Opt-out & takedown

Stable URL: https://policy.publicvcons.org/opt-out

PublicVCons publishes public-domain US federal proceedings. Members of Congress and federal officials speaking in their official capacity are part of the public record and are generally not removable. The opt-out path exists for documented privacy or legal grounds — for example a private citizen witness, or material that should not have been public.

How to request

Email opt-out@publicvcons.org with the vCon UUID (shown on its page), the specific segment or party, and the privacy or legal basis. Acknowledgement target: 3 business days; decision target: 15 business days.

What happens when a request is honored

The vCon is redacted (the affected segment/party removed or masked) and a deleted_or_redacted (or amended) lifecycle statement is added and anchored in the SCITT log. History is not silently rewritten: the chain records that a redaction occurred, when, and over what hashes — so the action itself is verifiable without disclosing the removed content. See /verify.

Scope

Removal from the PublicVCons corpus does not affect the underlying primary source (e.g. the National Archives or an official committee channel), which PublicVCons does not control.