Privacy
Police buy the same thing everyone buys.
We sell data. The police buy it on the same terms as a city traffic engineer or an insurer. No side door, no discount, and no refusal.
It cannot be pointed at a person, because the system never learns who anyone is. If a buyer works out who was there, they used their own records.
Fig 01
A query is made of
- WhereA geometryCeiling on area
- WhenA time windowCeiling on duration
- WhyA declared purposeRecorded, binding
There is no field for
- A name
- A plate
- A face
- A watchlist
- A standing alert
- A person, returning places
The sharpest thing said about this business is that an agency could just buy what a warrant would take. Half of that misses us. Half of it is true. We would rather say which.
A warrant that asks who someone is demands something we do not have. There is no identity in the record. Buying the record is not a shortcut to one.
Imagery is real: an agency can buy pictures of a public street, for a place and a time. Our answer to that half is a public process. The sale shows up in the log. The reason for it is on the record. Two named people approve the release.
Both founders read every subpoena, court order and warrant. Both must approve a release. We challenge one that asks for more than its question needs. Where the law allows, we tell whoever it is about.
Some orders forbid us from saying a request exists. Those show up as a count, never as a blacked-out row. A blacked-out row tells you a request came in, and about when. That is usually what the order bans. When the order lifts, the full row goes up.