[271] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Public Records Data and Google Searches Privacy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Wed Sep 12 20:38:04 2007
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Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:51:54 -0700
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Public Records Data and Google Searches Privacy Issues
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000287.html
http://forums.pfir.org/main/messages/663/704.html
Greetings. I have previously offered some thoughts on "Benefits and
Risks in Google's Public Records Access Project"
( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000228.html ). This project aims
to make government public record databases more easily searchable
via Google. There are significant potential benefits and notable
negative aspects to this approach.
As an example, below is text from today's RISKS-Forum Digest
( http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.82.html ) that discusses privacy
issues relating to online property assessment databases. It notes
how in such cases, an inability to search through this data from
Google is apparently viewed by the text's author as an important
privacy-enhancing condition that significantly reduces the abuse
risk potential of this data. Worth thinking about. Discussion
welcome in the PFIR Forums Google Topics Area
( http://forums.pfir.org/main/messages/663/704.html ).
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
- - - - - -
Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 02:10:02 -0400
From: Jonathan Kamens <jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us>
Subject: On-line property assessment databases a bit too accessible
While engaged recently in a discussion with a parent at our
children's school whom I felt was being overly paranoid about
sharing her home address with other parents, I googled her name,
suspecting that I would be able to illustrate to her that the
information she was trying to protect was already available on-line.
I succeeded far more than I'd expected to. One of the first matches
returned by google was her home's property listing in the on-line
property assessment database for the town of Arlington,
Massachusetts, where she lives. Her name, her husband's name, their
address, a picture of the house, a floor-plan sketch, the date they
bought the house, their purchase price, and all of the information
used by the town to calculate the assessed value of the house were
instantly available.
Arlington's webmaster is guilty of two offenses: (1) providing an
interface for searching the assessment database by name (i.e., if
you go to <http://arlserver.town.arlington.ma.us/property/>, you
can search not only by address, but also by the owner's name); and
(2) allowing its assessment database to be fully indexed by public
search engines.
This is not a small thing. Consider a domestic abuse victim who
moves to a new house in a new town to get away from her abuser. She
takes precautions to avoid being tracked down, e.g., ordering
telephone service in a fake name and paying the telephone company
extra for an unlisted number. Unfortunately, however, the town she
has moved to is Arlington, which proceeds to publish her name and
address on its Web site for the world to see and search.
The discovery of Arlington's carelessness with its residents'
privacy prompted me to check on Boston, where I live. Boston, too,
allows its assessment database to be searched by name, but at least
its database isn't indexed in Google. Someone with nefarious intent
trying to locate a Boston resident must already know that s/he owns
a house in Boston. That's bad, but not as bad as Arlington.
I decided to check some other towns and cities in Massachusetts to
see how they stack up.
I checked 61 towns and cities, of which only 9 had their data
sufficiently secured (i.e., not easy to view the entire assessment
database, not searchable by name, not searchable in Google). I
found one town besides Arlington, Ashburnham, whose records were
searchable in Google, and four towns (including Ashburnham) where it
was easy to view the entire assessment database without needing to
perform individual searches. In addition, I discovered that
independent of town and city records, the registries of deeds of
most Massachusetts counties allow their land records to be searched
by name, most of them from a single, convenient Web site. See below
for the details.
When assessment and land records were kept only on paper, they were
organized by street name and number, not by owner name. When
Massachusetts communities began to put these records on-line for
public access, did they stop to think of the privacy, security and
safety implications of allowing them to be searched by name?
Apparently, only 9 of the 62 communities I looked at did, and most
of them are probably in counties which didn't.
Is Massachusetts typical?
Jonathan Kamens
For those who are curious, here are the details of what I found:
[ Please see the original RISKS item
( http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.82.html#subj8" ) for his detailed
data availability breakdown (including Google search capability
information) and the remainder of his message text. --Lauren ]
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