Acceptable use

GRAIL reads records that cities, counties and states already publish — permits, parcels, zoning actions, code enforcement — and shows them in one place. Nothing is stored; every answer is read live from the agency that published it, and every record links back to the filing it came from.

It is a reading tool for places. It is not a background check, a people-search, or a source of truth about any person.

GRAIL is not a consumer reporting agency and its output is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. You may not use GRAIL, in whole or in part, to decide anyone’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing or tenancy, or any other purpose covered by the FCRA.

This is enforced, not just stated: combinations of records that would constitute a consumer report are refused at export.

• •Screen people. No tenant screening, employment screening, or credit or insurance decisions.
• •Discriminate. No steering, redlining, or screening that disadvantages a protected class. Housing discrimination is unlawful and this tool must not be part of it.
• •Harass or locate. No using GRAIL to find, follow, contact or intimidate anyone, and no compiling dossiers on individuals.
• •Re-identify. Names of private individuals are withheld deliberately. Do not attempt to recover them, or to link records to a named person by other means.
• •Bulk-extract. No crawling, scraping, paginating through whole datasets, or systematically collecting records beyond what you are reading. Rate and volume limits are in force and evading them is a breach of these terms.
• •Resell the records. You may use what you read. You may not repackage GRAIL’s output as a data product.
• •Strip attribution. Exports carry source attribution. It is a licence condition of the underlying data, not a courtesy, and removing it makes you the infringer.

If you are a judge, a law-enforcement officer, a prosecutor, a survivor of domestic violence, or anyone with reason to keep your address out of a public map, you can ask and we will withhold it. You do not need an account and you do not have to explain yourself beyond telling us which place.

One thing to be clear about, because it matters: the county still publishes these records. Withholding removes them from GRAIL, which is the part we control. Suppressing them at source is a request to the agency, and many states have a formal process for it.

Requests are actioned within 10 business days, usually sooner.

Records are shown as the agency published them. Declared build costs are what a filer wrote on an application — not appraisals, not sale prices. Parcel boundaries are for orientation, not survey. If a record is wrong, it is wrong at the county, and correcting it there corrects it here.

Access can be limited or withdrawn. Where use is unlawful we will cooperate with the agency or authority concerned.