Google Pushes To Open Public Records 121
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? (Score:3, Informative)
Porn (Score:4, Interesting)
Talk about "youthful indiscretions". That's gotta hurt.
Re:Porn (Score:5, Funny)
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This is how I read it.. I just love my associative memory, especially combined with lack of sleep.
Freud would have been so proud of me!
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My last post to usenet predates Google by several years. Hell, it even predates deja news which is now Google groups. Deja is/was still the best idea ever, by the way.
So when... (Score:5, Funny)
(Literary reference. Hope I didn't get first post.)
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Hiro was a "freelance stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley, Virginia"
Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let me repeat that and see if I can get around the "we'll tell you how to say what you want to say" filter.
NO MORE LAWS!
As if we don't have enough of the useless things already. All they do is cause problems and criminalize the very things they were meant to protect.
NO MORE LAWS!
It's time to start equilibrating the government. The Federal Government (especially) has done nothing but expand, and expand, and expand, for 200 years. It's time for them to retract, and shrink, and be pruned back u
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Funny)
Welcome to human nature.
Better Idea - Word Limits (Score:3, Interesting)
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 li
Re:Better Idea - Word Limits (Score:4, Informative)
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Abreviating statutory prose is a commendable postulate. A diminished abundance of words will surely result in more lucid legislation.
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My solution would be to make all new laws have an expirey date of no more than 5 years at which point it will need to be re-voted upon. Think that would clog the system? Fuck yes it would, until they start saying "no" to renewing frivilous or outdated laws.
All existing laws should then expire in 20 years unless renewed under the new system. That way we dont have legal anarchy, but we do weed out the old ones quick enough.
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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 uncl
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There are many crazy laws on the books that were intended to curb particular behaviors that no lon
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Title X, section Y, Paragraph Z is hereby amended to read foo
Title X_1, Section Y_1, Paragraph z_1 is hereby amended to read bar
Inser into Title X_2, Section Y_2 is amended by inserting Paragraph Z_2 to read as Baz
etc. ad nausium
Then go look at Title X_527, Section Y_527, Paragraph Z_527 and it read: Title X_X, Section Y_Y, Paragraph Z_Z is amended to r
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Laws are not inherently bad. A well written piece of legislation can unambiguously take powers away from the government.
Wrong (Score:2)
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It passes a logic test, as well: one "lifetime" sho
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Humans are lazy, they'll put all the laws in one measure and pass it at the start of the year, and that's it. Your new system is subverted from within.
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Yeah, like that dumbass law against killing. All it does is make it illegal to stay alive!
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Re:Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the IRS needs to know your income, and the DMV should know whether or not you have 10 recent speeding tickets.
But I find the number of pieces of information that State, Federal, state-funded bodies, and legislative mandates (e.g. corporate information gathering and disclosure pursuant to governmental affirmative action directives) require from you seems to be going up and up.
This is rather disturbing.
Redacting, as the article suggests, is merely a half step. Setting a sunset on how long most information about you is available is a full step, and not collecting the information in the first place is better yet.
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[..]
This is rather disturbing.
Why is it disturbing to you?
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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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. Be
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I think you've got your exchange rate the wrong way round.
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Of course, its a stupid comparison unless you're just trying to establish severity to Canadians. The same shoebox in the USA would still hold the same number of tax records, and whether 50% of the population or not, 16 million upset citizens is a lot.
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Note also that I am refraining from making a snide remark about how we would use a more efficient storage mechanism and get the same percentage of our population into said shoebox. I think I deserve some diplomacy points for t
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So that's where they are.
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Interconnections. (Score:2)
This is, in fact, just what the late and unlamented Total Information Awareness project was all about and what private companies su
the only way to defeat the encroachment (Score:3, Interesting)
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The village has already burned to the ground except for they mayor's house. The fire is heading towards the grain silo. Which should we save?
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Depends, am I the mayor or one of the village people(pun intended)?
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That's my issue with this Transparent Society notion. It's great on paper, but how are you ever going to get actual compliance from the people who run things?
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I don't see a problem (Score:2)
I don't find it at all disturbing if public corporations are required to operate in full public view.
And, frankly, I think it wouldn't hurt if a lot of "private" information were public as well. For example, why shou
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You really want everyone -- that woman who might be looking at dating you, the person phoning you up to get a charity contribution, the telemarketer, the guy who just needs your address, SSN, dob to steal your identity, your co-workers, your kids asking you for a raise in their allowance, the 16-year-old with a drug problem and a crowbar, someone who slipped on a sidewalk outside your house -- to know how much you made every
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We could switch to consumption taxes rather than income taxes. That would not punish saving, and would not require a tax bureaucracy to track how much money you earn.
