How we source and publish records.
Every choice here follows one rule: report what official public records say, faithfully and neutrally — and make it easy to correct.
Official government sources only
We publish exactly two kinds of person-level information, and nothing else:
- Official government registry records — re-displayed verbatim from the maintaining agency (a state or county animal-abuser registry), with attribution and a link.
- Public court-record case tracking — the status of an animal-cruelty prosecution (charged, convicted, acquitted, dropped) with the court and date, drawn from public dockets.
We never accept self-curated lists, tips, or user-submitted accusations. If it isn’t in an official government record, it isn’t here.
Shown verbatim, with attribution on the record
Person-level fields are reproduced from the official source — not paraphrased into accusatory prose. Attribution lives on the record itself, not buried in a footer: the agency or court, the record identifier, the date it was retrieved, and a working link back to the original.
Reporting, not labeling
We report court proceedings; we don’t pass judgment. That means specific, neutral language — “charged with [offense] on [date] in [court],” “convicted of [offense] on [date],” “acquitted,” “charges dropped” — and when a charge is shown, its known disposition is shown alongside it. We don’t use editorializing adjectives, imply future dangerousness, or call anyone an “abuser” unless that is their attributed status on an official government registry. Status is shown in sober, desaturated colors — never alarm-red on a person.
Reviewed before anything is published
Nothing person-level goes public on a single person’s say-so. Publication is triple-gated:
- database access rules that keep unpublished records private by default;
- a recorded Legal and Compliance sign-off — and the two approvals must come from two distinct reviewers, so no one person can publish alone;
- a deliberate publish action by an administrator.
Correctable — a real removal process
Public records change: charges get dropped, convictions get vacated, records get sealed or expunged, and sometimes the wrong person is identified. So a correction and removal process is a precondition for publishing, not an afterthought. The design:
- high-risk claims — expungement, sealing, mistaken identity, an overturned conviction — are handled fail-safe: the record is provisionally taken down first, then verified.
- expunged or sealed records are removed; mistaken identity is removed.
- a vacated conviction loses its “convicted” framing; a dropped charge or acquittal is annotated prominently and fairly.
- every step is written to an audit log.
Anyone can request a correction or removal — the named individual, an attorney or guardian, or anyone reporting a factual error.
Kept current
Official registries are re-synced on a regular cadence, and a record that has dropped off the latest official pull is removed. Court cases carry a “disposition last verified” date. If a sync can’t be completed, we withhold rather than show data we can’t vouch for.
Practical obscurity, respected
Bringing scattered public records together carries real responsibility. We limit each
person-level record to what the official source itself exposes — we don’t build dossiers
or cross-link people — and sensitive person-level pages are marked noindex so they
are not amplified by search engines. Our sitemap and crawler rules deliberately exclude every
page that can surface a person.
See the official sources we draw from on the sources page, or read more about the Florida statewide database on Dexter’s Law.