Terms of Service

Independent and not official

Georgia Civic Data is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the State of Georgia, the Georgia General Assembly, the Georgia courts, the Georgia Department of Education, or any government agency or school district. We gather public information and make it easier to use. Official sources remain the authority; check them before you rely on anything for a decision that matters.

Free to use, no accounts

The service is free and needs no account or sign-in. We may change, limit, or stop any part of it at any time, for example to fix a problem, to control costs, or because a source changes.

Accuracy and AI

We work to keep the information accurate and current, but it can contain errors, gaps, or delays, and sources can change after we collect them. Answers written by AI can be wrong even when they are grounded in the source material. Each answer links or cites its source where it can; please check the source.

Nothing on Georgia Civic Data is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Acceptable use

Please use the service in good faith. Do not:

• attempt to disrupt, overload, or gain unauthorized access to the service or the systems behind it;
• get around rate limits or other technical limits, or use many sources to multiply your request volume;
• use the service to break the law or to harass, defame, or harm anyone;
• present our content as official government material, or as made or endorsed by someone it was not;
• enter other people's personal information into a chat or tool.

We may block traffic that harms the service or other users.

The MCP connector and your AI assistant

The MCP connector lets an AI assistant you choose, such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, read Georgia Civic Data's public information. It is read-only. Your assistant is run by its own provider under that provider's terms and privacy policy, not ours. We do not receive your conversation with your assistant, and we are not responsible for what the assistant says or does with the information it retrieves.

Content and licenses

Our data and documentation (the cleaned datasets, their data contracts, our documentation, and the data stories) are licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt them for any purpose, including commercial use, if you credit “Georgia Civic Data (georgiacivicdata.org)” and the original source, and say if you changed the data. The same terms apply however you get the data: Data Explorer, Data Talk, the API, or the MCP connector.

The license covers our own work: cleaning, standardizing, and compiling the data, and documenting it. The source data stays under its original publisher's terms, which our license does not change; every dataset names its source. See how to credit us.

Links to other sites

We link to official sources and other sites. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

No warranty

The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, and availability, to the fullest extent the law allows.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Georgia Civic Data will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, or opportunity, arising from your use of the service or your reliance on its content. Because the service is free, our total liability for any claim is limited to zero dollars, where the law allows that limit.

Privacy

Our privacy policy explains what we collect and how long we keep it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms: shane@georgiacivicdata.org. For help using the service, see Support.