Our Privacy Policy

Effective Date: June 17, 2026
Applies to: Black Cemeteries by kinkofa

This Black Cemeteries Privacy Notice supplements kinkofa’s Privacy Policy. It explains how kinkofa collects, uses, shares, reviews, and protects information connected to Black Cemeteries.

1. What Black Cemeteries is

Black Cemeteries is a public-history and preservation project documenting historically Black cemeteries, burial grounds, burial places, deceased individuals, source evidence, cemetery conditions, and related community history.

Because Black Cemeteries involves public and community history, some approved information may be publicly visible.

2. Categories of information we may collect

For Black Cemeteries, we may collect the following categories of information.

Account and contributor information

• name, username, email address, login information, and account identifiers;

• contributor history;

• submissions, corrections, source links, photos, documents, and comments;

• stewardship requests;

• moderation and review activity.

Cemetery and burial-place information

• cemetery name, alternate names, location, address, county, state, coordinates, condition, access status, cemetery type, documentation status, history, sources, photos, and related notes.

Deceased-person and burial profile information

• name, birth date, death date, burial place, grave location, family connections, biographical details, source evidence, photos, documents, and obituary-derived facts.

Information that may relate to living people

• contributor usernames and account information;

• page steward details;

• family relationships or survivor names appearing in obituaries or submitted sources;

• contact information submitted for stewardship, correction, or support;

• information in photos, documents, or uploaded materials.

Source and evidence information

• source URLs, source titles, publisher names, archive names, funeral home names, cemetery directory references, short excerpts, citation notes, access dates, and confidence or review metadata.

Crawler and public-source discovery information

• URLs crawled or reviewed;

• raw page metadata;

• extracted candidate fields;

• evidence snippets;

• candidate match results;

• confidence scores;

• review status;

• crawl logs and error logs.

3. Sources of information

We may collect Black Cemeteries information from:

• you and other contributors;

• page stewards or managers;

• public cemetery records;

• public archives;

• public websites;

• cemetery directories;

• funeral home or obituary pages;

• government records;

• local history organizations;

• preservation organizations;

• libraries, museums, and historical societies;

• crawler or automated discovery tools;

• kinkofa review and moderation workflows.

4. How we use Black Cemeteries information

We use Black Cemeteries information to:

• document historically Black cemeteries and burial grounds;

• create and maintain cemetery, burial-place, and deceased-person records;

• display approved public records;

• review, moderate, approve, reject, or merge contributions;

• evaluate stewardship requests;

• identify duplicate or conflicting records;

• preserve source attribution;

• maintain Page Status and contribution history;

• improve search, matching, and discovery;

• identify candidate cemeteries and person profiles;

• prevent abuse, fraud, spam, infringement, and misuse;

• respond to correction, removal, privacy, and support requests;

• comply with legal obligations;

• improve kinkofa products and preservation workflows.

5. What may become public

Approved Black Cemeteries records may publicly display:

• cemetery names and locations;

• historical descriptions;

• cemetery condition notes;

• photos and media;

• source citations;

• deceased-person profile information;

• burial information;

• family names represented;

• documentation status;

• page steward username;

• contributor usernames;

• approved contribution details;

• Page Status details.

Do not submit information you are not comfortable having reviewed or, if approved, made public.

6. What remains internal or review-only

The following may remain internal, private, or review-only:

• draft submissions;

• pending contributions;

• rejected contributions;

• request-to-manage forms;

• internal moderation notes;

• candidate records from crawler discovery;

• raw crawl logs;

• confidence scores;

• duplicate-matching notes;

• private account information;

• support communications;

• legal, privacy, or abuse reports.

7. Sensitive historical and community context

Black Cemeteries documents historically Black burial grounds and Black community history. This work may involve information that reflects race, ethnicity, religion, family relationships, geography, community institutions, and historic discrimination.

We use this information for archival, historical, preservation, research, moderation, stewardship, and community-documentation purposes. We do not use Black Cemeteries information to make eligibility decisions, employment decisions, credit decisions, housing decisions, insurance decisions, or other decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

8. Living-person information

Although Black Cemeteries focuses on cemeteries and deceased people, submitted or public-source materials may mention living people.

We may limit, suppress, or remove living-person information where appropriate, especially where information creates privacy, safety, dignity, or misuse concerns.

You should avoid submitting sensitive living-person information unless you have permission or another appropriate basis to submit it.

9. Obituaries

We may use obituary information as source evidence. We generally prefer structured facts, source links, citation details, and short evidence snippets rather than full obituary text.

We may remove or limit obituary-derived information if it raises privacy, safety, copyright, or dignity concerns.

10. Public-source and crawler-discovered data

We may use public-source discovery tools to identify candidate records. Candidate records are not automatically public records.

Crawler-discovered information may be reviewed before publication. We may store crawl metadata, source URLs, extracted fields, evidence snippets, match results, and review status.

We do not knowingly use crawlers to bypass paywalls, login walls, technical access controls, or private systems.

11. Sharing and disclosure

We may share Black Cemeteries information:

• publicly, when records are approved for publication;

• with service providers that help us operate kinkofa;

• with reviewers, page stewards, or administrators as needed for moderation;

• with partners where needed for preservation, research, programming, or community archive work;

• in response to legal process or legal obligations;

• to protect rights, safety, security, and integrity;

• with your consent.

We do not sell Black Cemeteries personal information.

12. Retention

We retain Black Cemeteries information for as long as reasonably necessary for archival, historical, preservation, legal, moderation, security, and operational purposes.

We may retain approved public records indefinitely as part of the historical archive.

We may retain internal review records, rejected submissions, crawler candidates, and source evidence for quality control, dispute resolution, auditability, and abuse prevention.

We may delete or reduce raw crawl data after extracting structured facts, source links, snippets, and review metadata.

13. Correction, deletion, suppression, and dispute requests

You may ask us to correct, delete, suppress, or review Black Cemeteries information.

Because Black Cemeteries is an archival and public-history project, we may not remove all historically relevant or lawfully obtained public information. However, we will review requests involving inaccurate information, living-person privacy, safety, dignity, source attribution, copyright, or disputed stewardship.

Submit requests at:

privacy@kinkofa.com
Black Cemeteries correction/removal form

14. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or limit certain uses of your personal information. kinkofa will respond to privacy requests as required by applicable law.

Some privacy rights may apply differently to archival, public-interest, historical, or publicly available information. We will evaluate requests case by case.

15. Children

Black Cemeteries is not intended for children under [13/16]. Users should not submit personal information from children without appropriate permission.

16. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect Black Cemeteries information. No system is completely secure.

17. Contact

For privacy questions or requests:
privacy@kinkofa.com
legal@kinkofa.com