Beyond account data, GDELT Cloud processes a narrow class of personal data about people who are not our customers: individuals who hold, or have held, a public office published by a government or legislature, and individuals named on public restricted-party lists (sanctions, export-control, debarment and similar designations). This data is gathered from the publishing authority's own public rosters and lists, and from Wikidata, by our open-source crawler lane. We rely on the fact that the source is a public record published by a public authority for the purpose of identifying the office-holder or designated party; we do not obtain this data from private sources, data brokers, or compiled commercial databases.
For each such person we store and serve only: a name, aliases, citizenship, a Wikidata identifier, gender, birth year, the offices held with their published start and end dates, and any public-list memberships with their published dates. We deliberately do not store a date of birth, a passport, national-identity or tax number, an address, a birthplace, or any contact detail, even where the public source publishes them. Where a source does publish such a value, the crawler reduces a date of birth to its year and discards every other such value at the moment of writing; a salted one-way hash of the discarded value is kept in a raw, non-served layer solely so the same public record can be recognised across two sources, and that hash never reaches any table the API, MCP or web app read from. No served table has a column that could hold these values, and this is enforced by an automated test on every build.
Public-office and public-designation data is served as analytical context for geopolitical research. It is not a politically-exposed-persons list, it is not a sanctions-screening or KYC/AML service, and we do not make or supply compliance determinations about any individual. Every response from the political-offices endpoints says so.
Retention follows the source. A person's record exists in the product for as long as the publishing authority carries it. When the publisher removes an entry, the current view no longer returns it; a dated removal fact, or the end date of the office, is retained so that a query about a past date remains answerable. We do not use this data for advertising, profiling for marketing, or automated decisions about the individuals concerned.
If you are the subject of such a record and want to ask what we hold, request a correction, or object to the processing, email hello@gdeltcloud.com with the name and public office or list you are asking about. Because every record is a projection of a public source, a correction we make applies to our copy; the publishing authority remains the place to change the underlying public record, and we will tell you which source a record came from so you can do so.