Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

This site is operated by Free Parcel Data. We decide what personal information this site collects and why, which makes us the controller of it.

For anything in this policy, write to privacy@freeparceldata.com.

2. Personal information inside the parcel data

This is the part most people come here to read, so it goes first.

County parcel records routinely contain an owner's name and mailing address, along with the property address, the sale price and date, the legal description and the assessed value. Where a dataset we publish contains those fields, we publish them as we received them.

That information originates from public records maintained by county governments. It is public because the law of the state in question makes it public — property ownership is a matter of public record almost everywhere in the United States, and county assessors, appraisal districts and recorders publish it themselves. We are not the source of it. We did not collect it from you, we cannot verify it, and we cannot correct it.

If you want it out of the official record

The county is the only place that can do that, and it is the only removal that lasts. Contact the county assessor, appraisal district, recorder or clerk for the county where the property is. Many states run confidentiality or address-confidentiality programmes that let particular people — among them law-enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors, victims of domestic violence, stalking or trafficking, and participants in a state address-confidentiality programme — have their details withheld or replaced in the public record. The county can tell you whether you qualify and how to apply.

What we can do

We will act on the copies we publish. If you ask us and we can confirm the request relates to you or that you are authorised to make it, we will remove or redact your name and mailing address from the datasets we host, and we will take the affected files down while we do it. Start at removal requests.

What we cannot do

We cannot change the county's record, or anything the county publishes itself.
We cannot recall files that other people have already downloaded from this site. Once a copy is out, it is out.
We cannot remove your information from other sites, from search engines' caches, or from anyone else who obtained it from the county.
We cannot promise that a later version of the same county, arriving as a fresh bulk file from the county, will not contain the same record again. If that happens, tell us and we will act again.

3. What we collect about you

What you give us

Your email address. This is the only thing we require, and downloads are tied to a verified one.
If you register: a password, and optionally a public handle, a display name, your organisation, what you use parcel data for, and a state you are interested in.
If you contribute: the files you upload and everything inside them, the county and vintage you claim, and any notes you add.
If you endorse or report a dataset: your verdict and any comment.
Anything you put in an email to us.

What we record automatically

Server and request data: your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, the page you requested, the page you came from, and the date and time.
Download history: which datasets you downloaded, in which format, how many bytes, through which route, and whether the download completed.
Upload history: what you submitted, when, and what our checks made of it.
Credit ledger: every credit awarded or spent, why, and the running balance. This is append-only by design — it is the audit record of the credit economy and entries are never edited or deleted.
Email delivery events: whether a message we sent you was delivered, bounced, or reported as spam.
Risk signals: scores and flags we derive from the above to detect bulk extraction and account abuse — request rate, the order in which counties are requested, similarity between accounts, whether an email domain is a disposable one, and related patterns.
Cookies and similar technologies: section 5.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for payment card details, bank details, a government ID, a date of birth, a phone number, or precise geolocation, and we do not want them. Please do not send them to us. We do not knowingly collect any of the special categories of information that laws like the CPRA call "sensitive".

4. Why we collect it

To deliver files. To build the download you asked for and send you the link.
To verify an email address. So a download is attributable to somebody, which is what makes a free service possible without an open door to automated extraction.
To run the credit system. Award, spend, audit and correct.
To check contributions. Automated quality and authenticity checks, and human review where those are inconclusive.
To prevent abuse. Quotas, rate limits, duplicate-account detection and bulk-extraction detection. This is a substantial reason we keep IP addresses and download history at all.
To operate and secure the site, including diagnosing faults.
To measure traffic, in aggregate.
To sell advertising, which is how the site is paid for.
To contact you about your account, a download, an upload or a request you made — and, only if you opted in, occasional updates about the site. Every optional message has an unsubscribe link.
To comply with the law and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

5. Cookies and similar technologies

Strictly necessary. A session cookie, a cross-site-request-forgery token, a login cookie once you sign in, and — if you choose "remember this browser" at a two-factor prompt — a token that saves you the second step next time. The site does not work without these and they are not used for advertising.
Preference. Your light or dark theme choice is stored in your browser's local storage. It never leaves your browser and is never sent to us.
Analytics. Where analytics is enabled, a third-party tag records visits so we can see which pages are used. We look at this in aggregate.
Advertising. Our ad network and its partners set cookies to serve and measure ads. See section 6.

Your browser can block or delete cookies. Blocking the strictly necessary ones will break signing in and downloading.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. This site does not currently detect either signal automatically. If you send one and want us to treat it as an opt-out request, email privacy@freeparceldata.com and we will honour it.

6. Advertising

This site carries advertising served by Google AdSense, and by Google's advertising partners. Google uses cookies to serve ads, including ads based on your prior visits to this site and to other sites. Its partners may do the same.

We do not give advertisers your email address, your account, your download history or anything else you gave us. The ad network sees what any site's ad network sees: your IP address, your browser, the page the ad appeared on, and its own cookies.

How to opt out of interest-based advertising

Turn off ad personalisation for your Google account at Google Ads Settings.
Opt out of many participating vendors at once at the Digital Advertising Alliance's WebChoices tool, or the Network Advertising Initiative's opt-out page.
Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com.
Use your browser's own controls to block third-party cookies.

Opting out stops ads being personalised. It does not stop ads.

