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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?"
I know someone who works in the court clerk's office of my county, and I can rattle off hundreds of examples of this.
One of the more notable ones was a real estate agent who came into the court and was upset that her case, and arrest, for DUI was posted online on the court schedule. Demands were made that this information not be published because the person was worried about how it would affect their reputation. I honestly dont think it ever occured to them to avoid the actual driving while intoxicated to avoid that damaged reputation. Only the publishing of that information was what was the problem.
Closer to home, I had posted a listing of all the court cases of a local real estate agency. Some of them arbitration cases, and some of them small claims cases. All that was posted was an exact copy of the information from the court website. This was up for about 6 months when I received a letter from an attorney DEMANDING I take the information down because it was 'making knowingly libelous claims'.
It gets worse. In the Cease and Desist letter, the demands were for me to turn over my domain names to this company free of charge, or they were going to move forward with criminal charges against me. Needless to say, I ignored the letter. Suprisingly, I never heard from them again. But that might be because I decided to post the nice Cease and Desist letter online that was sent by Caton Commercial. I can only imagine the point at which they realized that it might have been a bad idea to bring MORE attention to what they were trying to keep hidden.
To this very day, simply typing in the company name "Caton Commercial" into Google, returns the courthouse website and schedule with all their cases listed in the #2 spot. The 'streisand effect' is a beautiful thing to watch unfold sometimes. If you doubt the story, you can always type it in and see for yourself.
My court record doesn't say anything other than I was arrested, after that it just drops off. Gave me hell trying to join the army because no one wanted to provide them information on why they dropped the charges.
And I'm sure the court record would say "innocent" on lots of potential employees.
Course I wouldnt employ them. If someones had some drug charges thrown out, then they are less desirable than another potential employee that isn't the sort of bloke whos accused of being a dealer.
I'm sure it will be illegal to discriminate too. Just like the same laws that never seem to force me to have an ugly PA ;)
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I think you missed the entire point of his post.
Fact is that with a choice between the person who went to court for X and was found not guilty, and the person who didn't, the vast majority of companies would pick the person who didn't, even if they were not as suitable for the job as the person who did.
A workaround would be that any defendant found not guilty could request reasonable anonymisation of the court papers presented to the internet. The court proceedings would be available, but an innocent person's life would not be ruined because of the false accusation / poor police work / etc.