Data sources and attribution
Last updated 29 July 2026
Every figure in 2nd Sight traces to a public record. This page names each source, the terms we are relying on, how often it refreshes, and — the part most pages like this leave out — what we pass on to customers and what we keep internal.
When each source last refreshed
Licence data and the Google-derived fields run on different cadences, so they carry separate timestamps. Collapsing them into one "last updated" would imply the monthly fields are as fresh as the daily ones.
- Chicago licenses
- never
- Google enrichment
- never
The sources
Business Licenses
City of Chicago open data portal · Refreshed daily
- Terms:
- Open data, free to use with attribution
- What we pass on:
- Displayed and included in purchased reports
Food Inspections
City of Chicago open data portal · Refreshed daily
- Terms:
- Open data, free to use with attribution
- What we pass on:
- Displayed and included in purchased reports
Property characteristics
Cook County Assessor · Periodic
- Terms:
- Open data, free to use with attribution
- What we pass on:
- Used to derive floor-area estimates; underlying records not republished
Places data (business status, ratings, reviews)
Google, accessed via Apify · Refreshed monthly
- Terms:
- Google's Places API policies allow place IDs to be stored indefinitely but do not permit pre-fetching, caching or storing other Places content, and require Google attribution wherever that content is shown
- What we pass on:
- Used to determine whether a business is still trading; we show a derived open/closed signal and a coarse price band, with Google attribution
- Open question:
- Our current architecture stores Places-derived fields (status, rating, price band) between monthly refreshes, which goes beyond the place-ID exemption. The compliant shape is to keep the place ID — expressly allowed — and re-derive the rest on read. Tracked as LEG-06; it changes the pipeline, not just this page.
Restaurant inspection history and liquor licences
NYC DOHMH and New York State Liquor Authority · Archived weekly (New York is not yet a live market)
- Terms:
- Open data, free to use with attribution
- What we pass on:
- Not displayed to customers yet
Franchise Disclosure Documents
Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions · Per filing
- Terms:
- Public filings, free to access
- What we pass on:
- Figures are quoted with the filing year and franchisor named
Commercial listing asking rents
Third-party commercial listing sites · Periodic
- Terms:
- Site terms generally prohibit scraping and redistribution
- What we pass on:
- Internal calibration only. We publish broad rent-per-square-foot bands that cannot be traced to any individual listing, and never republish a listing, its address or its asking price
- Open question:
- LEG-06 is deciding per source: licence it, replace it with a permitted source, or keep it as an internal calibration input that is never displayed or resold.
Two questions we have not settled
2 of the sources above carry a terms question we are actively reviewing with counsel rather than one we have answered. They are marked as such. We would rather show you an open question than a confident claim we cannot support.
Where a source's terms restrict redistribution, our default is to use it as an internal calibration input and publish only broad derived bands that cannot be traced back to any individual listing — never the underlying record. If a review concludes we cannot use a source even that way, we will replace it or drop the feature that depends on it, and say so on this page.
Corrections
Public records are wrong more often than people expect: a licence stays active for months after a restaurant closes, addresses get transposed, and a single storefront can appear under three business names. If a figure about an address you know is wrong, tell us from the report itself — the correction reaches the same data everyone else's report is built from, not just yours.
City and county data is used under the open-data terms of the publishing agency. Those agencies do not endorse this product or our interpretation of their records.
Questions about this page? Email hello@use2ndsight.com. Related: Terms, Privacy, Refunds, Data sources, Security, Methodology.