Google Pushes To Open Public Records

AlHunt sends us an AP story on Google's push to help states open up their data to online searchers. Google is going about this in an evenhanded way, according to the story, and the results of its labors — initially in Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia — will be available to all search engines, not just theirs. The move is being hailed by groups such as OpenTheGovernment.org, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center expressed concerns, given what they call Google's "checkered past" with regard to privacy on the Internet.

Googles "checkered past"? What mine?

[Richard McBeef]

Now not only are my stupid usenet posts from the early 1990s going to be available, so are my other "youthful indescretions". Great.

It's gotta be better than Australia..

[QuantumG]

Where our government claims copyright on court cases and findings and other public documents. If you want a document, you order it from Go Print [qld.gov.au]. There's libraries in our court houses, like most the rest of the civilized world, but if you go in there in a pair of jeans the librarian will come over and ask if they can "help" and then ask you if you are a law student, and then ask you if you are a lawyer, and then ask you to leave.

Thankfully you can still read the laws without paying the government for a copy of them.

Re:Privacy

[daeg]

There are many laws that dictate the length of public records. Repealing those laws and correcting existing laws will reduce complexity and overall reduce cost over time.

One of the parts of a real solution is something like 'cvs blame' for every single word in every single law passed. Want to know who added every single phrase. Yes, even punctuation, grammar, spelling, and capitalization changes should be tracked, after all, "I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse" is distinctly different than "I helped my uncle jack off a horse".

Re:So when...

[Fatal67]

Snow Crash.

Hiro was a "freelance stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley, Virginia"

How is this different from

[Nephster]

The Wisconsin Circuit Court Access (WCCA) [wicourts.gov] ?

That site allows you to search any court case in WI. There are limitations - minors often aren't on there, and certain other cases are blocked from public access as well. But overall this has been a *good* thing.

Hell, I even once ran a girl I had started dating through there - and turned up three shoplifting convictions.

We always went to her place after that... :-)

Re:Better Idea - Word Limits

[lilomar]

Something like this [downsizedc.org]?

Re:It's gotta be better than Australia..

[quarrel]

Gee, or you can grab them off the web for free:

AustLii [austlii.edu.au]

Still isn't complete, but they're adding past cases to it very regularly.

I suspect that this is true in the rest of the western world, but legal systems were hardly ever going to be the first to embrace technology.

Note they're robots.txt (this is just the most important snippet):

# 14 August 2003 - unrestricted access to everything except cases
User-agent: *
Disallow: /au/cases/
Disallow: /au/other/HCATrans
Disallow: /au/other/hca/
Disallow: /nz/cases/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /do/
Disallow: /do2/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forms/
Disallow: /fcgi-bin/
Disallow: /rsjlibrary/rciadic

Apparantly they got complaints when people would egosurf and find their names from former court cases... (or their employer would etc etc) So they've "fixed" it.

Ok, ok, so its coverage of lots of local courts leaves a lot of holes, but its getting there. I think that the system, rather than any conspiracy, is more likely however. The idea that our government gets copyright in things it produces isn't inherently evil.

Projects like google's here though sound great. If they're sharing the data then all should be above board. It will most likely have the effect of forcing governments to collect LESS about us, as we'll all be so much more aware of what is out there.

--Q

OK, this is very important

[hey!]

While the social security number issue is important, it barely scrapes the surface when it comes to the dangers of doing this.

Open government records exist to ensure government accountability.

For example, court records exist to prove that the operations of the courts are fair, impartial and proper.

However, when incorporated into private databases (in this I include search engine indices) the character of these records changes tremendously. For example, if you are sued by your landlord, future landlords will be able to search the records, using it as an intelligence database on you, not a record of the operation of the government. Likewise, if you had a disgruntled employee who files complaints about alleged violations of state regulations, then potential employees and investors could be deterred from doing business with you.

Placing public records in private datasets alters the nature of the records.

The problem is that in the US, the legal notion of privacy is broken. It was broken by technology.

In the US, we have a libertarian notion of privacy that is based on some simple dichotomies: public/private, disclosed/undisclosed. Information is either of a public nature, in which case it is fair game to ferret out and publish, or it is of a private nature, in which case you are protected from intrusion. It is either undisclosed, which means that if it is of a private nature it is safe, or it is disclosed, in which case anybody who has the data in hand is welcome to publish it to the world. The only exception are those who have a specially recognized duty of confidentiality, such as doctors and lawyers.

The reason that this is a libertarian notion is that it seeks to preserve the freedom of anybody who receives data to do whatever they please with it. That is why when you give your name and address to a vendor, that vendor can turn around and sell that information, as well as information about what you have purchased, to somebody else. While US law forbids using this information in a credit report, it does not clearly forbid using it for investigative purposes such as a background check. Even if you construe a usage of this information as a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, since it is not part of your credit report, you have no way of knowing that it is being used in a background check or by identity thieves or stalkers.

Our notions about privacy tend to be centered around the concepts of non-disclosure, but the issue of privacy is much deeper. Privacy, in my view, is the right of the individual to choose and act autonomously without unreasonable interference by outside parties. Limiting informational privacy to protection of non-disclosed facts falls far short of protecting what we expect privacy to secure, which is nothing less than individual liberty. Nowhere is the threat to individual liberty greater than in the use of government records for purposes other than ensuring the proper operation of government. As an individual, you are not free to avoid appearance in such records. If you are sued, your name, address, and information about your doings goes into a public record. This is true even if you are subpoenaed. What is worse, individual bits of data about you can be assembled from various public record sources to create a picture of your private life, even if no single fact in isolation reveals much.

In 1972, the US Department of Health Education and Welfare published a report called "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". It was a very early look into the impact of computer record keeping on privacy. The report, started under Secretary Elliot Richardson, recognized the privacy dangers inherent in using data for purposes other than. Richardson, whose integrity and impartiality was widely admired on both sides of the isle, left his position in HEW to take over as Attorney General during the mushrooming Watergate scandal, and he was replaced by Caspar Weinberger, known to current generations as an early