Where Signal's data comes from — and how to ask us to stop

Who we are

43 Sunsets is developing Signal (not yet open to the public), a service that reads public records and turns them into short, plain-language notes for industrial sales teams in the U.S. Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin). Contact: [email protected].

What we collect

• Building-permit records that cities, counties and states publish on their public search portals (including Accela, EnerGov, BS&A and open-data portals such as Socrata and ArcGIS), and records we receive through public-records (FOIA) requests.
• State economic-development award lists published by state agencies.
• Job postings that employers publish on their own careers pages and applicant-tracking job boards.
• Federal filings and other government records published for public use.

We do not read anything that requires an account or a login, and we do not collect information about private individuals for publication.

How we collect it

1. We identify ourselves. Our crawler's user agent is 43sunsets-signal/0.1 (+https://43sunsets.com/signal/sources/; [email protected]). Some public search portals only display records in a full web browser; for those we use a headless browser whose user agent keeps the standard browser string and adds our name and contact address (43sunsets-cockpit/0.1 (public-records research; [email protected])), in the same way major search-engine crawlers do.
2. We follow robots.txt.
3. We do not work around blocks. If a site refuses our requests, shows a human-verification page, or rate-limits us, we stop. We do not hide who we are, switch to a different identity after being refused, or change IP addresses to get through.
4. We go slowly — typically one request at a time, with pauses between requests, mostly at night (U.S. Central time).
5. If you ask us to stop, we stop. See below.

What we publish

Facts from the records (for example: date, address, permit type, stated project value) and our own short summary of what the record may mean for a supplier, with a link or reference back to the original record wherever one exists. We do not republish news articles.

How to ask us to stop

Email us with the subject line "Stop collection" and the site or portal address. You do not need to give a reason.

[email protected]

• We stop collecting from that site within 1 business day of receiving your email.
• We remove records from that site from Signal's public pages within 3 business days, and confirm to you by email.
• If you would like us to continue under specific conditions (a different schedule, an official API, attribution wording), tell us and we will follow them.

Corrections

If a record we show is wrong or out of date, email us with the page link and we will correct or remove it.

日本語の要約(Signal をご覧になる方へ)

Signal は、市・郡・州などが公開している記録と、雇用主が自ら公開している求人を、ログインを要する領域には立ち入らず、robots.txt を遵守し、当社の身元を明示したうえで、アクセス頻度を抑えて取得します。運営者から収集停止のご要請があった情報源は、翌営業日までに収集を停止します。記録の内容は、元の記録へのリンクからご確認いただけます。