Let's keep this between us

Fat chance.

This is going to be one of those long-quote-short-comment posts that I dislike, but it seems the best way to handle this in this case. The excerpted article is from the Christian Science Monitor for November 10.

The highway is packed as you drive home and then a car swerves in front and cuts you off. You jot down the license plate number as the traffic stalls. When you get home, you log onto the Internet, type the plate into publicdata.com, and up pops the owner's name, home address, and driving record.

New neighbors move in across the street. You wonder how much they earn, how old he is, if they're married or just cohabiting. A few clicks on the county court's website and you're privy to the husband's Social Security number, details about his wife, and the fact that he had a financial spat with a local business.

And it is all perfectly legal.

In the name of "efficiency," counties and municipalities are putting public records online. Yes, the records are public, not private - but before, in order to see them you actually had to go to the county clerk or city hall, which usually would only happen if there was some good reason. Now, anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection can rifle through them at their leisure for reasons good or bad, for idle curiosity, revenge, voyeurism, identity theft, or stalking. And public records can go far beyond name and address.

Divorce decrees and child-custody cases can include accusations and allegations - whether true or not. Sexual-harassment cases can play on damaging allegations about the plaintiff's lifestyle or sexual history. Private medical records - not open to public scrutiny - sometimes end up in court documents, and thus online, if an insurance holder sues over payment claims. "It is a common tactic of companies to threaten to bring highly sensitive medical information, as well as other personal matters, into the case in order to discourage the plaintiff from proceeding," [Beth] Givens[, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse,] notes.

Although some federal laws restrict access to certain kinds of personal data, including some financial data, health records, and records relating to minors, there is a great deal left unprotected. The idea, supposedly, is to promote transparency, but frankly this strikes me as a very poor and very risky way to do it. The idea of public records was to monitor the government, not lay details of our personal lives - including, in a number of cases, Social Security numbers - which are of no proper interest to uninvolved parties open to view.

But some legal analysts suggest the tide of Internet exposure may be hard to turn back. It's a generational thing, says Mark McCreary, an attorney at Fox Rothschild in Philadelphia who specializes in Internet privacy issues. He cites Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO: "If you're online, you have no privacy." ...

Advertisers, marketing companies, hundreds of websites offering - for a price - "hard-to-find info about people" are all pulling their data from public records. Commercial background reports often have the option of monitoring an individual for a year, as their database is refreshed with new public records. A singles resort, for instance, uses recent divorce filings to plump up its mailing list.

All of this is legal. But, as America becomes a "dossier society," privacy advocates question how much of this activity still corresponds to the original intent of government oversight.

My contention is "none at all."

Some states and localities are starting to react. California has passed some laws requiring consumer notification and restricting online access to certain data. Other laws are focusing on the right of individuals to access their own data rather than others'.

State and county governments are also looking at the type of data collected and reviewing whether all the categories are necessary, McCreary says. Other solutions, privacy advocates say, might include regulating the information broker industry by keeping closer tabs on how personal data are used and by requiring more accountability from private investigators.

But the bottom line, warn some privacy advocates, may be that "old-fashioned" privacy - once defined by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as "the right to be let alone" - is becoming an anachronism.

But don't despair, it is possible to fight back, guerrilla-style:

Virginia resident Betty "BJ" Ostergren, a self-described privacy watchdog, has been following her own state's push toward digitizing public records. "I think it's a stupid, dangerous, reckless venture," she charges.

Two years ago she mailed hundreds of letters to individuals in King William, Scott, and Warren counties. Each person received a list of personal details about him or her that Mrs. Ostergren had culled from the Internet. The response was outrage, she says. Within 24 hours of her letters arriving "all three [Virginia] counties shut down their sites," she says. Two still remain offline.

Now, there is an unsung hero.