Accessing Public Records in the Digital Age?

A concerned Anonymous Coward asks: "News.com has a story about what happened last week with RootsWeb. The state of California legally sold them the birth records of all Californians born since 1905, and they put the records online. Our Senator, Jackie Speier, immediately took action to stop the selling of these records in electronic form. Should public records (drivers licenses, criminal records, birth/death records etc...) be this accessible? Is it not hypocritical to make these records public but not easily accessible, or does the level of accessibility matter? Does it matter that they want to make this information easily accessible to big businesses (credit card companies, snail mail spammers) but not to the private citizen? Or should all these records just simply not be public?" There's a difference between "publicly available" and "publicly accessible", and there is something to be said about using this information for evil. How can we balance the two? The records should be available, yes, but only accessible to people who might need it (hint: not spammers and resellers). This issue is currently under debate in New York, as well.

Comments

Fair Information Practices

[BuckMulligan]

The anonymous coward has posed excellent questions on public records. The challenge we face is to make records easily accessible to the public while stopping inappropriate uses. This can be done through fair information practices (notice, consent, access, security, use/collection limitations). In these cases, use limitations are most important for protecting citizens.

Generally, public records are created for government accountability. However, there are no restrictions on use--anyone can use public records for any purpose under the sun. We need to establish appropriate uses and audit logs to catch those use who public records for identity theft, pretexting, and marketing.

The fact of the matter is that many banks and other institutions use mother's maiden name and DOB as passwords for user verification. With that information public, all Californians are at heightened risk for pretexting.

Restricting access doesn't work. When you restrict access, the infomation brokers (who have the resources to send researchers and aggregators to records offices) get the records and citizens don't.