Website Terms of Service
Welcome to the Maryland Community Compass. Please read these terms, conditions, and notices carefully.
Last Updated: 08/07/2026
Welcome to the Maryland Community Compass. This Maryland Community Compass Terms of Service (“Website Terms”) is a legal agreement between you and the State of Maryland (the “State, “we”, “us”). These Website Terms govern your access and use of the Maryland Community Compass website located at https://compass.maryland.gov and the Maryland Community Compass Model Context Protocol (“MCP”) server described in Section 9 (together, the “Website”).
You acknowledge and agree that by accessing or in any way using this Website, including by connecting to the MCP server, you are indicating that you have read and understand How This Site Works, as well as these Website Terms, and agree to be bound by the terms, conditions, and notices set forth herein (collectively, the “Agreement”). If you do not agree to the Website Terms, then you may not access or use the Website.
You are responsible for regularly reviewing this page for updates to these terms, which is detailed further below in Section 3.
1. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability
Please read this section carefully. The information provided through this Website is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or professional guidance.
THIS WEBSITE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY AI FEATURES OR OUTPUTS (BOTH DEFINED IN SECTION 5), IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” AND TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. THE STATE MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ABOUT THE COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR RELIABILITY OF THE INFORMATION OR ITS SUITABILITY FOR OR APPLICABILITY TO YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES. WE MAKE NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY THAT THE WEBSITE WILL BE AVAILABLE ON AN UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE BASIS, OR WILL BE ACCURATE RELIABLE, FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL CODE, COMPLETE, LEGAL OR SAFE. INFORMATION MAY BECOME OUTDATED AND LAWS AND REGULATIONS VARY BY JURISDICTION. YOU ASSUME ALL RISK ASSOCIATED WITH THE USE OF THIS INFORMATION AND ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR EVALUATING WHETHER IT IS APPLICABLE TO YOUR SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR VERIFYING ANY INFORMATION BEFORE RELYING ON IT. YOU ASSUME ALL RISK ASSOCIATED WITH THE USE OF THIS INFORMATION AND SHOULD SEEK APPROPRIATE LEGAL ADVICE OR PROFESSIONAL GUIDANCE BEFORE ACTING OR REFRAINING FROM ACTING BASED ON THE INFORMATION PROVIDED. WITH REGARD TO ANY AI FEATURES OR OUTPUTS, YOUR USE OF AI FEATURES AND OUTPUTS IS AT YOUR OWN RISK, AND YOU SHOULD NOT RELY ON THEM FOR ANY PURPOSE, INCLUDING TO MAKE DECISIONS OR FOR PROFESSIONAL, MEDICAL, LEGAL, FINANCIAL, EDUCATIONAL OR OTHER ADVICE. OUTPUTS ARE NOT THE STATE’S REPRESENTATIONS. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL LIABILITY FOR ANY LOSS, DAMAGE, OR INJURY RESULTING FROM ANY RELIANCE ON INFORMATION PROVIDED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES.2. Third-Party Sites and Services
This Website may contain hyperlinks to websites operated by parties other than the State. Such hyperlinks are provided for your reference only. The State does not control such websites and is not responsible for their contents or the privacy or other practices of such websites.
Further, it is up to you to take precautions to ensure that whatever links you select or software you download (whether from this or any other website) is free of such items as viruses, defects, and other items of a destructive nature. The State’s inclusion of hyperlinks to such websites does not imply any endorsement or recommendation of the material on such third-party websites or apps or any association with their operators.
In some cases, you may be asked by a third-party website to create a profile or otherwise input data, including personal identifying information. This is purely optional, and you are responsible for deciding if you will do so. You should read the terms and conditions and privacy policy of the third-party websites and apps that you visit, as they have rules and permissions about how they use your information that may differ from resources provided by the State. We encourage you to review these third party websites and apps, and to use them at your own risk.
3. Modifications to the Agreement
The State may change, add or delete the terms and conditions of the Agreement or any portion thereof from time to time in its sole discretion, such as for legal, general regulatory and technical purposes, changes in the services provided, or changes to the nature or layout of services.
You are responsible for regularly reviewing this page and the How This Site Works page for updates to the Agreement.
Your continued use of the Website following an update to the Website Terms or the How This Site Works page will constitute your acceptance of the updated Agreement.
4. Jurisdiction and Governing Law
This Website is owned and controlled by the State. The Agreement and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with it or its subject matter or formation shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Maryland.
You hereby consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of courts in Maryland and stipulate to the fairness and convenience of proceedings in such courts for all disputes, both contractual and non-contractual, arising out of or relating to the use of the services by you or any third party.
You agree that all claims you may have against the State arising from or relating to the services must be heard and resolved in a court of competent subject matter jurisdiction located in Maryland.
5. AI Features
This Website uses generative artificial intelligence, specifically large language models (“AI Features”), to analyze public planning documents, data sets, and user-supplied inputs (collectively, “Inputs”) and produce summaries, extracts, recommendations, and answers displayed to you (“Outputs”). AI Features on this Website fall into two categories:
- Pre-generated Outputs — summaries and extracts produced from public planning documents and third-party data sources in advance of publication (for example, community-plan quote extraction, funding-program descriptions).
- Interactive Outputs — Outputs produced in real time in response to your queries. This includes “Guide Me” (a one-shot recommender that suggests which parts of the Website may help with your ask) and “Site Insights” (a multi-turn assistant that answers questions about a specific Maryland parcel).
