This post clarifies some thoughts from my last. When I speak of public records, I’m not talking about personal information – necessarily.
I picked up a list of registered voters from the Hamilton County Board of Elections. It lists your name, address, phone number, party affiliation (within the confines of our current political structure) and the date of your last vote. Sure. It’s election season. You knew that information was public.
What about the information attached to the registration of your dog?
That list has your name and address as well as the name and breed of your dog. Even though this is public information available to anyone, it has been (weakly) argued that the information should not be made available.
You can find the information neatly displayed in a map on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website. The argument against making this information THAT public was that a burglar may enter your home without fear of your beloved protector because he would be able to call them by name.
You can search through other types of public records on the Enquirer’s website, but there are many, many more. Most can be found with a little digging in the right corners of the web, but not all.
The Ohio Department of Education releases a lot of data, but it maintains much more than it releases. They keep track of everything about everybody – literally.
Every student is assigned a student ID number in an attempt to maintain their privacy and tracked throughout their entire school career. Every teacher is graded on the performance of those students and every school is evaluated on the performance of their teachers. And it’s all about testing.
When suspicions of cheating swirled, according to a local reporter that covers education, USA Today fought for more than a year to obtain the information they needed.
So public records inevitably contain information about individual members of the public that can also be useful to the public (and watchdog reporters). What are your feelings on public records? Should it be required that all public records be easily accessible?
My mind explodes when I think about how much information is out there.
Open Missouri lists all of the public records that are not easily accessible, just for their state. David Herzog, the founder of the organization, said it took a small team one year to determine what information is maintained by most of their agencies, which isn’t available online. Not all agencies responded to their requests.
They didn’t fight for the information like USA Today because, he said, he didn’t think they should be doing the government’s job.
Digging Data 