When Public Records Become Really Public
When I took my first look at the data for our Massachusetts campaign finance maps this fall, I nearly jumped out of my seat.
According to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign & Political Finance, my mother had given more than the legal limit to Deval Patrick. It turned out that there had been a credit-card foul-up, the campaign had immediately recognized the error and her money had been returned.
Still, the incident gave me a sense of how some people feel when public records are … well, made public. More and more frequently, information that was nominally public but effectively unavailable is showing up on news sites and blogs.
In general, this growth of data publishing is fantastic. But all this newly accessible data is making some folks uncomfortable. It’s one thing to have your name, address and campaign contributions in a filing cabinet in a state office building. It’s another to have them pop up when you’re Googled.
Earlier this week Derek Willis pointed to a great example of this data-publishing backlash. The Journal-News in the Lower Hudson Valley published the list of permitted gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. Permits are public record, but the owners weren’t used to them being that public, and they made a fuss.
Commenting on the situation, Derek argued that “every media organization has to weigh the benefit of making available public records that can identify individuals versus the potential backlash. Not the backlash against the paper itself … more meaningful for everyone is the backlash against public records laws.”
I’m not so sure. How can publishers make decisions about “making available public records”? Public records should be available.
Plus, media organizations are no longer the only ones making public data accessible. Public information that isn’t published on a news site will eventually show up on somebody’s blog.
As communities begin to understand that public now means really public, backlash is inevitable. Hopefully that backlash will grow into conversations about what should and shouldn’t be accessible to all.
Certainly, conversations could lead to less open data. But I doubt it. Call me quixotic, but I think momentum favors openness.
