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Ethics And Limitations

Shark attack data can involve injured or deceased people, witnesses, families, and local communities. This API is built for aggregate analysis and education, not for identifying victims or sensationalizing incidents.

Privacy Choices

The public pipeline does not publish victim names, source notes, PDF links, private notes, exact street addresses, restricted-source content, geocode caches, or precise coordinates.

Locations are retained only as generalized public labels useful for regional analysis. Injury descriptions are truncated and lightly redacted, but they should still be reviewed before broad publication.

Data Quality Limits

Historical incident records can be incomplete, duplicated, disputed, mistranscribed, or based on uncertain reports. Values such as species, activity, location, and fatality status should be treated as source-derived labels, not definitive scientific findings.

Interpretation Limits

Incident counts do not measure risk by themselves. Meaningful risk analysis needs exposure data such as beach attendance, water activity rates, seasonality, local reporting practices, and population changes.

Use this API for exploratory analysis, dashboards, teaching, and broad public-interest statistics. Avoid ranking victims, republishing identifying details, or using the data to stigmatize regions, communities, or activities.