Privacy and your data rights

Privacy policy

The short version

This site republishes custody records that Minnesota county governments already publish themselves. It runs no analytics, sets no tracking cookies, and loads nothing from any third party. If you are listed here and want that changed, email privacy@bigbeefslottools.com and you will get a reply within 45 days.

What we collect about you as a visitor

Almost nothing. There is no analytics service, no advertising network, no social media widget, no embedded font, and no third-party script of any kind on this site. Nothing you do here is reported to anyone else.

The web server keeps ordinary access logs, as essentially every web server does: your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser's user-agent string. These exist to keep the service running and to identify abuse. They are not combined with anything else, not used to build a profile, and not sold or shared.

Cookies

This site sets exactly one cookie, and only for the site's own administrator when signing in to the maintenance page. It is a session cookie, it is strictly necessary for that sign-in to work, and an ordinary visitor never receives it. There are no analytics, advertising, or preference cookies, which is why you are not being asked to consent to any.

Where the roster records come from

Every custody record shown here was published by a Minnesota county sheriff or jail on its own public website. Under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, Minn. Stat. § 13.82, certain arrest and booking data is public government data. This site collects that data from the counties' own published pages, on an hourly schedule, honouring each site's robots.txt and rate limits.

We do not create these records, and we cannot correct the underlying record at the county. If the county's own listing is wrong, the county has to fix it — though we will still act on a request to us, as described below.

What we deliberately do not collect

The collector is configured to discard several fields that county sources do publish. It does not retain dates of birth, photographs, home addresses, race or ethnicity, sex or gender, or physical descriptions, even where a source supplies them in the same response.

Age is shown only where a county publishes an age directly, and it is never calculated from a date of birth. Where no age is published, the roster shows a dash rather than an estimate.

Records about young people

This site is not directed at children and does not knowingly publish records of anyone under 18. Juvenile records are confidential under Minn. Stat. § 260B.171 and are not public data. If you believe a record here concerns a minor, email privacy@bigbeefslottools.com and it will be removed promptly on verification.

Your rights under Minnesota law

The Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act gives Minnesota residents the right to confirm whether their personal data is being processed, obtain a copy of it, correct inaccuracies, and request deletion. To exercise any of these, email privacy@bigbeefslottools.com.

We will respond within 45 days. If a request is genuinely complex we may extend that once, by a further 45 days, and will tell you before doing so. If we decline a request we will explain why and how to appeal it. There is no charge.

To act on a request we need enough information to find the right record — usually the name as it appears on the site and the county. Please do not send a Social Security number, a driver's licence number, or any other sensitive identifier; we do not need one and do not want to hold one.

Removal and expungement

You do not need a court order to ask. Email privacy@bigbeefslottools.com with the name and county, and say briefly what is wrong: the charges were dismissed, the record is not you, the record is out of date, or you simply want it gone.

If a Minnesota court has granted expungement under Minn. Stat. ch. 609A, say so and we will remove the record and suppress it from future collection. A copy of the order helps but is not required to start.

Records for people no longer in custody age out of this site on their own as counties stop publishing them. Nothing here is intended to be a permanent archive of anyone's arrest.

Search engines

Pages that name people are excluded from search indexes, by both robots.txt and a noindex instruction on the pages and API responses themselves. Someone searching your name on Google should not find you here. This site is meant to answer "where is this person being held right now", not to publish a permanent, searchable record of an arrest.

Selling data

We do not sell personal data, share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, or use it for any automated decision-making or profiling.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS only. The public site holds no accounts and no personal data about visitors beyond the server logs described above.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page changes with it.

Contact

Privacy questions, data rights requests, removal requests, and corrections: privacy@bigbeefslottools.com.