Although we integrate certain safeguards into AI Features — including grounding AI responses in source data, reviewing pre-generated content where feasible, conducting randomized quality audits, redacting personally identifying information from long-term storage, and using prompt-level instructions that limit Interactive Outputs to informational content sourced from vetted data providers — Outputs may nonetheless be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, outdated, offensive, objectionable, inappropriate, infringing, unsuitable, unlawful, unfit for particular purposes, or the same or similar to content generated for other users of the Website. AI systems can and do produce fabricated or “hallucinated” content that appears authoritative. You should verify any material fact, program detail, deadline, or eligibility criterion against the original source before acting on it. Nothing contained in or produced by the AI Feature creates an attorney-client, advisor-client, or other fiduciary or professional relationship between you and the State.
Outputs may also contain content inconsistent with the State’s view, and the State does not endorse any content included in any Outputs.
If an Output references a third party, individual, product, or service, it does not constitute or imply an endorsement of, or affiliation with the State or this Website.
Interactive Outputs are prohibited by their system instructions from rendering subjective judgments about whether a project is advisable, risky, worthwhile, or likely to succeed. If you request an assessment or opinion of this kind, the assistant will decline and refer you to a qualified professional. You should not interpret the assistant’s refusal or lack of a verdict as an endorsement or discouragement of any course of action.
The State reserves the right to modify, suspend, throttle, or discontinue any AI Feature at any time without prior notice or liability.
By submitting Inputs to the AI Features, you represent and warrant that you hold all necessary rights and permissions to submit such content and that your entry does not violate third-party intellectual property or privacy rights.
You should not paste sensitive personal information (e.g., Social Security numbers, financial-account numbers, medical information, or similar) into any AI Feature. Automated redaction of personally identifying information is applied before long-term storage but cannot be guaranteed to remove every identifier a user might submit.
6. Third-Party Data Sources
The Website aggregates and displays data and content from federal, state, county, municipal, non-profit, and private third-party sources. The State does not warrant the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or fitness for any particular purpose of any third-party data source, and the State disclaims all liability arising from reliance on such data. Third-party data providers retain their own terms of use, and you are responsible for reviewing and complying with those terms where applicable.
For the current list of data sources the Website relies on and the methodologies applied to them, see the Methodology page. Data sources may be added, removed, or updated at any time in the State’s sole discretion without prior notice.
7. Service Availability and Operational Limits
To protect the availability of the Website for all users, to steward taxpayer-funded infrastructure, and to prevent misuse of AI Features, the State applies operational limits including per-session and per-network-address rate limits on AI queries, session-length limits on chat transcripts, timeouts on individual requests, and automated detection of abusive traffic patterns. These limits are technical safeguards intended to keep the Website functioning for legitimate users and are not intended to restrict any person’s access to public information otherwise available through Maryland State agencies.
The State may adjust these operational limits at any time without notice. If you encounter an operational limit and believe you have a legitimate need beyond it, contact compass@maryland.gov.
8. General Provisions
You agree that no joint venture, agency, partnership or employment relationship exists between you and the State as a result of the Agreement or use of this Website.
The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of these Website Terms shall not affect the validity or enforceability of any other provision hereof.
In the event that any provision of these Website Terms are determined to be invalid, unenforceable or otherwise illegal, such provision will be deemed restated, in accordance with applicable law, to reflect as nearly as possible the original intentions of the parties, and the remainder of the Agreement shall be in full force and effect.
The Agreement does not create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, express or implied, enforceable at law or otherwise by any third party against the parties to the Agreement, their parent, or affiliated entities.
Nothing in these Website Terms constitutes a waiver of the State’s governmental immunity, or any other immunity or defense available to the State.
9. MCP Server
The State operates a Model Context Protocol (“MCP”) server that exposes a subset of the Website’s data through the open MCP standard. External AI clients — such as Claude Desktop, the Claude API, or third-party agent frameworks — can connect to the MCP server to answer questions about Maryland parcels, incentive programs, and community-planning documents on the user’s behalf. The MCP server is a separate technical surface from the Interactive Outputs described in Section 5; the State does not operate the AI client through which you reach the MCP server.
9.1 Scope of the MCP Server
The MCP server is read-only. Every tool it exposes performs a lookup, search, or retrieval against the same public data the Website already publishes — Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation (SDAT) parcel records, Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) determinations, historic-register data, zoning-ordinance summaries, community-plan quotes, and the funding-program directory. The MCP server cannot modify data, create records, submit applications, move money, take any action on your behalf outside the State system, or read any information you have not supplied in the current MCP request.
The MCP server does not carry a login, does not associate requests with a user account, and does not maintain server-side conversational memory between calls. Each MCP tool call is stateless: the tool receives the arguments provided by the calling AI client, performs the lookup, and returns the result.
9.2 Privacy
The MCP server’s data-handling practices — what tool arguments it receives, what aggregate analytics it retains, which third-party services it invokes, and the boundary between what the State handles and what the calling AI-client vendor handles — are described in the separate MCP Server Privacy Policy.
9.3 Accuracy and Limitations
MCP tool responses are extracts of the same public data described elsewhere on this Website and are subject to the same disclaimers about accuracy, completeness, and timeliness set out in Section 1, Section 5, and Section 6. AI clients may summarize, rephrase, or combine MCP tool results in ways the State does not control; verify any material fact, program detail, deadline, or eligibility criterion against the original source before acting on it.
9.4 Contact
For questions about the MCP server or to report a suspected outage, abuse, or security vulnerability, contact compass@maryland.gov.
Acknowledgement
By clicking "Accept Website Terms" below, or by connecting to the MCP server described in Section 9, you acknowledge that you have read and understand the Website Terms and How This Site Works (opens in new tab), and agree to be bound by the terms, conditions, and notices herein.
Success: You have accepted the Website Terms.