Census Attribution Notice

The Census attribution notice is a fixed sentence, not a courtesy credit. The Census Bureau Data API — including the CBP / Economic Census / Wholesale Trade record — requires displaying "This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau" in any service built on it. The Available APIs record adds two more ToS conditions: it prohibits "using the data alone or combined to identify any person, household, business, or other entity," and it "prohibits modifying content while claiming Census provenance." So the notice travels with three obligations — display the disclaimer verbatim, do not re-identify, and do not alter the data while still attributing it to Census.

Skip the notice and a Census-built product is out of Terms of Service even though the underlying data is commercial delivery terms. The same ToS prohibits using the data alone or combined to identify any person, household, business or other entity, and bars modifying content while claiming Census provenance. For dashboards built on County Business Patterns or the Economic Census, these clauses bind the product, not just the download.

Use these checks before you rely on a source's treatment of this term:

1. Paste the exact sentence — "This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau" — into the product UI verbatim, per the CBP/Economic Census/Wholesale Trade terms_notes.
2. Audit any transformation that keeps Census attribution: the ToS prohibits modifying content while claiming Census provenance.
3. Check whether your use case identifies entities, since the ToS bars using the data alone or combined to identify any person, household, business or other entity.
4. Ask vendors which Census record they build on and whether the notice is included in their white-label output.

Where to see it in context: automotive-parts-equipment data, consumer-staples-merchandise-retail data.

• census-api-key — the free credential for the same API whose Terms of Service mandate the notice.
• title-13-confidentiality — the confidentiality law behind the ToS prohibition on identifying people or businesses.
• us-government-public-domain — the public-domain status that coexists with — and does not waive — these ToS conditions.
• public-domain-government-data — the broader family of federal data where service terms sit on top of public-domain rights.