We meter infrastructure, not people.
Grifom's products record what City infrastructure does — gallons drawn from a hydrant, particulates above a park, kilowatts on a circuit, what tumbled into a recycling hopper, when a sprinkler ran, what an inspector logged at an outfall. Those records belong to the City that deployed us. This page explains what each product captures, where it goes, and what we will never do with it.
Last updated: August 22, 2026
The short version
- Each product records an event about infrastructure — a draw, a reading, a circuit, a cart, a watering day, an inspection. That's the product.
- Those records are the City's data. We process them on the City's behalf and hand them to the systems it already runs.
- No one is tracked. Devices know where they are bolted; the only camera points into a garbage hopper, and the only microphone is the one an inspector deliberately dictates into.
- The City, not Grifom, decides what happens next — a postcard is a courtesy, a reminder is a courtesy, and enforcement is always the City's call.
- We never sell or rent data, and we don't use it for advertising.
- This website sets one cookie — your sign-in session — and runs no analytics or trackers.
What each product collects
Water Meter
Each authorized hydrant draw produces a record: hydrant identifier, device serial, start and end time, volume in gallons, and the contractor account whose credential opened the valve. To authorize a draw we hold what the utility provisions — the contractor company, the account or permit it maps to, and a credential identifier tied to a crew member's device. The NFC handshake is offline and happens on contact; we do not read the contents of the phone, its contacts, photos, or location history. The unit also reports its own health over LoRa: battery and turbine state, valve position, firmware, signal quality, and tamper or impact events.
Air Meter
Each node reports environmental readings — PM1.0, PM2.5, PM10, ozone, temperature, and humidity — stamped with the time and the fixed location of its pole, plus node health (battery, solar charge, signal). There is no personal data in an air reading. Pilot data collected alongside the TCEQ monitor during co-location is used only to validate and tune the sensor corrections.
Energy Meter
Inside a City facility the meter records circuit-level electrical data: current and voltage waveforms sampled on the device, 15-minute energy registers per circuit, load-shed actions and their timing, detected equipment faults, and device health. The data describes buildings and machines, not occupants. Work orders the meter files carry the circuit and equipment name and whatever contact your CMMS already holds for that facility.
Trash Meter
This is the one product that produces an image, so we are specific about it. At the moment the meter recognizes contamination during a dump cycle it saves a thumbnail of the hopper contents — a few kilobytes — together with the GPS coordinates, the time, and the lift-arm event that ties it to a service address. That thumbnail is what appears on the household's postcard. The camera faces into the hopper; it does not record the street, people, vehicles, or continuous video, and recognition runs on the truck rather than in a cloud. During the stealth-mode baseline no postcards are sent. Whether any event ever becomes an enforcement action is decided by the City, not by Grifom.
Water Alarm
Each night the City sends us its water-meter export — service account, address, and interval reads. We use it to detect irrigation running outside that address's assigned watering day and to email the account's contact a courtesy reminder. The reminder carries no fee and no citation, and the export is replaced by the next night's.
Mayvil
Mayvil holds the inspection records that municipal inspectors create in the field: the asset inspected and its location, photos the inspector takes, observations the inspector dictates (transcribed on the device), ordinance citations, findings, and signatures. Records are stored offline on the inspector's device until they sync, and each jurisdiction's data is isolated from every other's. Accounts are issued by the jurisdiction. The app is distributed through Apple's TestFlight, which is governed by Apple's own privacy terms.
People who contact us
If you email hello@grifom.com, we keep your message, your address, and whatever you chose to include so we can answer and follow up. We don't add you to a marketing list off the back of a support request.
This website
This site is private: it requires a sign-in, and after you sign in it sets a single session cookie so you stay signed in. That is the only cookie. It embeds no third-party scripts and runs no analytics or advertising trackers.
Nearly every contact route is a plain mailto: link, so nothing reaches us until you deliberately send an email from your own client. The one form on the site — the Water Alarm test-send — emails a sample resident notice to the address you type, nothing else; it is rate-limited, and the address is not kept beyond the mail log. Our hosting provider processes standard web request data (such as IP address and user agent) to serve pages and protect against abuse, as any web host does.
How we use it
- Authorize, meter, and bill — verify a credential before a valve engages, then turn gallons into a line item that posts to the utility's billing system.
- Measure and report — publish validated air readings to the City's dashboards; feed gap-free circuit data to the City's SECO report; tally diverted tons and avoided CO₂e for grant filings.
