Clear terms for careful research.

Terms of use

CivDIP is an independent research service. It is not a government agency and is not endorsed by a government agency. Official agencies, recorded instruments, and licensed professionals remain authoritative.

The service organizes public-source and customer-provided information for informational research. It does not provide legal, title, surveying, engineering, environmental, appraisal, tax, or archaeological advice. Users must review source dates, qualifications, unresolved work, and cited records before relying on a finding.

Access is limited to authorized users and approved workspaces. Customers are responsible for their users, devices, lawful research purpose, and decisions made from service output. The contracting operator and any negotiated terms are identified in the applicable order or checkout record.

Privacy notice

CivDIP processes account identity, approved-device and session data, workspace membership, case research, uploaded evidence, annotations, review decisions, report history, billing identifiers, support requests, security events, and limited operational telemetry needed to provide and protect the service.

Raw passwords are not collected because customer access uses passkeys. Raw research-query text is not retained in operational analytics. Payment-card details are entered on Stripe-hosted pages and are not stored by CivDIP. Public-site traffic may be measured with Cloudflare Web Analytics.

Information is used to operate customer workspaces, produce and preserve research, enforce access and usage limits, provide support, reconcile billing, prevent abuse, and meet legal obligations. It is shared only with service providers needed for those purposes, with a workspace customer's authorized users, when directed by the customer, or when legally required.

Use the help and corrections form to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal data. Identity or authority may be verified before a request is completed.

Retention and deletion

Active workspace records, evidence, findings, and reports are retained while needed to provide the subscribed service and preserve the customer's research trail. Security, audit, invoice, and consent records may be retained longer when necessary for fraud prevention, dispute handling, accounting, or legal compliance.

After a verified deletion or account-closure request, eligible active data is removed from production systems within 30 days. Encrypted backups age out under the backup-retention schedule and are not restored except for disaster recovery. Data that must be retained for legal, security, billing, or evidentiary reasons is restricted to that purpose.

Before closing a workspace, customers should download reports and source material they are authorized to retain. Deletion is not a substitute for a customer's own records obligations.

Billing, cancellation, and refunds

Checkout and account management use Stripe-hosted pages. Prices, billing interval, included seats, and usage limits are shown before purchase. Access changes only after CivDIP verifies the corresponding Stripe event.

Subscriptions renew automatically until canceled. A customer may cancel through the billing portal, and paid access ordinarily continues through the end of the current billing period. Recurring charges are generally nonrefundable except where required by law. Duplicate charges, billing errors, and service charges made after an effective cancellation will be corrected or refunded after verification.

Failed payments may cause access to be limited or suspended. Refunds, disputes, or loss of good standing may end promotional or founding-price eligibility. Billing questions and refund requests may be submitted through the help form.

Service, support, and corrections

CivDIP targets 99.5% monthly availability for the standard service, excluding scheduled maintenance, upstream official-source outages, customer systems, and events outside reasonable control. This target is an operating objective, not a service-credit commitment unless a signed order says otherwise.

Support, incident reports, access recovery, privacy requests, and source or report corrections use the help form. Reports show source provenance, capture dates, review state, and unresolved work. Confirmed corrections are documented in the case and, when appropriate, in a new versioned report.

Source coverage changes as agencies publish, move, restrict, or remove material. A failed or unsearched source is treated as unresolved, not as proof that no record exists.

Acceptable use

Customers may use CivDIP for lawful property, planning, development, due-diligence, and related professional research. They may not use it to harass, discriminate, evade access controls, discover restricted sensitive sites, upload malware, interfere with the service, misrepresent CivDIP as an official government record, or violate a source's terms.

Automated harvesting, bulk extraction, credential sharing, systematic replication, resale of the compiled research corpus, and attempts to bypass workspace or usage boundaries are prohibited. Public records remain available from their official custodians.