Removal and Takedown Requests

Removing personal information

If you found your name, your mailing address or your property in a dataset here, this section is for you. Read the next three paragraphs first, because they decide whether writing to us will actually get you what you want.

Where this information comes from

Property ownership is a public record almost everywhere in the United States. County assessors, appraisal districts, recorders and clerks collect owner names, mailing addresses, sale prices and legal descriptions, and state law requires them to make those records available. Most counties publish them on their own websites.

We are not the source. We republish copies of county files, exactly as we received them.

Ask the county first — it is the only removal that lasts

Removing your details from our copies does not remove them from the county's record, from the county's website, or from the many other places that also republish county data. Only the county can do that.

Contact the assessor, appraisal district, recorder or clerk for the county where the property is. Most states have a confidentiality process that lets certain people have their details withheld or replaced in the public record — typically law-enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, code enforcement officers, victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault or trafficking, and participants in a state address-confidentiality programme. Some states extend it more widely. The county will tell you whether you qualify and what to file.

What we will do

We will act on the copies we publish. When we can confirm that a request relates to you, or that you are authorised to make it for someone else, we will remove or redact your name and mailing address from the datasets we host, and take the affected files down while we do it.

What we cannot do

• We cannot change the county's record or anything the county publishes.
• We cannot recall a file somebody has already downloaded from this site. Once a copy is out, it is out, and we have no way of reaching whoever holds it.
• We cannot remove your information from other websites, from data brokers, or from search engine caches.
• We cannot guarantee that a future version of the same county — arriving as a fresh bulk file from the county — will not contain the same record again. If you see it come back, tell us and we will act again.

We would rather say all of that plainly than let you find it out after you have written to us.

How to ask

Email privacy@freeparceldata.com with "Removal request" in the subject line, and tell us:

• the state and county;
• the parcel number (APN, PIN or similar) if you know it, or the full property address;
• the name and any other details you want removed, spelled as they appear in the data;
• the page on this site where you found it, if you have it;
• enough for us to see that the request relates to you — or, if you are acting for someone else, what authorises you to;
• an email address we can reply to.

Please do not send us a copy of a government ID, a social security number or a court order unless we ask for it. We do not want to hold those, and we can usually confirm a request without them.

What happens next

We will acknowledge your email, tell you what we can and cannot do about the specific records you named, and write to you again when it is done. Where a request is made under the California Consumer Privacy Act or a comparable state law, we respond within 45 days and tell you if we need the further 45 days the law allows.

We keep a minimal record of the request and of what we did about it, so we can show it was handled. That record is described in section 9 of the Privacy Policy.

If you are worried about your immediate safety, contact your local law enforcement and the county about a confidentiality filing. Those are faster and more complete than anything we can do.

Rights-holder takedown

If you believe something on this site should not be published, tell us. Our posture is simple and worth stating up front: we do not need a court order to take something down. We would rather un-publish a dataset and look at it properly than argue about whether we have to.

Counties, appraisal districts, vendors and licensors

This is the most likely case here, and it does not need a formal legal notice. If you are a county, an appraisal district, a data vendor, an employer or anyone else who believes a dataset was published in breach of your licence, your terms of use, a contract or a confidentiality obligation, email legal@freeparceldata.com with:

• who you are and what your interest in the data is;
• which dataset — a link to the page on this site is ideal, otherwise the state, county and vintage;
• what the problem is, briefly.

We will normally un-publish while we look into it. If we agree with you it stays down, and we will tell you what we did. We will also look at whether the person who uploaded it broke the promises in section 6 of the Terms of Use.

The same route works if you are reporting somebody else's upload — for example, if you recognise a dataset as one that a vendor sells and that no user had the right to redistribute.

Copyright — DMCA notice

If you own a copyright and believe material on this site infringes it, send a written notice to legal@freeparceldata.com containing all six of the things the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires (17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3)):

1. your physical or electronic signature, as the owner of the right or a person authorised to act for them;
2. identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed;
3. identification of the material you want removed, with enough detail for us to find it — the URL of the dataset page is best;
4. your name, address, telephone number and email address;
5. a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law; and
6. a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or are authorised to act for them.

A notice missing any of those six may not be effective, and we may come back to you for the rest. Section 512(f) makes it unlawful to knowingly and materially misrepresent that material is infringing, and someone who does can be liable for the resulting damages and legal fees.

A note about this kind of data specifically: in the United States, facts are not copyrightable, and a compilation of facts is protected only to the extent its selection or arrangement is original. Much of what a parcel file contains is facts recorded by a government. That is not a reason to skip the notice — send it and we will look — but it is why we ask what your interest is rather than removing on assertion alone.

Counter-notice

If we removed something you uploaded and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to legal@freeparceldata.com containing (17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3)):

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. identification of the material that was removed and where it appeared;
3. a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification;
4. your name, address and telephone number; and
5. a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the district where you live — or, if you are outside the United States, of any district where we may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice.

We will forward a valid counter-notice to whoever sent the original notice. We may restore the material after 10 business days, and no later than 14, unless they tell us they have filed a court action.

Repeat infringers

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances, as section 9 of the Terms of Use says.

Anything else

If a dataset is simply wrong rather than improperly published, the data accuracy page explains what we do about that — the short version is that we would rather take it down than leave it up, and reporting bad data pays credits when a reviewer agrees with you.

Anything not covered here: legal@freeparceldata.com.