Qipudata
San Francisco · v0.7.1
qipu data›San Francisco›Documentation›Privacy

Privacy

The minutes name private people: claimants, applicants, neighbours, people appointed to small posts. We withhold those names for 75 years in San Francisco and 92 years in Vancouver.

The rule

  • Names of private people in records younger than the cutoff are replaced with [name withheld], in every published file: Parquet, SQLite, CSV, the JSON documents and this site, including the summaries a model wrote.
  • Public officials acting in office (supervisors, mayors) are named. Their roster is the persons table.
  • The printed quotes of embargoed records are not published.
  • On this site, the summaries of decisions after 1951 are also hidden for now while a further privacy check finishes. Their date, kind, outcome and page link stay.

How it is applied

The free-text columns of every table are filtered before export. The build then sweeps every published file for known private names and stops if it finds one. The release gate for v0.6 passed with 0 failures.

SELECT privacy_flag, count(*)
FROM 'https://tiles.qipu.org/data/releases/v0.7.1/parquet/claims.parquet'
GROUP BY 1

Known gaps

  • The name finder works on patterns and a list of first names. It can miss a lone surname ("Smith gets a permit") and can hide a place named after a person.
  • The earlier staging copies (v0.1, v0.2) showed private names. They were withdrawn on 14 October 2026 and are not republished.

Asking for a record to be withheld

See Corrections and takedown. Requests about a private person are handled first.