This is well worth a look. I've had a puzzle in the back of my head for a while about the fact that I simultaneously feel that privacy needs protection, but work at establishing a public identity for myself (this weblog, for instance).
There are a lot of government records that are public: court proceedings, arrest records and property recordings are examples. Public records are one of the cornerstones of democracy. Democracies prefer accountability to enforcement. Rather than trying to enforce every rule and law with absolute certainty, we make information public and make people accountable. Accountability based systems scale better than enforcement systems. Even so, the Internet has upset some long held practices however related to public records. [Phil Windley]
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