MCP Server Privacy Policy
This section explains what the Maryland Community Compass Model Context Protocol server receives, retains, and shares with third parties — and how that compares to what your AI client vendor does with the same conversation.
Last Updated: 08/13/2026
The Maryland Community Compass operates a Model Context Protocol (“MCP”) server that exposes a subset of the Compass website’s public data through the open MCP standard, so external AI clients — such as Claude Desktop, the Claude application programming interface (“API”), or third-party agent frameworks — can use this data to answer questions about Maryland parcels, incentive programs, and community-planning documents on the user’s behalf.
This Privacy Policy describes what data the MCP server receives from calling AI clients, what data it retains, which third-party services (if any) it invokes, and the boundary between what information the State handles and what information the calling AI-client vendor handles. It complements the umbrella Maryland.gov Privacy & Security policy and the terms of use in the Compass Website Terms of Service, Section 9.
1. What the MCP Server Receives
To perform a lookup, the MCP server receives only the tool arguments the calling AI client sends — typically an address, latitude and longitude, a search term such as an industry or county, or a program identifier. The MCP server does not receive the surrounding conversation the AI client is having with its user; only the specific arguments needed to run the requested tool.
You should not send sensitive personal information (Social Security numbers, financial-account numbers, medical information, or similar) as an MCP tool argument. There is no legitimate MCP tool that requires such data, and any sensitive input would be treated the same way as an ordinary lookup argument.
2. What the MCP Server Retains
The MCP server does not retain per-user conversational data. Specifically, the State does not build or maintain a long-term record of which questions were asked through the MCP server, what tool arguments accompanied them, or what results were returned. This is a narrower posture than the Compass website’s on-page AI Features, which do log per-turn telemetry for quality review; the MCP surface is deliberately read-only, stateless, and low-retention.
The State collects aggregate usage analytics on the MCP server — for each tool invocation, the tool name, request timestamp, response duration, ok/error status, and, on errors, the error class — to monitor availability, measure traffic, and detect abuse. Aggregate analytics do not identify individual users, do not preserve tool arguments, and are used solely for capacity planning and operational integrity. Aggregate-analytics records are retained for up to one year.
Standard web-server logs generated by the hosting infrastructure (source IP address, timestamp, HTTP method and path, response status, user-agent string) are retained indefinitely by the State’s cloud provider. These logs are used to support security incident response and abuse investigations and are not correlated to any user identity by the State.
Third-party services invoked by MCP tools. The geocode_address MCP tool submits the caller-supplied address string to the Mapbox geocoding API to resolve it to geographic coordinates. Only the address string is transmitted; no other tool input, no surrounding conversational context, and no user identifier accompanies the request. No other MCP tool transmits any input to a service outside the State of Maryland.
No profiling or training. No data received by or generated on the MCP server is used to profile individual users or to train any machine-learning model, whether operated by the State or by any third party.
3. The Role of the AI Client
Every MCP request is initiated by an AI client that the user has chosen to install and configure — for example, Claude Desktop, an editor extension, or a custom agent script. The State is not the operator of these AI clients and has no visibility into how they log, retain, or transmit your conversations with them.
Your MCP-side privacy posture is therefore governed by two separate policies: this Privacy Policy, which covers what the State receives and retains on its own MCP server, and the privacy policy of the AI-client vendor you use, which covers what that vendor does with your conversation, its context, and any tool calls it decides to make. You should review the AI-client vendor’s policy before connecting it to any MCP server, including this one.
4. Contact
For questions about the MCP server’s data handling or to report a suspected privacy incident or a security vulnerability, contact compass@maryland.gov.