Privacy Policy

GoToJail (“GoToJail,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) respects the privacy of our members, website visitors, advertisers, and data partners. This Privacy Policy describes how personal information is collected, used, protected, and shared when you visit or interact with go-to-jail.com, how payment transactions are handled through our payment processor Stripe, how we process public government records, and the standards governing our creation and commercial licensing of privacy-protected public-safety datasets and application programming interfaces (APIs).

1. Information We Collect

We collect personal information that you provide directly to us through the website, as well as standard technical data generated by your device when accessing our servers:

• Subscriber Information: When you register for an Annual Member Pass or manage an account, we collect information including your name, email address, password credentials (stored as one-way cryptographic hashes), subscription status, county edition preferences, and details necessary to authenticate and administer your membership.
• Advertiser Information: When you purchase, submit, or manage advertising campaigns on GoToJail, we collect business and contact information, billing email addresses, advertising copy, submitted creative image assets, destination URLs, campaign scheduling preferences, and transaction identifiers necessary to review, publish, and administer your advertisement.
• Support and Communications: When you submit an inquiry through our authenticated Member Contact Form or email our publisher desk at publisher@go-to-jail.com, we collect your message content, subject line, inquiry category, and related correspondence to provide customer service and maintain appropriate business records.
• Technical and Security Information: When your browser or application interacts with GoToJail, our web servers and security systems automatically record standard technical request information, such as IP addresses, browser and device user-agent strings, HTTP request headers, timestamps, requested URLs, and security events. This information is utilized for application security, sliding-window rate limiting, fraud and bot prevention, troubleshooting, and server performance monitoring.

2. Payment Processing via Stripe

Payments for GoToJail Annual Member Passes, sponsored advertising orders, and other paid commercial services are processed securely through Stripe, Inc. (“Stripe”), an industry-standard, PCI-DSS Level 1 certified payment gateway.

Zero Card Credential Storage: Full payment card numbers, CVVs, and security codes are submitted directly from your browser to Stripe’s encrypted checkout infrastructure. GoToJail never receives, processes, or stores full payment-card numbers or security codes on our servers or databases.

Stripe provides GoToJail with limited transaction and token identifiers (such as Stripe Customer IDs, Subscription IDs, checkout session tokens, payment completion timestamps, and subscription status flags) necessary to identify payments, fulfill orders, administer recurring memberships, reconcile accounts, prevent fraud, and maintain required accounting records.

For details regarding Stripe’s security standards and privacy practices, please review Stripe’s Privacy Policy.

3. Privacy-First Processing of Public Records

GoToJail collects and analyzes information originating from publicly available government and public-safety records, such as law enforcement jail booking logs and arrest affidavits.

Our platform is engineered to separate useful, objective public-safety data from individual personal identifying information. The purpose of this methodology is to preserve meaningful public-safety insights while removing direct identifiers. Information processed and highlighted includes:

• Jail intake activity, booking timestamps, and agency volume;
• Criminal charges, statutory classifications, and degree levels;
• Custody status, release timelines, and judicial release trends;
• Bond amounts, release conditions, and scheduling patterns;
• Jurisdictional comparisons, agency statistics, and aggregate public-safety trends.

Platform Exclusions: GoToJail does not operate as, and explicitly disclaims functioning as, a traditional people-search engine, commercial mugshot website, or consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). We strictly avoid indexing individual personal names for consumer profiling.

4. De-Identified Data, Commercial Licensing & API Access

GoToJail develops and commercializes specialized data products, analytics feeds, and programmatic application programming interfaces (APIs) derived from de-identified public-safety information.

We may license, sell, distribute, analyze, aggregate, and provide API access to de-identified, non-personally-identifying public-safety datasets to institutional clients and third parties, which may include:

• Commercial businesses, risk intelligence platforms, and insurance analysts;
• Academic, criminological, and legal researchers;
• Software engineers, civic developers, and application creators;
• News media, journalistic organizations, and investigative reporters;
• Public policy institutes, statistical analysts, and other legitimate commercial data customers.

Contractual Governance & Strict Anti-Reidentification Covenant: Access to GoToJail’s commercial datasets and APIs is governed by contractual agreements, acceptable-use policies, technical rate limits, and mandatory privacy covenants. Customers licensing or accessing our data are contractually and technically prohibited from attempting to:

• Identify or re-identify any individual represented within a GoToJail de-identified dataset;
• Reverse engineer, decrypt, or de-anonymize identity;
• Combine or correlate GoToJail data with third-party datasets for the purpose of discovering or linking identities;
• Circumvent or compromise GoToJail’s identity-protection methodologies.

