Whatever comes to mind, and then the interesting directions that thought will take you on the web.

Monday, February 01, 2010

What are Public Records?

There are many Public records created by government bodies.

However, the concept of Public Records was created before the internet. In the old days, there was some effort involved in accessing a Public Record - eg go to the Government Organization, and search for it, or pay somebody else to do it. And from an indexing point of view, were complex searches even available? For example, say I wanted to find all property owned by a given person - that might involve trips to many government bodies.

In the internet age, a surprising amount of information is incredibly easily available. eg - find the owners of houses in the smart part of Broadway in San Francisco.

Is this really what was intended by making records public?

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