It's a lot worse in India. One can look up voter information in one's constituent area and find the names, ages and addresses of the hundreds or thousands of people living there. Many government enterprises also put up subsidy related information for public view along with detailed personal information in the name of "transparency".

With the unique biometric identification system (Aadhaar) being pushed heavily for various uses (not just subsidies alone, which is what it was intended to curb leakages in), the lack of a national privacy law, and the attorney general recently claiming in court that "privacy is not a fundamental right", things have never looked bleaker. The central (federal) government and state governments don't care about privacy and privacy protections. It seems like the masses, many of whom don't know much or don't care much, are being coerced into systems that can be heavily misused by those in power.

That site appears to only cover some states.

I'm not sure how your proposal would work in any case. If a database record with your name in it exists (because you bought a house, have a telephone number, got married, got arrested, etc.) looking up any permutation of that data is just a search. I don't know how you make that illegal.

It's true that some laws/decisions about what constitutes public data arguably made more sense when finding that data required making the effort to physically look through the physical files of some town clerk who was probably out for lunch. However, this has been a topic of discussion since companies started selling databases on CD-ROMs and nothing much has changed. So I'm inclined to think that genie is well out of that particular bottle.

It shouldn't be "just a search". In other words, it should be possible to go to a web site, enter an address and find out who owns the property at that address. But the same site should not allow the user to enter the name of a citizen and get the address where that citizen lives, or who else lives at the same address. So businesses who possess the data should not be allowed to just dump the entire data into Google's search indexes, they can only allow certain narrow searches.

So, again, you're basically proposing that even though data is legitimately in the public domain, somehow people should be prevented from connecting that data with a search. Good luck with that.

The government should not put citizen's personal information in the "public domain". When government collects personal information about its citizens there should be laws governing what is allowed use and what isn't.

The list of people who voted in a particular election is placed into the public domain as an anti-fraud measure. It's an important part of the US version of democracy. Other info like property ownership is public for similar reasons. Rich people form trusts to buy property and obscure their names.

And in some cases there are. Your tax records are not public. But a wide range of transactions/interactions with both the government and private companies (such as home purchases and arrests) are as a matter of law.

> There is public interest in knowing who owns the property at a certain address, but the reverse lookup of the same information--where does a certain citizen live--should be made illegal without the permission of the citizen.

This is not possible. The most you can do is make it slightly inconvenient to invert the Address -> Resident lookup.

I'm also not sure "public interest" is a valid justification to violate privacy in this way at all. Perhaps one shouldn't be able to look up who owns an address without some rigamorole.

Charge $10 to look up the owner of the property would probably look fine.

The site has a link at the bottom of user pages to opt-out. They keep you listed but remove your address and telephone number.

The opt-out is for information they added on top of what is in your voter record. They don't let you opt out of information that's in your voter record.

Maybe partially, but street address is definitely public info.

Because your voting record is public information.

Sure, but we need new laws on how public information can be used. Just because you want to register to vote shouldn't mean your date of birth can now be made freely available to identity thieves and potential employers who can use the info to discriminate against you.

>Just because you want to register to vote shouldn't mean your date of birth can now be made freely available to identity thieves and potential employers who can use the info to discriminate against you.

Yes it does - that's exactly what "public" information is.

Maybe you can argue that some information shouldn't be public, but some things can't be hidden, like your date of birth or your name or your DNA, and those things are up for grabs by anyone who can collect them, for better or worse.

Again, the government should not collect citizen's personal information and make it "public" information. Even when certain information is known about a private citizen, there should be laws governing what is allowed use of that information and what isn't. Certain uses should require a release from that citizen.

But that information was public, more often than not, before the government collected it.

Newspapers even published birth announcements. Dunno if this is opt in or opt out

There's two schools of thought here - that the day you were born is somehow confidential or that the public has a vested interest in knowing who is on the voter roll.