Terms of service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

Elevator Uptime (elevatoruptime.com, “the site”, “we”, “us”) is a free, public platform for reporting and tracking elevator and escalator outages. These terms cover your use of the site, including the alert emails. Our Privacy policy explains how we handle personal information and is part of how you use the site.

The site is run by FIELDBOSS.

Contact: info@elevatoruptime.com. It is the only inbox we run; messages are sorted by the start of the subject line.

2. Accepting these terms

By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.

3. Who may use the site

The site is a general-audience service and is not directed to children. You must be at least 13 years old to submit a report, post, claim or alert signup.

4. What the site does, and what it does not

The site collects rider reports of broken elevators and escalators, displays public records (inspection data, permits, transit-agency outage feeds), and emails alerts to people who ask. Reports are anonymous: no account is needed to report. Posting on a building wall and using the building dashboard need a signed-in email address (magic link only).

We are not an emergency service, a regulator, an inspector, or a building manager. We do not repair elevators and we cannot dispatch anyone. If anyone is trapped or hurt, call local emergency services.

5. Content you submit

“Your content” means reports, notes, photos, still-down and working confirmations, right-of-reply responses, record-correction requests, contractor tips, owner/manager claims, building-wall posts and replies, and bug reports.

What you promise.Your content is yours to share and is true to the best of your knowledge. It does not break the law or anyone’s rights, is not spam, abuse or a joke report, does not include other people’s personal information (names, phone numbers, faces, licence plates) beyond what is needed to describe the outage, and a photo shows the equipment or place you are reporting.

The licence you give us. You keep ownership. You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable licence, for as long as the content is on the site, to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example, resize or re-encode), display, distribute and make your content available, on the site, in our feeds and in our public dataset (section 13), and in our alert emails where described there. You also give us permission to use it to run moderation (below).

What is published.

• A report is published to the public record. The confirmation screen tells you the report is now on the public record.
• A report is tied to a device ID, not to your name or email. The ID is either random and saved in your browser, or computed in your browser by FingerprintJS; it is not published. The public dataset does not include it.
• Notes are limited to 500 characters.
• Resubmitting on the same building from the same device within 30 minutes of your last submission there usually updates your earlier report instead of creating a new one. It creates a new report instead if the earlier report has already been closed, or if your earlier report was for a different kind of unit (elevator versus escalator).
• A report stays open until riders confirm it is working or an administrator closes it. It is never closed for inactivity.

Photos. Photos are shrunk to at most 1200 px and re-encoded to WebP in your browser before upload, which removes location and camera metadata. Files over 5 MB are refused. After upload a classifier decides whether the photo shows the outage. A photo is shown on the site and in the dataset only once the classifier has marked it as showing the outage; until then, and if the classifier says it does not or fails to run, it stays hidden. Only a photo the classifier marks as not showing the outage is sent to a human review queue; if the classifier fails, the photo stays hidden and is not queued.

Moderation. We check text you submit with automated language models before it is published. Text classed as spam or abuse is refused. If the check cannot run, the report is still recorded but the note is held back from public view until a person approves or rejects it. We may also remove or hold content, reject a submission, close a report, or block a device or address, at our discretion, including when it is inaccurate, off topic or against these terms. The providers that receive text and photos for this are listed in our Privacy policy. A test classifier also receives the same text and never changes the outcome.

Building walls and claims.Wall posts need a signed-in email address. Posts by a verified claimant of the building are published straight away only when that kind of post allows the claimant’s role (for example, a modernization post is published straight away only for a verified owner, not a verified property manager); every other post waits for human review. Claims of ownership or management are reviewed by a person and we may refuse or revoke one at any time. You must have the authority you claim.

6. Removing your content

You can ask us to delete it. Email info@elevatoruptime.com with the building and date of your report, or the email address you used. We delete your report, device ID, alert address and other submissions we can match to you, and we answer within 30 days. A deleted report is also removed from the public dataset export and cannot be republished by it.

What deletion does not reach. Copies already downloaded, a copy already pushed to a third-party dataset host, and backups (deleted after 8 weeks).

Reporting content that should come down. If you think content breaks these terms, is inaccurate, shows you or private information, or infringes your rights, email info@elevatoruptime.comwith “Content removal” at the start of the subject line, the page address, and what is wrong. We review it and may remove, hold or leave it.

7. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on the site infringes your copyright, email info@elevatoruptime.comwith “Copyright” at the start of the subject line, a description of the work, the page address and your contact details.

8. Rules for using the site

You agree not to:

• submit false, misleading, malicious or spam reports, or reports about equipment you have no reason to think is broken, or to try to inflate or suppress a building’s record;
• harass, threaten, impersonate or defame anyone, or post personal information about others;
• evade rate limits, the bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile), moderation or a block, for example by rotating devices or addresses;
• scrape the site in a way that burdens it, or ignore robots.txt. Use the daily dataset (section 13) for bulk access;
• probe, attack or test the security of the site, or access admin pages or other people’s alert and dashboard data;
• send alerts or sign up an email address that is not yours;
• use the site for anything unlawful, or in a way that gets us blocked by a provider.

