Editorial Policy
ObitsDaily lists death notices for towns across the United States as short facts and links every one to the funeral home's own obituary page. We do not write about anyone, and we do not copy obituaries.
What a listing shows
Only facts the funeral home's notice states: the person's name (with a nickname or maiden name when given), age, town and former towns, birth year, date of death, the times and places of services, and the funeral home. Listings are made automatically and appear as soon as a notice arrives. Each fact is compared word for word with the notice it came from, and a person checks new listings and takes down any that are wrong.
What we never publish
Obituary text, photos, survivors' names, home addresses, cause of death, requests for memorial contributions, livestream links or full birth dates. Nothing is offered for sale on our lists.
Where notices come from
From funeral homes only: notices a home sends us, the notification emails a home sends to anyone who signs up for them, and the home's own public obituary pages, which ObitsDailyBot reads slowly and as the home's robots.txt allows. We never take notices from newspapers, other obituary sites, social media or search engines.
Links and visits
Each listing's “Full obituary” link passes through obitsdaily.com/go/ on its way to the funeral home's page. We count each visit for the funeral home and tag the link with utm_source=obitsdaily, so the home can see the visit in its own analytics.
Corrections and removals
If a listing is wrong, or you want it taken down, send a removal request or write to [email protected]. A person reads every request. We aim to act on removal requests within an hour, 7 AM to 11 PM Eastern. A notice we take down leaves every page within minutes.
Privacy
We never sell what you give us or share it for anyone else's use. The services that run the site for us (hosting, the database and the service that sends our email) handle it only to do that.
The morning email
When you sign up we keep your email address, the county you chose, the wording you agreed to, the page you signed up on and, if you came from a campaign link, its tags (the utm_ values and fbclid). Nothing is sent until you confirm from the email we send you, and every email has an unsubscribe link. A confirmation link works for 7 days. A new signup that is never confirmed is deleted 7 days after its link expires, and so is a county you add later and never confirm; the counties you confirmed stay.
Unsubscribing stops every email. We keep your address, marked as unsubscribed, until you ask us to delete it.
So the form cannot be used to flood anyone's inbox, we keep a record of each confirmation email we send (the address in a simplified form, the county and the time) for 35 days.
To have your signup deleted, write to [email protected]. We delete it within 30 days.
IP addresses
We never keep your IP address. When you send one of our forms or follow a listing's link, we keep a one-way, keyed hash of it instead, made with a key that changes every day (for an IPv6 address, from its first half only). It lets us limit how often a form can be sent and count a visit once.
A new signup's hash is cleared when you confirm it, or deleted with the signup if you never do. Once you have confirmed, a county you add later keeps no new hash. A visit's hash is cleared after 2 days, the records that limit how often a form can be sent are deleted after 7 days, and a removal request's hash is cleared 90 days after the request is closed.
Removal requests
A removal request keeps what you send (the link to the notice, your name, email address, relationship and details) and a hash of your IP address made as above. Ninety days after the request is closed, the name, relationship, details and IP hash are deleted. The link to the notice and your email address are kept after that: the link as the record of the request, and the address so the signup form never sends email to it.
Funeral home sources
The emails and pages funeral homes send us are kept privately for 30 days, then deleted. They are never published.
On our pages
Our pages carry no analytics or advertising trackers. The signup and removal forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to stop bots. It loads only when you start filling in a form, and Cloudflare handles what it collects under its own privacy policy.
Data credits
Town and county names and locations come from the U.S. Census Bureau's Gazetteer files and population estimates, and from the U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).
Contact
Write to [email protected]. A person answers every message.