[euopendata] [open-government] Examples of dates of birth being published as part of the public record?

[Bill Proudfit]

There has been an interesting issue in Hong Kong and public personal data
the past several weeks.  Here is the story and some links.

1.  Public personal data here means civil and criminal litigation records
and personal bankruptcy filings.  These are data of a personal nature that
is freely available to the public if a member of the public goes to the
courthouse and look it up in paper registry records.  The records include
name and partial Hong Kong Identity Card number.  Some of these records
would include other personal details such as address, date-of-birth, spouse
name and s on. In some cases there is a very small fee to get the 'daily
record' of cases in court that day.

2.  A search firm collected and built a database of over 2 million such
public personal data records and built a smartphone app that people could
use to search for a person by name.  The app was called 'Do No Evil'.

3.  The app was reasonably successfully.  It was charging people about 1
HK$ for a search (about 0.12 US$).

Below is some info on the developer Alex Kong and the company here
represented by Vivian Lam that manually collated the data.

Alex Kong,who released the famed "Do No Evil" app that, until recently,
provided public access to a database of more than two million records of
litigation and bankruptcy cases.  The app recently made news for being
pulled by the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) as being a
"serious invasion of privacy" despite sourcing publicly-available data.

Read more here:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1296390/smartphone-app-infringes-upon-peoples-privacy-says-commission

Alex is the CEO of SINO Dynamic Solutions Limited, a leading mobile
Enterprise Application Developer & Infrastructure Provider, headquartered
in Hong Kong.

@alex_kong on Twitter

http://www.donoevil.hk/pc.html

http://www.donoevil.hk/notice.html

Vivian Lam of Glorious Destiny Investments (GDI) whose company collated the
information from the millions of pieces of information about litigation,
bankruptcy and company directorships from sources such as the Judiciary,
the Official Receiver's Office, and the Companies Registry Gazette.

4.  Alex and Vivian have been successfully intimidated by the Personal Data
Privacy Commissioner into taking down the application for iOS and Android.


On 2 September 2013 19:52, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:

> I was wondering whether anyone might know of any examples of where
> personal information about living persons - such as dates of birth - have
> been published as part of the public record by public sector bodies?
>
> For example in relation to interest, lobby or political registries?
>
> While generally personal information needs to be carefully protected, we'd
> be interested to hear of examples of where there might be broader public
> interest arguments or exceptions for publishing this kind of data.
>
> All the best,
>
> Jonathan
>
> --
>
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*
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-- 
Bill Proudfit
鮑偉霖
Hong Kong
baoman.wordpress.com
www.linkedin.com/in/proudfit
twitter ~ @baoman
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