A few days ago I was freaking out to discover that along with my phone number and address being available in Google, so was a map with directions to my house sitting right next to my phone number.
I wrote to Google to complain. They replied, in part:
“The intent of all of Google’s services from Websearch to Google Groups to
Google News is to organize and provide *publicly* available information.
Due to the vast amount of data that we aggregate (more than 4 billion web
pages, 845 million Usenet messages, and 880 million images) many
individuals become aware for the first time that their personal
information is publicly available via a Google search.”
This reminds me of what they tell women who wear mini-skirts, low cut blouses and tight fitting clothing. This way of dressing, they’re told, is “inviting” cause for unwanted sexual advances, including rape. If they choose to wear something sexy, they risk their personal safety.
By having a phone number and allowing it to be listed in a phone book, people are “inviting” a search engine to do whatever they want with it. They unknowingly give permission for invasion of privacy.
More and more I’m beginning to understand why people want to own guns.
There are a lot of records that are considered to be public records, but are difficult to get to by most people. These include deeds and liens, court case records - civil and criminal, judgments, and others. These are “practically inaccessible” because you can normally only see them at the county courthouse during normal business hours, or some other place that is difficult for most people to get to.
But what happens once those records go up online? Will people be checking all of their neighbots out to see what their past criminal and civil history is like?
There are other records that are going to be easier to get to as records become available online.
Comment by Bill Slawski — March 18, 2004 @ 12:37 am
And an unregistered gun would be most safe..:)
Comment by Sharondippity — March 19, 2004 @ 12:25 pm
Quite right - although the information may be in the public domain, Google are purposefully engineering it in such a manner as to make the information even more accessible. Are creeps really going to go down to the reference library to work all this stuff out?
Comment by britecorp — July 1, 2004 @ 4:39 am
It really is a tradeoff. In many ways, we often ask for more information being made available to us. But, there are many times where we don’t want a lot of information about us available to other people.
Information that was very hard to get, and required some specialized knowledge, or access to an out of the way office, is becoming easier to get.
It’s not always right though. For instance, I understand that many places are offering to do criminal history checks, but search through public access case file records for that information, rather than trying to get it through police records. The two sets of records are often different. So, there’s not just the possibility of more access to information that was very hard to get, but there’s also the risk of incomplete, or even wrong information.
Comment by Bill Slawski — July 2, 2004 @ 11:19 am