Also, no state bureaucracy should have access to how many speeding tickets you have. That is something for the courts to see, when they consider whether or not to reduce the cost or throw out your ticket. Some people woul
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I think that would be a great step (even though it would probably cost billions to implement).
That said, it still doesn't do anything about the decades of State & Federal records that are full of SSNs and other 'private' information... which would also cost billions to do something about.
What privacy? (Score:2)
How did she do it? Simple, many of the counties in my area post tax records for land, fully searchable. She simply picked county after county until she got mine. (its not good to have an uncommon last name)
So she not only had my street address she also could approximate my net worth b
It's gotta be better than Australia.. (Score:3, Informative)
Thankfully you can still read the laws without paying the government for a copy of them.
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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:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow
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Everywhere else has the sense to recognise that works produced by the government are automatically in the public domain.
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Uh
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright [wikipedia.org]
As an American I think it's a pretty preposterous system, but then again I think it's ridiculous here in the States that works produced by contractors, being paid by the USG, aren't automatically in the public domain, and they aren't.
God no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:God no! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the privacy problem of public records - the issue is not whether such records are public or not but why they were made public. It was never intended that public records would be harvested by information brokers and marketers and data mined but that it exactly what will happen once easy access is provided to such data.
I don't mind (most) requirements for public records being public but what I do mind is when that data is then used for purposes other than for which it was intended. This is where we need privacy laws. I have no problem for example with having my name, address and phone number in the phone book for public use but I do have a problem when this information is abused by using it in ways that were not intended.
'Public' and 'Accessible' are not the same thing. (Score:2)
All of those things probably should be public - i.e. if a particular party has a particular interest in those records, they should be able to walk down to the county courthouse or town hall or whatever and have access to them.
Historically, records ha
Re:'Public' and 'Accessible' are not the same thin (Score:2)
The cost of accessing each individual record served as a barrier to accessing each record for trivial purposes.
Why is that a problem?
But with technology, that barrier to access can be eliminated. So when accessing public records becomes trivial to do, what happens?
I don't know, you're the one telling the story.
They get accessed for trivial purposes.
Why is that a problem?
For example, hardly a day goes by without me receiving some sort of offer to refinance my home loan.
Why is that a problem?
It's one thing when you suspect election fraud and have to walk down to the courthouse and inspect records; it's another thing entirely when you can run a query or event 200,000 queries and come up with the name and address of every registered voter in the country.
Are you trying to suggest that being able to trivially determine if there has been election fraud is a bad thing?
Just because a record is public does not mean it's a good thing that it can be found on Google.
Why? Can you make an actual argument here or is "it just feels bad" supposed to convince us that nothing should ever change?
Re:'Public' and 'Accessible' are not the same thin (Score:2)
[...]
"Historically, records have been public, but NOT EASILY ACCESSIBLE."
I have a home loan too. I receive at least 1 offer to refinance or to open equity line of credit in my mail everyday.
Seems to me, the information was VERY ACCESSIBLE to obtain.
Off course, its not easily accessible by you and me, we would need to go find the proper county office, and the proper hours of operation of the service, which of course would be during wor
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I don 't own a home yet I get offers to refinance my home weekly. When my car loan was about to hit 3 years I started getting offers to refinance and extend my warranty. I have never voted, yet when i changed counties that I lived in I was suddenly called to jury duty for the first time. I discovered the local county already data mines the DMV looking for new people for jury duty.
What's the difference. companies and governments already data mine the public record. Oh and
Coming soon to google (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fantastic news from a privacy standpoint! (Score:5, Insightful)
This has given people a false sense of security when it comes to government data collation. I don't think most people realize just how much public information this out there that anyone with a few bucks and who knows who to ask can see it. On the flip side, it means there's almost no public benefit from the government keeping the information because it can't be easily collated by a private citizen.
This is the best thing that could happen--let's dump it all out on the net and make it easy to see someone's entire public record. Let's go for complete transparency and let public information really be public information. If the government really is overreaching, the outrage should be enough to throttle them back. And maybe they aren't; maybe this really is in the public interest. Now we can find out. Either way, it's going to force a resolution.
On another positive side note, this'll also gut the cottage ripoff industry that's grown around public records research. You shouldn't have to pay some PI wannabe $$ to walk across the street and meet his records-room friend at the Capitol.
