Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 19, 2023

This Privacy Policy applies to the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego (“San Diego Superior Court”, “SDSC”, “We”, “Our”, “Us”) and all of its branches and departments. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and share the personal information that we gather on our website at www.sdcourt.ca.gov, any court public facing application, and any court vendor-hosted case information portal (collectively, “Website”). By continuing to use our Website, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy.

WHAT THIS PRIVACY POLICY COVERS

This policy covers how SDSC treats personal information that we receive, including information related to your past use of certain court services. Personal information is information about you that is uniquely identifiable such as your name, residential address, email address, or phone number.

WHAT TYPES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

Information You Give Us. You may give us information by signing up for an online account, entering information through our online forms or surveys, or contacting us by phone for information.

The categories of information include:

  • Contact information, such as name, address, location, email, and telephone number
  • Online identifiers, such as IP address, cookies, username, and password
  • Professional, employment, or education information, such as copies of your resume or CV and any other information required to verify your qualifications, for recruitment purposes
  • Social media information, such as social media handles, content and other data shared with us through third-party features that you use on our Website and other service (such as apps, tools, payment services, widgets and plug-ins offered by social media services like YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter) or posted on social media pages (such as our social media page or other pages accessible to us)
  • Financial information, such as credit card information, for making payments online

***Under California Rule of Court, rule 1.201, to protect personal privacy and other legitimate interests, parties and their attorneys must not include, or must redact where inclusion is necessary, the following identifiers from all pleadings and other papers filed in the court's public file, whether filed in paper or electronic form, unless otherwise provided by law or ordered by the court:

  • Social security numbers. If an individual's social security number is required in a pleading or other paper filed in the public file, only the last four digits of that number may be used.
  • Financial account numbers. If financial account numbers are required in a pleading or other paper filed in the public file, only the last four digits of these numbers may be used.

Information We Automatically Collect. Like many website operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Website.

This includes Log Data, such as your computer’s Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics, and whether you reached our page via a social media or email campaign. This information may be collected via several technologies, including cookies, web beacons, clear GIFs, canvas fingerprinting and other means, such as Google Remarketing and Facebook Pixel.

You can control cookies in your browser to enable or disable them.

Information We Collect From Third Parties. If you access our Website through third parties (e.g., Facebook or Google), or if you share content from our Website to a third party social media service, the third party service will send us certain information about you if the third party service and your account settings allow such sharing. The information we receive will depend on the policies and your account settings with the third-party service.

HOW DO WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We may use your personal information as follows:

  • To provide you with the services on our platform, including online case access, online services for jurors, traffic tickets, and to contact you in order to alert to you an impending court appearance or some other issue that we feel may be important to your court-related matter
  • To analyze Website usage and improve the services offered
  • For project planning and troubleshooting problems
  • To provide you with employment opportunities
  • For detecting and protecting against error, fraud or other criminal activity

HOW DO WE SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Affiliates and Service Providers. We share your information with our third-party service providers and any subcontractors as required to offer you our services.

Third Party Links and Websites. Our Website may contain links to and from the websites of third parties. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any data to these websites.

Additionally, because we do not control linked websites, we are not responsible for the information on linked websites. In addition, the content of a linked website may change without our knowledge of the change.

Disclosures required by law. We may be required to disclose your data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet law enforcement requirements. We may be under a duty to disclose or share your personal information in order to comply with any legal obligation, to enforce or apply our terms and conditions and other agreements, to protect our rights, property, or safety, or the protect the rights, property, or safety of others. This includes, but may not be limited to, exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection.

HOW DO WE RESPOND TO ‘DO NOT TRACK’ SIGNALS?

Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that users can set in certain web browsers. DNT is a way for users to inform websites and services that they do not want certain information about their webpage visits collected over time and across websites or online services. We do not recognize or respond to browser-initiated DNT signals, as the Internet industry is currently still working toward defining exactly what DNT means, what it means to comply with DNT, and a common approach to responding to DNT.

CONFIDENTIALITY AND SECURITY

We strictly limit access to personal information about you to those employees who we believe reasonably need to come into contact with that information to provide assistance to you. We have physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to protect personal information about you. Except as otherwise stated herein, we do not give it to any other public or private organization for commercial purposes or otherwise. However, please be advised that if you communicate a threat or a message that describes or promotes unlawful activity, the court will share it with law enforcement.

No website, application, or transmission can guarantee security, however. While we have established and maintain what we believe to be physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us.

COOKIES

To make our Website and services work properly, we sometimes place small data files called cookies on your device. A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer, tablet, or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, shopping cart, or other preferences) over a period of time, so you do not have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.

Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics. We use the information we get from Google Analytics only to improve this Website. We do not combine the information collected through the use of Google Analytics with personally identifiable information. Please refer to Google’s Privacy Policy for more information. You may also choose to download the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

POLICY CHANGES

We may change our Privacy Policy at any time. We encourage you to periodically review this Privacy Policy to ensure you are familiar with the most current version.

QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, E-MAIL

We appreciate questions or comments about this privacy policy or our Website, although we cannot respond to each of them. You can address questions or comments about our Website to our Webmaster. Any email should be submitted through your email service provider; you cannot submit email directly through this Website. If you voluntarily provide us with personal information, as in an e-mail with a comment or question, you should know such communications become the property of the court for all purposes and without restriction on use.