Data privacy
This page describes how Case Harvester handles the personal information of the people who appear in Maryland court records. It covers the data we serve. For what this website collects about visitors, see the visitor privacy policy.
Where the data comes from
Every record in this database is public. It comes from the Maryland Judiciary Case Search, where anyone can read the same cases one at a time. Case Harvester adds no private information to the record. It adds structure: the published record in one place, queryable, and kept current.
There is no public search on this site. The public pages show aggregate statistics only, and case-level access requires a license under a data-use agreement.
Whose details are withheld
We withhold personal details for two groups of people: criminal defendants, including traffic defendants, and tenants in eviction cases. For those people, the structured party fields we serve omit names, exact dates of birth, physical descriptions, and street addresses. City, state, and zip code remain visible, as do other fields the court publishes, such as race and gender. When the court record includes both a usable name and a full date of birth, we substitute a stable pseudonym and a five-year range of birth years. A pseudonym is currently available for about 55.2% of protected criminal-defendant rows. Protected records without the required inputs cannot be linked this way. The methodology explains how pseudonyms are made and what they cannot establish.
We also omit residential property addresses from bail-bond and judgment records by default.
Everyone else in a case remains named: police officers, prosecutors, judges, attorneys, landlords, businesses, and agencies. They act in the record in an official or institutional capacity, and studying their conduct is much of what this data is for. The rule in one sentence: withhold the details of the people most exposed to harm if the record is used against them in bulk, and keep institutional and official actors legible so their conduct can be studied.
What redaction does not do
Redaction does not make anyone unfindable, and we do not claim that it does. Any single case, with full names, is a search away on the court's own website. What redaction changes is what a full copy of the database can do: it removes the fields that would let someone process criminal defendants or eviction tenants in bulk.
Court records also contain narrative text, such as docket notes and the terms of orders. Court-authored narrative text remains as published and can mention anyone. Researchers need the full text, and we do not edit the court's records.
Withheld by default
Those structured fields are withheld by default on every license and access method. A justified, project-scoped grant exposes every structured field withheld by the customer redaction policy until its required expiry. Fields used only to operate Case Harvester remain unavailable. Paying more does not unlock the exception.
Records the court withdraws
When a court shields or expunges a case and Case Search stops serving it, we stop serving it too. Those records are left out of every license unless a specific research project is approved for them in writing.
Changes & contact
If this policy changes, we will update this page and note the date. Questions: [email protected].
Last updated: September 3, 2026