Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Registry Recognizer is published by Berserkr LLC, Aberdeen, Washington, United States, the controller of the personal data described here. Privacy contact: Sean Wagner, sean.robert.wagner@gmail.com.

No tracking, no advertising

Registry Recognizer runs no Google Analytics or other analytics, no advertising and no tracking scripts, and sets no tracking cookies. It does not sell personal information or build profiles of its readers. That is why there is no cookie banner: nothing here needs your consent until you choose to use one of the features below. The only reading measurement is an anonymous count of how often each article is opened, which ranks Top Stories; it records the article and the time, never who opened it.

What we collect, why, and for how long

• Reading the site. Our web server logs each request: IP address, time, page and browser identification. We use them to run the service and defend it against abuse (our legitimate interest in a working, secure site). The logs are deleted after 14 days.
• Crime alert emails (if you subscribe). Your email address, the place, radius and categories you choose, your language, and a keyed hash of your IP address used to limit sign-ups. Basis: your consent, confirmed by the link we email you. We use it only to send the alerts; every message has an unsubscribe link. Unconfirmed sign-ups are deleted after 7 days. When you unsubscribe your address, location and choices are erased at once; a keyed hash of the address is kept so the per-address limit still works.
• Comments (if you sign in to comment). If you sign in with Google we receive your Google account identifier, display name and profile picture, and we store your comments with a keyed hash of your IP address. Basis: providing the comment service you asked for, and our legitimate interest in moderating it. Deleting a comment erases its text. Ask us to delete your account and we erase it.
• County chat. Messages are held in server memory only, are visible to anyone in that room, and are gone when the service restarts; they are never written to a database. To suggest your county we look up your IP address in a location database on our own server; the address is not stored or sent anywhere.
• Legal, correction and privacy requests sent through our form: your email address, name, message and IP address. Basis: our legal obligations and legitimate interest in handling your request and keeping a record of what we changed. The IP address is deleted after 30 days and the request after 3 years.

Cookies and your browser's storage

We set only cookies the site needs to work: a session cookie when you sign in, use county chat or submit a form (it keeps you signed in and protects forms against forgery) and ends when you close the browser or after 30 minutes idle. The site also keeps small values in your browser's own storage — your language, the last map position, the date range you chose, whether you have seen the alerts prompt, which game promotion you saw last and a chosen video volume — so it behaves sensibly next time. These never leave your device and clearing site data removes them.

Who else receives data

• Our hosting provider (Akamai / Linode, United States) runs the servers.
• Purelymail sends our alert and form emails.
• Map tiles load from the OpenStreetMap Foundation's tile servers, which receive your IP address as any website you load images from does.
• Google receives data only if you choose to sign in with Google, or press play on a game trailer (served by YouTube in its privacy-enhanced mode, under Google's privacy policy). The site loads nothing from Google otherwise; its fonts are served from our own server.

We are based in the United States and our servers are there, so information you give us is processed in the United States.

Your rights

Wherever you live you can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable form; where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland these are your rights under the GDPR, the UK GDPR or the Swiss data protection act, and you may also complain to your data protection authority. Use the request form (choose "Privacy request") or sean.robert.wagner@gmail.com. We answer within one month and may ask you to confirm the request from the email address it concerns.

People named in public records

Most pages here are compiled from government booking, charging, court and registry records. If you are named on one, the Corrections process is the route to a correction, an update reflecting a later outcome, or a removal request. Include the page URL and an authoritative source. An arrest or charge is not a conviction, and dispositions that resolve in your favour are exactly the kind of update we want. We do not publish records originating in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or France's overseas territories, apart from official missing-person notices from Czechia and Hungary and wanted-person notices from Czechia.

Children

This site publishes crime reporting and is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.