The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40

Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by c3534l on Sunday October 21, 2018 @04:17AM (#18267142)

I have never assumed that an email address I gave the government would be protected. I would also not assume that the contents of any email I sent would be in any way protected either. The government is collectively owned. Your police record, where you live, who you're married to, and whether or not you voted last election are publicly available. I would rather all of that be protected in some way, but I think it's common knowledge that a lot about you is made public to anyone who wants to walk down to the courthouse. In fact, if you want to take a trip to Hawaii, you can drop in and see a copy of Obama's famously "missing" birth certificate. I am rather shocked that credit card numbers are being emailed about.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by tgsovlerkhgsel on Sunday October 21, 2018 @07:40AM (#18267577)

> Your police record, where you live, who you're married to, and whether or not you voted last election are publicly available.

This is highly country specific. For the marriage record, I checked the laws in Germany, and (except for your own records) you have to present a "legal interest", which seems to be stricter than a "legitimate interest" (i.e. probably you need the information to enforce your rights, not just because you want to do genealogy). I'm pretty sure the others would count as particularly sensitive personal data too.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by stordoff on Sunday October 21, 2018 @09:21AM (#18267849)

In the UK, as far as I know of those only marriage records is open. Police records can be obtained by your employer, but even then most minor (sentence less than 4 years) offenses are eventually considered spent and not disclosed to most roles. The electoral role (addresses) is open by default, but you can opt-out (though can still be used for certain narrow purposes), and as far as I know there is no way to check if someone voted (I've never heard of it happening, and searching doesn't give any information about it)

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by walshemj on Sunday October 21, 2018 @01:31PM (#18269050)

You can opt out of allowing use of the electoral role for marketing - you can't opt out of political use.

You can also not be on the role but you cant vote in that case.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by jarfil on Sunday October 21, 2018 @12:15PM (#18268704)

Maybe you need the GDPR.

When governments in the EU started digitizing their data like 20 years ago, it used to be that lots of personal data would end up published on official websites, either in the form of scanned PDFs that Google would gladly OCR and index, or in directly readable formats. Since then, the EU has cracked down on all of that, and you can no longer search for someone's phone number in order to get their full name, address, date of birth and ID. Even data that used to be available just 10 years ago, now has been removed.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by kasey_junk on Sunday October 21, 2018 @04:10PM (#18269904)

GDPR largely does not regulate what governments do with data.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by astura on Sunday October 21, 2018 @05:35PM (#18270438)

Except the GP is talking about explicitly public records, not private records that were inadvertently published.

(Ignoring that the GDPR doesn't even apply to governments)

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by rocqua on Sunday October 21, 2018 @05:51AM (#18267343)

> I have never assumed that an email address I gave the government would be protected. I would also not assume that the contents of any email I sent would be in any way protected either.

I have similar assumptions, but what about the less technically inclined citizens?

Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if the ploy described by the OP:

> Could I request this data myself, then start emailing them scam emails "I know you contacted us in June, could you call me on 555-1223 etc"

would work on me. Really, it would take me checking DKIM and/or SPF to notice such an email. And from this story it seems likely the city of Seattle doesn't actually implement DKIM or SPF.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by wolco on Sunday October 21, 2018 @01:59PM (#18269203)

DKIM and/or SPF can be a liability if you want to accept everyone's email. Only use if filtering is more important.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by mratzloff on Sunday October 21, 2018 @10:02AM (#18267995)

> I have never assumed that an email address I gave the government would be protected. I would also not assume that the contents of any email I sent would be in any way protected either.

That's because you're not corresponding with case officers and police officers.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by kasey_junk on Sunday October 21, 2018 @04:11PM (#18269906)

Note that human services & the police dept. did not respond. Likely because they are exempt from foia requests.

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