Transparency
What we scan for, what we catch, what we redact.
Before any post is published, it is run through an automated PII auditor that scans for personal identifiers and redactions, then it is reviewed by an editor. This page shows the aggregate picture.
How clean is the public post corpus?
Counts come from the posts table. Flagged means a post that had at least one PII span detected during audit; redacted spans do not appear in the public text.
PII types detected
| Type | Detections | Why we redact it |
|---|---|---|
home_address |
3069 | Street addresses — redaction triggered when a residential identifier (apartment, trailer, home) is paired with a personal label. |
dob |
102 | Dates of birth labeled as personal (DOB, birthday, born on). Birthdays that appear as event context are kept. |
phone |
4 | Phone numbers — redaction triggered when the number is paired with a personal label (caller, victim, witness). |
other |
2 | Other PII surfaced by Claude during tone/context review. Re-reviewed manually before publication. |
Severity breakdown
High = direct identifier (SSN, MT DL). Stops publication automatically. Medium = contextual identifier (residential address, personal phone). Redacted and editor-reviewed. Low = contextual date or label (DOB, age). Reviewed before publication.
What runs before a post goes public.
1. Regex scan
Every post draft is scanned against a list of pattern detectors — SSN shape, MT DL format, US phone, residential street address with a personal-context label, and labeled DOBs. The detectors are deliberately conservative: a street address without a residential context word (apartment, residence, home, trailer) is allowed because it is typically the public incident location.
2. Claude review
When the API is available, the post is also passed to a second-pass model that flags contextual PII the regex misses — for example, an indirect reference to "her boyfriend's truck, which is usually parked at 412 Spruce" — and returns a clean rewrite. The clean version is the one that publishes.
3. Editor sign-off
Posts flagged as manual_review are not published until an editor reviews them. A clean post is published automatically. A pending post has not yet been audited.
4. The corrections log
If something slips through, we log the fix in the public corrections log. Editorial framing changes, factual errors, and PII redactions after the fact are all visible there.