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.

Re:Privacy

[Holmwood]

Fair question. I like privacy.

I also don't like the idea of some bureaucracy's picture of me defining me, especially if it's distorted.

I lean, slightly, to a libertarian perspective. Your mileage may vary; fair enough.

I really don't like the idea in our hyper-sensitive culture of some one (say) being able to look up (and granted, not all of these can be looked up -- at present) my ethnicity, my voting history, or every letter/report/form I've had to file with the government, whether or not I belonged to a gay/straight alliance in high school, or a Christian fellowship club in university. Or whether I asked for the Kosher or the Halal meal on my last airline flight.

These, frankly, are no one's business but my own, my family's and close personal friends.

I see data-mining as an expanding source of derivative information about people, to a disturbing degree.

There certainly are legitimate things (in my personal view) for people to know about. Does someone have a criminal record? Are they a sexual predator? Child molester? Have they been disbarred? What is their credit history (if a lender).

But I don't see increasing governmental information -- even if its universally accessible -- on us all as a uniform positive.

Let me now turn the question back on you. Do you? If so, can you please elucidate?

Re:Privacy

[Holmwood]

As they said in the 60's, 'the personal is the political'. I don't think our two concerns are infinitely far apart.

I admit, my mindset in responding to your question was shaped by TFA -- namely, wide access to lots of information gathered on you.

Nope, I don't like the uses governments have historically found for such information.

I would again point out something that you haven't addressed -- perhaps because you took it as read -- the combination of search engines and datamining seems to raise the stakes. Being able to readily collate disparate data on a single individual is... disturbing.

About 15-20 years ago, IIRC, someone in Ottawa, Canada, dumped a shoebox containing microfiche tax records for 16 million Canadians. That'd be the equivalent of perhaps 150-some million American citizens' tax records.

It got turned in to a journalist. Today? It'd probably be sold for identity theft -- and the records would be digital and would spread like wildfire.

Couple that with an HMO/HCP dataleak and a VISA/MC/Eurocard dataleak... and you've got everything you want to know about millions of people, potentially up to the level of blackmail if your datamining is good enough.

Sure, I agree with you we need to be skeptical -- and very worried -- about what governments are doing. But that isn't the only thing.

Best,
-Holmwood

Porn

[Hao Wu]

Do you think that models and actresses from the 1970s through mid-90s ever imagined their sex scenes would be available for FREE AND EASY download to ANYONE on the planet?

Talk about "youthful indiscretions". That's gotta hurt.

Better Idea - Word Limits

[Shihar]

Maybe we should make a law that there can be no more laws.

You joke, but I could think of a good law that do almost that. How about a law that states that the number of words that can be used to create laws is now fixed at its current levels. So, pretend that you want to pass a law with 10,000 words in it. That would mean that you would need to either remove a law, or reword a current law such that you free up 10,000 words.

What would be the result? Well, I bet you would find government pork would drop like a rock and laws would become much simpler to understand. Shit, need some words to pass the new health care law? Let's axe an old law giving pig farmer subsidies to do anti-terror research. Trying to pass a new tax bill? If you try and make it archaic and full of loopholes you are going to have to go hack up some OTHER archaic and richly worded law... or just write a simple law that makes sense as a normal human can read.

I could see only good things coming out of this.

Very, very bad

[Angst Badger]

I'm sure there will be a steady stream of eager users for stalker.google.com long before it emerges from beta.

I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.

the only way to defeat the encroachment

[misanthrope101]

...is universality. Sort of the same reason some Democrats were pushing for a military draft without as many exemptions--if it applies to everyone, a lot fewer people are willing to go down that road. If everyone's information is available, with no exceptions for being a Senator or CEO of a fortune 500 company or a famous actor or famous conservative talk-show host, then enough important (i.e. rich) people will be opposed to scuttle it and inadvertently protect the privacy of us little people. But if your military record can magically become inaccessible, or the number of times you've been arrested for DUI can vanish, just because you're running for President, then we're screwed because the rest of us will still have no privacy. The only way to defeat the encroachment is to make the loss of privacy universal.