Well, certainly it’s pretty easy to “organize your own community around the issues that are important to you” when you can look up your neighbors’ info on devalpatrick.com (the new Massachusetts governor’s personal website). Yes, it’s easy to find information on most people. On others, not so easy. (yes you can find me but maybe not my roommate).
The explanation that
www.devalpatrick.com also believes strongly in protecting people’s privacy. Data on this site is limited to ONLY data that is now publicly available at any number of locations, including city and town halls, and websites. The site further limited data by eliminating specific street address numbers.
Is a bit hollow. Public can be too public when it’s combined with online access, the ability of anyone to scrape the information and combine it with commercially available data, and the like.
This issue - the online availability of public, yet sensitive, records - has been around for a long time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to the governor or his committee that a whole lot of people believe that technology <> lack of privacy. There are right and wrong ways to put public information online, and this was the wrong way.
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