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

Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by danso on Sunday October 21, 2018 @01:52PM (#18269169)

The scenario you propose is possible through using Google, and/or many other services that collate public records of people's names and addresses. Try Googling your name and one of your cities of residence some time.

> someone as a favor looked someone's new address up for a friend which resulted in a murder.

A government employee who looks up someone's address for a friend is not covered by FOI laws. Just as FOI doesn't protect cops who use the DMV database to look up other cops they like/hate:

- https://www.wired.com/2012/11/payout-for-cop-database-abuse/

- https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-pines-police-o...

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by walshemj on Sunday October 21, 2018 @05:07PM (#18270259)

And if the state govement employee freely just hands massive amounts of personally identifiable information due to a FOI this is some how better.

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Re:The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40 by danso on Sunday October 21, 2018 @05:49PM (#18270525)

FOI is a law mandating these public records be provided on request -- with various exemptions and allowances for redacting information that could be reasonably seen as a violation of privacy. It's not about being "somehow better", because legislators have deemed that bureaucrats cannot be trusted to decide whether transparency is a good thing.

Consider the example you brought up -- it is against the law for a state employee to send a friend that kind of information, and I imagine that that law exists because politicians feared that kind of murderer scenario. How exactly does that murderer use a cache of email metadata and redacted messages to go after his victim?

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