Privacy Policy

This policy covers two very different things: the information you give us as a customer (an account, a subscription), and the public records about property that we republish — which can name real people as owners of record, buyers, sellers, permit applicants, or attorneys. Both are explained below.

• Account: your email address, a display name you choose, and a hashed password. We never store the password itself.
• Billing: handled by Stripe. We store your Stripe customer id, your plan and its status, and the brand and last four digits of the card on file so the account page can show it; for one-time purchases, the product, the parcel it was bought for, the amount, and the Stripe session id. Full card numbers never reach our servers.
• Usage: standard server logs (IP address, browser, pages requested, timestamps) kept for security and debugging, plus your watchlist and saved preferences. We also collect anonymous page-family counts, research-action counts and a 20% sample of browser performance measurements. These measurements contain no account identifier, full URL, search text, parcel number or IP address; they use no persistent tracking identifier, honor browser Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control, and are deleted after 35 days. When browser Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are not enabled, a tab stores only the landing-page category, whether a recognized search engine referred the visit, and the device category; we use this context for 30 minutes. We use an update-feed opening timestamp for up to 35 days to count later visits after that action. Expired values are replaced or removed on a later measured visit. Neither value is a unique browser identifier. Paid conversion counts use those coarse categories and an opaque event key to avoid counting the same confirmed checkout twice; the measurement table does not store the Stripe session id.
• Research updates: followed records, published snapshots, detected differences, read status and email preferences are stored with your account. Private notes in the existing watchlist remain in your browser. We retain detected updates and their email delivery records for up to 90 days; deleting your account removes its monitors and update history. Messages you request include a link to stop that record’s emails. Provider delivery events confirm mail-server delivery; we do not use open pixels to track whether you read a message.
• Email: transactional messages only — receipts, password resets, service notices and record updates you explicitly enable. No marketing list unless you opt in later.

We set a session cookie so you stay signed in, and a short-lived cookie that caches your session to speed up page loads. We do not run advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Stripe sets its own cookies during checkout under its own policy.

The property records on this site are obtained from public datasets published by the Cook County Assessor, the Cook County Board of Review, Cook County GIS, FEMA, and the Illinois Department of Revenue (MyDec PTAX-203). They include, for each parcel, the taxpayer (owner) of record and the mailing address on file with the Assessor, the names of buyers and sellers on recorded sales and MyDec declarations, the applicants on building permits, and the attorneys or agents on assessment appeals. MyDec buyer, seller, agent, and preparer names are treated as identity and are not shown on the free layer.

We also publish inferences drawn from those records — for example, that two owners share a mailing address, or that two people at the same address share a surname. Every inference is labeled as such in the product and is never presented as a verified fact.

If a record about you is wrong at the source, the fix has to happen at the agency (for example, an incorrect taxpayer name is corrected with the Cook County Assessor); our copy updates on the next refresh. We will tell you which agency to contact.

If you are an owner of record and do not want your name displayed, email support@cookcountyrecords.com from an address that lets us confirm you own the parcel. Where the law permits, we will suppress the name on our site within ten business days. Lead lists downloaded after that date exclude the name, and we notify every buyer who downloaded a list containing it in the previous twelve months so they can delete the row; copies already downloaded cannot be recalled. We give particular priority to requests from people with a safety concern, such as those covered by an address-confidentiality program.

Customers can ask us to export or delete their account data at any time. Deleting an account removes your profile, watchlist, and our billing cache; Stripe retains payment records as required by financial regulations.

We do not sell the account information you give us. We do sell compilations of public property records — including the county’s owner of record for each parcel — to businesses as lead lists, under a license that forbids resale and consumer-report uses (see the Terms). If you are an owner of record and do not want your name in those lists, the suppression request above covers them too.

The services that process data on our behalf are:

• Stripe — payments and subscription billing.
• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the website.
• Neon — the managed database that stores accounts and the published records.
• Resend — delivery of transactional email.

We may also disclose information when required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or property of our users, the public, or ourselves.

Account data is kept while the account exists and for 90 days after deletion in backups. Server logs are kept for 30 days. Published record versions are retained for rollback and then pruned; a name suppressed at your request stays suppressed across future refreshes.

The service is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect account information from them.

We will post changes here and email subscribers about material ones. Questions or requests: support@cookcountyrecords.com, or see the Contact page. Written requests: Cook County Records, 205 West Touhy Avenue, Suite 328, Park Ridge, IL 60068. Our methodology — including which fields are facts and which are estimates — is on the Methodology page.