We do not sell your personal information for money, and we do not share your account details with advertisers. We do use service providers to run the site, and we describe them by the job they do:

Our cloud hosting provider — runs the application and the database.
Our object storage provider — holds the dataset files and the download bundles built for you.
Our content delivery network — serves pages and downloads, and filters malicious traffic. It sees your IP address.
Our email delivery provider — sends verification codes, download links and account notices, and tells us whether they arrived.
Our advertising network and its partners — serve and measure the ads. Section 6.
Our analytics provider — measures traffic, where analytics is enabled.

Each of them gets only what it needs to do that job, and is required to use it only for that purpose.

We may also disclose information:

to comply with the law, a subpoena, a court order or a lawful request from a public authority;
to enforce these documents, investigate abuse, or protect the rights, property or safety of anyone;
to our professional advisers where they need it; and
to a successor, if this site or its assets are sold, merged or transferred — in which case this policy continues to apply until it is replaced, and we will say so on the site.

Our servers and our providers are in the United States. If you are somewhere else, using this site means your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, where the privacy laws are not the same as yours.

8. What is public about you

Browsing and downloading are not public. Nothing you download is shown to anyone else.

Contributing can be. If you upload datasets, a contributor profile may show your handle, the counties and states you have contributed, your verification accuracy record and any badges. Your email address is never shown. You can turn the public profile off in your account settings, and you can pick a handle that is not your name.

9. How long we keep it

We keep information for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, and then delete or anonymise it. In practice:

Account details — while your account is open, and for a period afterwards where we need them to prevent someone re-registering to evade a limit or a ban, or to defend a legal claim.
The credit ledger, download history and upload history — for as long as the account exists. The ledger is append-only: it is the audit record of the credit economy, and removing an entry would falsify every balance after it. If you close your account we detach these records from your identity rather than delete them.
Server and security logs — a limited period, long enough to investigate an incident.
Download bundles — the file built for a particular download expires automatically after two days, and the link to it expires in minutes.
Email suppression records — indefinitely. If you unsubscribe or a message bounces, we keep the fact of it, because deleting that record is how a site starts emailing someone again after they asked it to stop.
Removal and rights requests — we keep a minimal record of the request and what we did about it, so we can show it was handled.

10. Your choices and your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

tell you what personal information we hold about you;
give you a copy of it;
correct it if it is wrong;
delete it;
stop using it for a particular purpose; or
stop sending you optional email — every optional message also has an unsubscribe link.

Ask at privacy@freeparceldata.com. We may need to confirm you are who you say you are before we act, usually by emailing the address on the account. An authorised agent can act for you if they show us they are authorised.

We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights. There is nothing to withhold: the service is free.

Two honest limits. Deleting your account does not delete the credit ledger entries described in section 9, and it does not withdraw datasets you contributed that other people have already downloaded. And the personal information inside the parcel files is dealt with in section 2 and on the removal page, not by this section.

11. If you are in California

The California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, gives you specific rights. In the last twelve months we have collected these categories of personal information:

Identifiers — email address, IP address, account identifier, handle.
Internet or network activity — pages requested, referring page, user-agent, download and upload activity.
Commercial information — records of the datasets you obtained and the credits you earned and spent.
Professional information — organisation and use case, if you chose to give them.
Inferences — risk and abuse scores derived from the above.

We collect these from you, from your device automatically, and from our own systems. We collect them for the purposes in section 4, and we disclose them for business purposes to the categories of provider in section 7. We do not collect sensitive personal information as the CPRA defines it, so there is nothing to limit the use of.

Sale and sharing. We do not sell personal information for money. Using advertising cookies may count as "sharing" for cross-context behavioural advertising under the CPRA. To opt out, use the controls in section 6, or email privacy@freeparceldata.com and we will action it. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Your rights are to know, to access, to correct, to delete, to opt out of sale or sharing, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. Use the routes in section 10. We respond to verifiable requests within 45 days, and tell you if we need the further 45 days the law allows.

One thing worth knowing about the parcel data. The CCPA does not treat information lawfully made available from federal, state or local government records as personal information. Most of what appears inside the parcel files is exactly that, so the statutory deletion right may not reach it. We will still act on a removal request for our copies — see section 2 — but we would rather tell you where the limit is than let you discover it later.

12. If you are in another US state

A growing number of states — among them Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon and Montana — now give residents rights of access, correction, deletion, portability and opting out of targeted advertising. If your state does, you have them, and the routes in section 10 and section 6 are how you use them. If we ever refuse a request you may appeal it by replying to our answer, and we will respond in writing.

13. If you are in the UK or the EEA

This site is about United States county records and is not aimed at people in the UK or the EEA. If you are there anyway, we rely on these bases:

Performance of a contract — running your account and delivering the downloads you request.
Legitimate interests — securing the site, preventing bulk extraction and account abuse, measuring traffic, and defending legal claims. We think these interests are not overridden by your rights, and you may object.
Consent — optional email, and advertising or analytics cookies where consent is required. You can withdraw it at any time.
Legal obligation — where the law requires us to keep or disclose something.

You also have the rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and the right to complain to your data protection authority. Information is transferred to and stored in the United States.

14. Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to privacy@freeparceldata.com and we will delete it and close any account.

15. Security

We take reasonable measures to protect what we hold: traffic is encrypted in transit, passwords are stored hashed and never in a readable form, download links are short-lived and single-use, the dataset store is private and not directly reachable, and access to production data is limited to those who need it. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee this one is.

16. Changes to this policy

We may change this policy. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page, and for a change that materially affects your rights we will also give notice on the site. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

17. Contact

Privacy questions, requests and complaints: privacy@freeparceldata.com.

Anything else, including legal notices: legal@freeparceldata.com.

In short