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Canadian Privacy Czar Wants To Anonymize Court Records On the Web
An anonymous reader writes "The web is evil and must be stopped — because it makes public information too public. So says Canada's Privacy Commissioner. She wants to 'anonymize' court records by substituting initials for names.
The Toronto Star quotes Jennifer Stodddart as saying 'The open court rule, which is extremely historically important, has now become distorted by the effect of massive search engines... Court decisions and other related documents, which contain all sorts of personal information, are now searchable worldwide, which was never intended when openness rules were devised.'
All Stoddart's proposal would do is erect a minor barrier for the techno unsaavy. Researchers, reporters, geeks, and most teenagers would still be able to figure out who's who.
Stoddart seems to believe only in an abstract notion of freedom and access — but only as long as not too many people use it and no one suffers. She cites the case of someone who is upset at reading the divorce case of her parents.
Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?"
Well, here's something: don't read it!
"Wow, reading about the war between Georgia and Russia, the parliamentary fire in Eqypt, and bombings all over the world is really depressing. If only there was a law against printing all that uncomfortable stuff, my life would be a lot better!"
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but this summary really sounds like a bunch of hyperbole. Who cares if the personal data is anonymized? Sure, security through obscurity doesn't work, but it does filter out a lot of noise anyways, and in the end, names aren't whats important in reviewing cases, it's the decision and the reasoning behind the decision that matters.
But the way this summary was written, you'd think the end of democracy is near.
Then you end it with "Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?"?
Is this honestly how a debate will go these days? It's bad enough that canadian politicians bicker like little children, we don't need the high school like ultimatums or multi-anti-your-opinion-choice questions from the populace to throw into the mix.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Sorry, responding to my own post.
Upon thinking about the issue some more, this reminds me of the case of Daryl Clark. He was arrested for masturbating in his own house, but he was visible to the neighbours. This was a case which went before the Canadian Supreme Court, but none of that is important.
What is important is the neighbours watched him for 10 to 15 minutes at times using binoculars and a telescope before deciding they don't like what they see and calling the police.
I don't know about you, but I don't have malware on my computer popping up divorce cases on screen. I don't get spams saying "Enl4rge your PEN!S, 4nd h3re's some d1v0rce pap3rs t00!" At some point this lady either decided she was going to look for the papers, or if turned up on Google, decided she was going to read the papers. She didn't like what she saw, and now is trying to change the world (for the worse) to suit her.
Ironically, the court papers in the Daryl Clark case name the complainant only as "Mrs. S."
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Neither. If I was ever falsely accused and taken to court for something really unsavoury then having my name come up against the charges would not be such a good thing.
Is it the records of the court case itself or the names of the people involved that is the important thing here? I'd say the former, in which case anonymising the names of those involved seems like quite a reasonable thing to do.
Anonymising of email addresses is done all the time on publicly archived mailing lists and I don't hear an outcry about that.
Considering that court rooms are generally open access, I don't see how bottling the information up later on is likely to be a good idea.
Hiding court records except on a case by case basis when absolutely necessary is a menace to society.
One of the major points of a free society is the openness of courts. The reason is that it's a lot harder to engage in shenanigans if you know that the public has the ability to attend the proceedings or view the record.
Open but not "lying in the open" access to information is an important concept. In the United States, many privacy-related things are left lying in the open - who's in prison, who's been arrested, the declared value of your home with the municipality. These can all be viewed online. In Canada, these are generally considered public information as well, but you can't access them that easily. They're not in a public database on the web. You have to write a letter or fill out a form and mail it in.
Although information in court records is considered public, it has in every practical sense stayed obscure until fairly recently, because few people besides reporters would wander into a courthouse basement to read it, Stoddart said.
There is a difference between in a basement in the public archives and online. When you make it easier to access a person's private information, you're more likely to have people doing look-ups for trivial/unjustifiable reasons. An employer doing a search on Google for an employee's name now might find a court appearance of the employee from several years ago for drug possession. The employee may have been acquitted, but that's still going to tarnish the employer's reputation of the employee. That's important, especially when discriminating based on arrest or court appearance record is illegal in Canada.
The Canadian legal system generally recognizes that access to such information in certain cases is extremely important. It is also recognized that publishing such information online in an easily accessible form could cause a lot of harm to a person's right to privacy. If it's important enough you need to know, it should be important enough for you to haul your butt to the local archives or paying the fee to have a copy mailed to you.
I'm sure to many Americans it would seem a bit nutty, the idea of making it "sorta" hard to access public personal information, but it fits in well with previous thought on privacy in Canada.
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Considering that court rooms are generally open access, I don't see how bottling the information up later on is likely to be a good idea.
Any /. reader should comprehend the difference between some information being available by traditional means, and that same information being available worldwide via web to every data miner.
Tell me, you're not even slightly worried about criminal organizations and foreign intelligence agencies (domestic "homeland security" types probably have full access anyway) and even tabloid newspapers doing data mining court records to find "interesting" potential victims, targets and recruits?
Full online access does create a problem. Many here seem to argue that openness of information is so valuable that abuse, even criminal use should be made easy. I disagree strongly. I feel a person should have full control over what personally identifiable information about him is internationally available in the internet. For example any court text available online should not have any names in it (names replaced by numbers, for example). The full text should only be available in person, or via snail mail for a cost of "shipping and handling".
Actually I think it is a good step forward. The process is what should be transparent, not necessarily the ID's of the people involved. The fact remains is that the presumption of innocence should technically take precedence because some of these cases that get reported in the media end up being false accusations and what not. Therefore, keeping the names of the people involved anonymized UNTIL there is a conviction. After all if you want proof a false accusation can ruin someone's life in this modern era just imagine what would happen if you got accused of child molesting or child porn... Even if you are found innocent (which is not very likely since its an emotionally charged issue and people are more likely to apply guilty until proven innocent in their mental process), your name is out there, attached to such a case so you'll probably never get a job again, you'd likely be the target of vigilantes and since you're arrest in the police database you can expect there to be a lot of law enforcement harassment not to mention their records may still list you as a sex offender regardless of the court findings. People have been falsely accused and gone on to commit suicide as a result.
So, what is your point? Surely, the images of me doing various things at home are theoretically available to my neighbor with good binoculars, who happens to be watching at the right time. Does that mean that it should be also made available to two billion of my neighbors on Internet? If so, is it too much for me to ask that at least I am identified by initials rather than full name?
Aren't *all* people scheduled to be on trial 'innocent'...as in 'innocent until proven guilty'? ...or should that be 'assumed to be innocent until proven guilty'?
I think the point is that the phrase 'innocent until proven guilty' has little meaning to the general public. They tend to assume that "there's no smoke without fire", if they don't just plain assume the person is guilty.
Max.
You are right. A reasonable and informed person (the privacy commissioner) has raised some important issues. She should have the respect she deserves and don't assume that she is a danger, menace or clueless. The summary is way too inflammatory and emotive. The OP wrongly and somewhat offensively implies that this is something to do with freedom of speech or suppression of information. The OP should learn to assume that people in her position are as smart and as altruistic as him or herself.
In fact, she clearly understands and values free speech and open justice or she would have proposed a major barrier that can't easily be worked around. The idea behind the solution she has proposed (make stuff hard to find unless people go looking) is not dangerous, not menacing, and certainly not clueless.
It probably isn't the best solution, because she is not a technical person, and maybe she has a professional bias towards information containment. So if people feel strongly about it, they should demonstrate respect for her and her principles, even if they don't agree that there's a problem, or like the solution.
Despite my UID and this post, I am not new here! (Because of my UID I am not New Here.)