- Act on the City's behalf — shed load in an ERCOT 4CP window, file a work order for a failing pump, mail a postcard, send a watering reminder — each within the rules the City set.
- Flag tampering, faults, and loss — impact events, unauthorized attempts, short-cycling motors, blinded lenses, nodes gone quiet.
- Keep hardware alive — diagnose faults, schedule replacements, ship firmware updates.
- Answer support requests — reconcile a disputed reading, correct a schedule match, pull the event behind a postcard.
- Report in aggregate — corridor, street, facility, and program totals for the City's own reporting. Aggregates never identify a household.
What we never do
- Sell, rent, or trade any of it — draw records, readings, thumbnails, meter exports, inspection records, or contact details — to anyone, at any price.
- Advertise. None of this data feeds ad targeting, profiling, or lookalike audiences.
- Track people. Devices know where they are mounted. Nothing follows a contractor's phone, a crew, a resident, or an inspector between sites or off the job.
- Watch or listen. No product has a microphone except Mayvil's dictation, which the inspector starts on purpose. The Trash Meter's camera sees the inside of a hopper and nothing else; there is no video.
- Gate fire flow. The 4.5″ steamer is unmodified and override is mechanical — no record is created, and no authorization is consulted, when a fire crew opens a hydrant.
- Decide enforcement. A postcard and a reminder are courtesies. If a City ever chooses to cite, that is its decision under its ordinances, made by its staff.
How long we keep it
Metering and billing records — hydrant draws and facility energy registers — are kept for as long as the City's own records schedule requires; these are financial and regulatory records, and the period is set in the City agreement, not by us.
Air readings are environmental measurements with no personal content and are kept so the City's trends remain usable year over year.
Hopper thumbnails and nightly meter exports are the records that touch households, so they are kept on the shortest window the program needs: long enough to mail the postcard or reminder, answer a dispute, and build the City's street-level trend map, then deleted or reduced to aggregates on the schedule set in the City agreement.
Inspection records in Mayvil belong to the jurisdiction and follow its schedule. Device telemetry is kept on a short operational window, long enough to diagnose faults and spot tamper patterns. Support email is kept as long as it's useful for the account, then deleted.
When an agreement ends, we return or delete the City's data at its direction, apart from anything we're legally required to keep.
Security
Hardware is built to fail safe. The Water Meter is fail-secure: at rest the nut free-spins and only the electronics can engage the clutch, so a damaged or compromised device withholds water rather than releasing it. The Energy Meter carries its identity in silicon, encrypts from boot to cloud, and only ever dials out — no inbound ports. The Trash Meter runs its recognition on the truck, so no video exists to be intercepted. Mayvil stores inspection data encrypted on the device until it syncs.
Data is encrypted in transit, access is limited to staff who need it to run the service, and tamper events are logged. No system is perfect; if a breach affects your data, we will notify the City and any other parties required by law without undue delay.
Your choices and rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete personal data about you, or to object to certain processing. Texas residents have these rights under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act; other states and countries grant comparable ones.
Residents who received a postcard or a watering reminder: the event behind it is held for your City. Write to the City or to us with the address and date and we'll pull the record, correct a wrong match, or tell you what the thumbnail shows.
Contractors and crew members: your credential is provisioned by the utility, so start with them — they control who is authorized on which hydrants. If it's easier, write to us and we'll route it.
Inspectors and City staff: requests about inspection, draw, facility, or fleet records generally belong to your City as the controller of that data. We will help you fulfil them.
To make a request, email hello@grifom.com. We'll verify who you are before acting, and we will not discriminate against anyone for exercising a privacy right.
Public records
Data held by or on behalf of a city may be subject to public-records law — in Texas, the Public Information Act. If someone requests hydrant draws, air readings, facility energy data, contamination events, or inspection records from your City, the City decides what must be released. That determination is theirs to make, and this policy does not override it.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle data in a way that matters, we'll update this page and move the date at the top. For material changes affecting a deployed City, we notify our contacts there directly rather than relying on you to re-read a web page.
This policy does not describe children's data: Grifom's products are deployed on municipal infrastructure and used by City staff and contractors; none is directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information.
Privacy questions
hello@grifom.comSame inbox as everything else. Write to us about a data request, a records question from your city attorney, a postcard or reminder you want explained, or anything on this page that isn't clear enough.