GoToJail reserves the right to immediately suspend credentials, terminate data access, and seek appropriate legal remedies if any data licensee violates these privacy protections.

5. How We Use Personal Information

Personal information collected from members, advertisers, and website visitors is used exclusively for legitimate operational, service, and administrative purposes, including:

• Operating, maintaining, and securing the GoToJail website and infrastructure;
• Authenticating member accounts and administering active Annual Member Passes;
• Reviewing, approving, and publishing advertising campaigns;
• Processing, reconciling, and auditing payment transactions with Stripe;
• Delivering requested member notifications, such as automated custody release alerts;
• Responding to inquiries submitted to our publisher and customer service desks;
• Preventing unauthorized access, automated scraping, bot attacks, and fraudulent activity;
• Satisfying applicable tax, accounting, audit, and legal record-keeping requirements.

Personal information collected from members, advertisers, and visitors is NEVER incorporated into GoToJail’s commercial public-safety datasets merely because someone visits our website, purchases a pass, or manages an account.

6. Disclosure to Service Providers

We share personal information solely with vetted operational service providers who perform critical technical and business functions on our behalf, including:

• Payment Processing: Stripe, Inc., for processing card transactions and managing subscription statuses.
• Cloud Infrastructure & Hosting: Amazon Web Services (AWS), for secure server hosting (EC2), relational databases (RDS), asset storage (S3), and transactional email delivery (SES).
• Security & Performance: Specialized network and routing infrastructure providers that protect our systems against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and malicious traffic.

These operational disclosures are strictly functional and are fundamentally different from selling or monetizing user personal information. Service providers are authorized to process data only to provide contracted services to GoToJail.

We may also disclose information where reasonably necessary to comply with valid legal process (such as a subpoena, court order, or search warrant), protect the safety and rights of GoToJail or its users, investigate suspected fraud or security incidents, or enforce our Terms of Service.

7. We Do Not Sell Member or Visitor Personal Information

GoToJail’s commercial data licensing activities are strictly confined to de-identified and non-personally-identifying public-safety information.

We do not sell, rent, trade, or disclose the personal information of our members, advertisers, or website visitors—including names, email addresses, passwords, private inquiries, or subscription records—to data brokers, marketing agencies, consumer profiling firms, or advertising networks for their independent marketing or commercial purposes.

As described in Section 4, this commitment does not prevent GoToJail from commercializing or licensing privacy-protected, de-identified datasets or public-safety APIs that contain zero user personal information.

8. Data Security Safeguards

We maintain appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect personal information against unauthorized access, destruction, loss, or alteration. These measures include:

• Transport Layer Security (HTTPS/TLS) encryption for all public and authenticated web sessions;
• One-way salted cryptographic hashing for account authentication credentials;
• Network isolation and role-based database permissions across application servers and databases;
• Sliding-window IP rate limiting and anti-automation controls on sensitive endpoints;
• Administrative access controls restricted to authorized technical and curation personnel.

While we continuously test and harden our systems, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is completely impenetrable. Consequently, we cannot guarantee absolute security against all unforeseen threats.

9. Data Retention Practices

Personal information collected in connection with member accounts, advertising orders, and support communications is retained for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this policy, including providing services, maintaining account continuity, resolving billing disputes, preventing fraud, and complying with statutory tax, financial, and legal obligations.

De-identified, aggregated, and historical public-safety data may be retained for research, analytics, historical analysis, product development, archiving, licensing, API services, and other legitimate business purposes.

10. Access, Correction & Deletion Requests

You may contact GoToJail at any time to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal information associated with your member account or advertising purchases:

• Email: publisher@go-to-jail.com
• Web Contact: Member Support Desk

Certain account, transaction, or security records may need to be retained notwithstanding a deletion request where reasonably necessary or legally required for financial audits, dispute resolution, fraud prevention, or legal defense.

Public Record Inquiries: Inquiries regarding information originating from government public records are evaluated separately from requests concerning personal information voluntarily supplied through an account or purchase. GoToJail’s public reporting reflects official law enforcement booking records. Requests related to official records may be directed to our publisher desk.

11. Changes to This Privacy Policy

GoToJail reserves the right to update or modify this Privacy Policy periodically to reflect enhancements to our services, application interfaces, data products, security practices, or applicable legal requirements.

When changes are made, the “Effective Date” at the top of this policy will be revised. If we make material modifications affecting how personal information is handled, we will provide additional notice through the website or direct communications where required by applicable law.