intofuture.org
Institute for Future Intelligence, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts, USA
Privacy Policy: ie.intofuture.org/privacy