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The only people that bother are exactly the people that probably shouldn't have access to it.
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By and large, I do think anything the government tracks, short of an active investigation, should be available publically. Transparency is an important check; I wish we had it now with the current administration.
If you're concerned about embarrassing or damaging information being fossilized in public r
Here's my idea on how to cure the privacy problem (Score:2)
If you track a person for any reason, you must let that person know you're tracking them and what information you have about them. Even government.
That's all. Beyond that, you just need to let human nature and outrage do the rest. The privacy issue will be sorted out properly in no time.
Re:Here's my idea on how to cure the privacy probl (Score:1)
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In practice, I suspect those admin/handling fees were pulled straight out of someone's rear as "what's the maximum they won't object to?" rather than reflecting any real cost. They're only unreasonable after they've been declared so in court.
Don't worry, you can have both! (Score:2)
You say that like they're mutually exclusive.
Such a project, in reality, would be a giant boondoggle; I can almost imagine all the big IT implementors slavering over their keyboards writing up slick proposals for it. But in the end it would be overbudget, incomplete, behind schedule, poorly designed, and nearly impossible for a sane person to use without cringing, just like 99% of everything that's produced accor
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My hope is that Google is creating/pushing generic access APIs for the current electronic stores of public information, so that anyone can write a search engine (or tool) for it. As much as Google's been disappointing me lately by their new "be juts a little evil" policy, they're probably the guys to do that. Unfortunately, I'm not
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Your current expectations of privacy reflect a misconception that obscurity is somehow the same thing as privacy. It's not and never was. This effort will draw a clear line between what's private and what isn't and correct any misconceptions.
How is this different from (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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This stupid form wants me to know case numbers or people involved.. I just wanna know what copyright cases have been prosecuted in the last year.
So many good applications (Score:2)
ORLY 2? (Score:1, Redundant)
So what? I'll post it again.
While Google pushes to open up public records, they neglect to include the X-Originating-IP, or any information which would help e-mail recipients determine where e-mail came from, on e-mail from Gmail. All Gmail e-mail appears to originate from a 10. IP a
There is no obvious discrepancy. (Score:2)
There is nothing inherantly "public" about the IP address of the computer I happen to be sitting at when sending an email. You might like to have it for some reason but it is arguably private information, not public.
Very, very bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What "do no evil" public image? (Score:1)
Who says it hasn't already? It's not like the Chinese government is exactly open about how many people it "re-educates," and you really have no idea what level of cooperation their mainland subsidiary has with the government. Even if they're not in triple-digits yet, gi
Electronic Privacy Information Center (Score:1)
Google Is Creepy (Score:4, Insightful)
Business records, yes (Score:2)
I'd like to have the name and address of every legitimate business in the United States, for web site legitimacy validation. [sitetruth.com] I've purchased databases which contain an approximation to that information, but that's mostly phone book data, not Government data.
More business records need to be easily available. This varies from state to state now. Corporation records are usually freely available, although a few states (notably Delaware) charge for address information. Every US state has their own format;
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Check out www.infinadyne.com. There is no SLL certificate for that web page. All SSL activity is done through a third party merchant which absorbs all of the credit card fraud we are subjected to - which is considerable. Were we to host
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Actually, that site got a "no rating" because it's listed in the Open Directory in a category that wasn't unambiguously commercial. That's not bad, just neutral. If you get the red circle with the bar through it, that's bad.
If we can find the name and address of the owner of the site on a commercial site, it gets a "?" rating, since that's required for businesses. A green checkmark requires third party verification of business identity, either via SSL or some other source. Right now, as well as SSL ce
easier to mine (Score:3, Insightful)
When will Google open up ? (Score:2)
When will Google be a bit more open about itself ?
It's part of their mandate (Score:2)
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.
Google's mandate is "to organize the world's information". Like it or not, this includes information about you. If there is stuff about you that you don't want Google to know, don't put it on the Internet and don't give it to anyone who could possibly one day leak it to the internet (i.e. th
OK, this is very important (Score:3, Informative)
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
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Truly, I think the key to this argument is "what should I expect to be private?" Ease of collation was always a BS mitigating factor--it was only going to get easier as tech marched on, as anyone since the database was invented could have told you. Obviously, there are a handful of things that -must- be private to make society work, such as medical or legal disclosures to a professional advocate.
But isn't the solution to saying "so and so entity will do evil things with al
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Way to rant.
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Well, we know you can't.