Privacy Policy

How MurderIndex handles data. This is an educational research project; this policy is provided for transparency and is not legal advice.

Cookies

• Essential cookie only. A single session cookie is set only if you sign in to the restricted admin area, so the site can keep you signed in. Ordinary visitors are not set any cookies by this site.
• No tracking. We use no advertising or third-party tracking cookies, and no third-party analytics service. Nothing is loaded from an analytics provider and no identifier is stored in your browser.

Page-view counts

We keep a simple count of how many times each section of the site is viewed, so we can see which records are useful to readers. This is a plain tally kept on our own server: for each day we store a number per page, and a running total per record. We do not store your IP address, user-agent, referrer, or any cookie or identifier alongside these counts, and there is no way to tell from them which pages any individual visitor looked at.

Server logs

Like most websites, the server keeps standard access logs which may include your IP address, browser user-agent, the pages requested and timestamps. These are used to operate the site and to detect and prevent abuse.

Information you submit

If you use the “Suggest amendment” or “Submit additional material” forms, we store the content you submit, any name or email you choose to provide, and your IP address. This is used solely to review, moderate and — if approved — apply your contribution. Providing an email is optional but, as noted on the forms, we may be unable to approve a submission if we cannot contact you for clarification.

Third-party resources

Pages load a small number of static assets (styling, fonts, charting and mapping libraries, and the map data) from jsDelivr and Google Fonts. To serve those files, those providers necessarily receive your IP address as part of the request. They are not used to set cookies or track you on this site. No other third parties receive your data.

Information in the database

Records describe individuals documented in public-domain sources (overwhelmingly convicted and/or historical cases). See the Terms & Conditions for accuracy caveats and how to raise a concern about a record.

Retention

Logs and submissions are retained only as long as needed for the purposes above.

Your choices

• You can browse the public site without accepting any cookies.
• You can clear cookies and local storage at any time through your browser.
• You can block third-party requests using your browser or an extension, though some features (charts, the world map, fonts) may then not display correctly.

This policy may be updated from time to time.