We may suspend or end your access, or block a device, address or email, for any breach of this section.

9. Alert emails

Signing up. You can follow a building or a single elevator or escalator. Before an address is confirmed, the only email it can receive is the confirm email, and the follow starts only when you click the link in it. Opening a link alone does not change your choices. A signup form shows the wording you agree to, and we store that wording, the date, and a protected hash of your IP address as proof of consent.

What we send.Once confirmed, a follow means any update: new rider reports, confirmation by other riders, fixes, reopenings, and posts from the building. Riders’ reports in an alert are labelled as reported by a rider and not confirmed until riders confirm them. Alerts never include the text of a note. We may also send a short “is it working yet?” check-in, a daily or instant digest if you choose one, and messages about your account (confirm, manage link, reconfirm, “not you?”).

How often. To limit noise, we group extra emails into a digest, and send at most 10 alert emails per address in 24 hours; extras roll into the next digest. Alerts are best effort. They can be late, grouped, duplicated, missed or wrong. Transit outages are polled once a day for most agencies and resolution mail for transit is delayed by an hour to avoid flapping. Do not rely on an alert for your safety or to plan around an emergency.

Stopping.Every alert email has a link to manage your follows and an unsubscribe link. “Unsubscribe from everything” stops all alert email and also blocks it through our email provider. If you did not ask to follow, the confirm email has a “Block this address” link, and we keep a protected record of a blocked address so we never email it again.

Law.Our alert email is meant to follow Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation and the US CAN-SPAM Act: you ask for it, every message names us as the sender with our mailing address, and every message has a working unsubscribe.

10. Accuracy of the information

The information on the site is provided “as is”, for general information. In particular:

• Rider reports are unverified. They are what one person told us at one time. Many are never confirmed and some are wrong, out of date or malicious, even with moderation. “Open” can mean an outage that has been fixed but never confirmed as working, because rider reports are never closed for inactivity.
• Public-record data comes from third parties (regulators, cities, transit agencies) and is shown with its source. It can be late, incomplete, wrong or removed by its source, and a record is not a finding that equipment is unsafe or safe. Inspection rows are regulator records, not confirmed outages.
• Contractor and ownership information may be wrong. Contractor information is matched to public records by confidence score and is labelled “verified” or “inferred from permits”. Ownership information is not given a confidence label. Each ownership entry instead shows source badges naming where it came from (for example “ACRIS”, “PLUTO”, “HM Land Registry”, “Staff-verified” or “Verified owner claim”), linked to the evidence when a link exists. There is no label that marks an entry as disputed while a dispute is open. Disputes and corrections: email info@elevatoruptime.comwith “Record correction” at the start of the subject line.
• Uptime and rankings are our calculation from the above and are not an official rating of a building, owner or contractor.

No professional advice. The site is not engineering, safety, legal or accessibility advice. Check with the building, the operator or the authority before you rely on it.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

The site and the alerts are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, availability, non-infringement and uninterrupted or error-free operation, to the fullest extent the law allows.

12. Limit of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we and our providers are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, data, goodwill or use, arising from the site, the alerts, or anyone’s content, even if told it could happen. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us, which is zero, and US$100.

13. Our content, the dataset and third-party sources

The site’s design, text, code and compilation belong to us or our licensors. You may view and use the site for your own purposes.

Open dataset. Every rider report is exported daily as CSV and JSON and published at /data under CC BY-NC 4.0 (attribute “Elevator Uptime (elevatoruptime.com)”, non-commercial). Commercial use needs a separate licence; email info@elevatoruptime.com. The same page publishes inspection and transit rows from a limited set of third-party sources, each with the attribution its own terms require. Those sources are not ours to license, and the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence covers only what we own. The dataset also lists notes and photos where moderation published them, with email addresses removed. A copy is mirrored to Hugging Face under elevatoruptime/elevator-outages.

Our names and marks.Do not use “Elevator Uptime” or our logo in a way that suggests we endorse you.

Third-party links and services. The site links to and uses other services (maps, address search, the transit agencies, building owners’ sites). We do not control them and their terms apply to them.

14. Suspension, ending, and changes to the site

We may change, pause or stop any part of the site or the alerts at any time, and may stop sending alerts without notice. You may stop using the site, and stop alerts at any time by unsubscribing. Sections that by their nature should survive (your promises, the licence for content already published, disclaimers, limits, governing law) survive.

15. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Miami-Dade County, Florida have exclusive jurisdiction.

16. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We will update the version and date at the top; for a material change we will make a notice prominent before it takes effect, and if you follow a building we may email you. Using the site after a change takes effect means you accept it.

17. Everything else

These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the site. If a part is unenforceable the rest stands. Our not enforcing a term is not a waiver. You may not assign the terms; we may.

18. Contact

Elevator Uptime, run by FIELDBOSS, 2875 NE 191st St., Suite 500, Aventura, FL 33180, USA. Email: info@elevatoruptime.com. Privacy requests: the Privacy Officer, at the same address (see the Privacy policy).