We strongly recommend that you fully understand data ownership terms before buying an air quality monitor, as some of them can be extremely restrictive. For many companies, the ability to monetize the data that your air quality monitor generates is an inherent part of their business model. Unfortunately, most companies are not transparent about it.
You Own The Data. Period.
We at AirGradient believe that the owner of our air quality monitors should own the data and have full control over it. If you read our terms & conditions, this is the first entry: “YOU own the data from your monitor"
You have full decision-making power over your data. You can share it or keep it private, sell it or delete it, and we at AirGradient have no rights to it.
We Encourage You to Share Your Data
Air quality data has value and can be very helpful to share with others.
It might be so that people in the same location can better protect themselves from hazardous pollution, or it might be because scientists want to better understand global trends in air quality and climate change.
Part of our mission at AirGradient is to raise awareness of the dangers of air pollution by running webinars, working with environmental justice organizations, and providing air quality data from our community members. As a result, we encourage all people who own an AirGradient outdoor monitor to share the data they own, not only with us but also with third parties that have an interest in using the data.
In the AirGradient dashboard, you can individually opt-in to the following data-sharing options:
- Make your data available on the AirGradient Map
- Make your data available on the public endpoint of the AirGradient API
- Share your data with OpenAQ
- Share your data with IQAir
- Share your data with WAQI / AqiCN
Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into these options.
Make your data available on the AirGradient Map
By opting into this, your air quality monitor will become visible on the AirGradient Map and pages that might embed our map into their website as an iFrame.
Please note that the data in the AirGradient map can be easily scraped by other systems. So as soon as you publish your data, it could be taken from there by others and distributed.
Make your data available on the public endpoints of the AirGradient API
You can also opt-in to making your data available in our public API endpoints. This way, other systems can easily access the data and, for example, integrate it into their own map. We have no control over who uses the data, and it is freely accessible (no registration or token is required). However, because we believe in open data, we want to make it as easily available as possible (of course, only with data from people who opted in).
Share your data with OpenAQ
OpenAQ is a non-profit organization that aims to aggregate and harmonize open air quality data from across the globe onto an open-source, open-access data platform so that anyone concerned about air quality has unfettered access.
We are an official partner of OpenAQ and strongly support their mission, as well as share the same ethos around open data.
Share your data with IQAir
IQAir is a commercial manufacturer of air purifiers and air quality monitors. They also run a popular air quality map. It’s important to point out that IQAir monetizes the air quality data it collects. So if you decide to share your data with IQAir, it will be monetized by them.
We at AirGradient do not receive any financial or other benefits from this data sharing. We do not believe it’s right to monetize air quality data and believe it should be a public good.
Some of you might wonder why we have an integration option with IQAir?
Community members asked us to see their data on the IQAir map, and thus, we want to support them. Since the data belongs to the monitor’s owner and they can opt in, we believe it’s up to the user to decide if they want to support the IQAir business model or not.
Being open source and open-data also means we should be non-discriminatory.
Share your data with WAQI
The World’s Air Pollution (WAQI) or AQIcn map was one of the first maps showing data from air quality monitors around the world. WAQI has some great visualizations about long term trends of air quality.
WAQI primarily uses advertisements on its website for their business model and also sells their own air quality monitors under the GAIA brand.
Sensor Community, and others
We have reached out to other data aggregators like Sensor.community because some of our community members want to share their data with them. This work is ongoing (see this forum post).
We will most likely provide more integrations in the future with various third parties. Our aim is to help share air quality data as much as possible because our mission is to make an impact. However, it is up to the monitor owner to decide exactly how they want their data to be distributed.