The whole public record. One honest file.

How we search and collect

Where every line in a file actually comes from.

Dossier does not crawl the web for whatever it can find. It runs a fixed pipeline against named public sources, attaches a citation to every claim it keeps, and labels the confidence of everything it can’t stand behind. Here is the whole of it, in order.

1. 01

   You declare a purpose — before we look at anyone

   The purpose gate runs first, before the subject is even looked up. Five purposes are permitted: investment diligence, partnership, introduction, business development, general professional.

   Four are refused outright — employment, tenancy, credit, and insurance — because those are consequential eligibility decisions about a person. An unknown purpose is refused too, rather than assumed. Every decision, accept or reject, is written to an audit record with your stated reason verbatim.

   “Dossier does not serve employment, tenancy, credit, or insurance decisions — this is a structural refusal, not a policy toggle.”

2. 02

   The intake gate decides whether a file opens at all

   A subject qualifies only if discovery finds at least two independent anchors from different classes of source — today that means corporate filings and authored work. One anchor per source: two mentions in the same registry is still one anchor.

   Personal-life signal never counts as an anchor. If the threshold isn’t met, no file is opened and you get a refusal instead of a thin, speculative profile.

   The point, stated plainly in the spec: an envious ex or a fixated stranger cannot get a file on a private person, because there is no file to get.

3. 03

   We query the public record — these sources, by name

   Only registries, filings, and publications that are already public.

   Corporate & registry

   • SEC EDGAR
   • Companies House
   • GLEIF
   • OpenCorporates
   • USPTO
   • IRS Form 990
   • ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer

   Scholarly & identity spine

   • Wikidata
   • Wikipedia
   • OpenAlex
   • Crossref
   • PubMed
   • Semantic Scholar
   • DBLP
   • arXiv
   • OpenReview
   • Zenodo
   • VIAF
   • Open Library
   • Google Books

   Public expression & activity

   • GitHub
   • Hacker News
   • Reddit
   • Stack Exchange
   • Substack
   • Bluesky
   • Mastodon
   • personal sites & RSS
   • Internet Archive

   Clearance — gated, run only on explicit request

   • OpenSanctions
   • CourtListener
   • GDELT

   Evaluated and refused

   • data brokers
   • consumer reports
   • username-enumeration tools
   • scraped private accounts

   The username-enumeration tool cluster was rejected on inspection: it is built on password-reset side channels and violates the terms of every provider it touches. We don’t buy broker files, and we don’t scrape accounts that block automated access.

4. 04

   Identity is resolved before anything is attributed

   A name is not an identity. A candidate profile only attaches to a subject if it points back at something already confirmed — it links to a known domain, reuses a confirmed handle, or names a confirmed alias in its own title.

   Anything that can’t be tied back stays labelled as a lead rather than quietly folded in as fact.

5. 05

   Every claim carries its source — and disagreements survive

   Provenance attaches at collection, not afterwards: each fact stores its source URL, source type, a confidence score, an evidence quote, and a timestamp.

   When sources conflict on the same field, the most recent observation wins and confidence is only a tiebreak — deliberately, so that a stale high-confidence “no match” can never outrank a newer true one. The value that lost still keeps its citation in the ledger.

6. 06

   Every field is state-labelled

   You always know which tier of confidence you’re reading. Nothing is presented flatly as fact.

   • DiscoveredFound in an open source, not yet tied back to this subject. The default for every new fact.
   • CorroboratedA second independent signal points at the subject — but not yet promoted.
   • ConfirmedCross-confirmed to this subject. The only state that earns the verified badge.
   • DisputedSources contest the claim. The value is suppressed; only the fact of the dispute shows.

   The label on the unverified column, verbatim: “Found in open sources, not yet cross-confirmed to this subject — may include namesakes. Shown as leads, not established facts.”

7. 07

   A failed check is never published as a clean result

   This is the rule we are proudest of. Sanctions and litigation lookups return one of three things: a result, no result, or unavailable — and “unavailable” is never allowed to collapse into “nothing found.”

   If a clearance source fails, the file records only that the screening did not complete, and the dossier carries a visible SCREENING INCOMPLETE stamp.

   “sanctions screening did not complete — no conclusion may be drawn from its absence”

   And a name that matches a sanctions list is recorded as a candidate for human review, never a verdict — stored at lower confidence, flagged as needing date-of-birth and nationality cross-validation before anyone treats it as real.

8. 08

   Scout answers follow-ups — or says nothing

   Scout is the analyst on the file. It may only render a claim whose source is an exact member of the set of sources fetched before the model was ever called — no prefixes, no normalisation. An invented or altered citation is dropped, not corrected.

   If nothing survives that check, Scout’s summary is suppressed too. It gets quieter as the evidence thins, instead of more confident.

   Four things Scout will not do, at any clearance level

   • Protected traitsIt will not infer health, sexuality, religion, politics, race, or genetics. It reasons from what the subject has said or done, never from what a model guesses they are.
   • Risk from personalityIt will not predict risk, criminality, or trustworthiness from personality. A name or a profile is never a verdict.
   • Vulnerability strategyIt will not build an approach that keys on financial distress, grief, addiction, cognitive decline, or job loss. The objective is mutual upside, not leverage.
   • Regulated decisionsIt will not advise on employment, tenancy, credit, or insurance — and will not answer around the refusal at the gate.

   A refusal is always a stated reason, never silence.

9. 09

   The subject gets the last word

   Anyone with a file can claim it, correct it, or have it scrubbed. A correction from the subject outranks an inference from us, and the deletion path preserves the record of what was wrongly asserted rather than quietly erasing it.

What a dossier refuses to contain

The most important part of the file is what isn’t in it.

These are excluded structurally — stripped upstream of anything that renders, by three separate passes that prune the data, its provenance, and then walk the whole document again to catch anything the first two missed. No purpose, clearance level, or price unlocks them.

• Family & relativesNo family tree, no partner, no parents, children, or siblings. Household composition is not a business asset.
• Home & mailing addressWhere someone lives is not business information, and it never counts as evidence a person is public.
• Personal lifeRelationships, health, beliefs, and private circumstance never enter a brief.
• Criminal & consumer reportsThe regulated-report line Dossier does not cross — refused in design, not merely switched off.
• Any score or rankingThere is no per-person score, rating, or criminality prediction anywhere in the data model. There is nothing to leak, sell, or misuse.
• MinorsExcluded by policy regardless of what happens to be publicly available.

If there is a file on you

The subject outranks the analyst.

Anyone who appears in Dossier can act on their own file, and a correction from the subject beats an inference from us permanently. Requests are recorded and reviewed — never acted on the corpus automatically.

• Claim

  Verify you’re the subject and take ownership of the file — see everything it holds and where each line came from.

• Correct

  Fix what’s wrong. The correction is recorded, outranks the inferred value, and shows up in Recent Changes.

• Scrub

  Have the file removed — with the deletion itself recorded, so the audit trail of what was wrongly asserted survives.

If you believe there is a file on you and want to see it, write to us and say so. Subject requests are handled by a person, not a form.