Michael Jay Lissnerhttps://michaeljaylissner.com/2012-04-27T17:05:21-07:00Further privacy protections at CourtListener2012-04-27T17:05:21-07:00Mike Lissnertag:michaeljaylissner.com,2012-04-27:posts/2012/04/27/further-privacy-protections-at-courtlistener/<p>I’ve <a href="https://michaeljaylissner.com/posts/2012/01/16/respecting-privacy-while-providing-hundreds-of-thousands-of-public-documents/">written previously</a> about the lengths we go to at CourtListener to
protect people’s privacy, and today we completed one more privacy enhancement. </p>
<p>After my last post on this topic, we discovered that although we had
already blocked cases from appearing in the search results of all major
search engines, we had a privacy leak in the form of our computer-readable
sitemaps. These sitemaps contain links to every page within a website,
and since those links contain the names of the parties in a case,
it’s possible that a Google search for the party name could turn up results
that should be hidden.</p>
<p>This was problematic, and as of now we have changed the way we serve
sitemaps so that they use the <code>noindex X-Robots-Tag</code> <span class="caps">HTTP</span> header. This tells
search crawlers that they are welcome to read our sitemaps,
but that they should avoid serving them or indexing them.</p>