[MyData & Open Data] [open-government] Examples of dates of birth being published as part of the public record?

Tue Sep 3 18:05:19 UTC 2013

In the US, the Congressional Bioguide might be of interest. We use their
identifiers as a hub for a lot of our legislative data work:

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=A000360

There are many, many ethics disclosure systems that collect and
redistribute personal information from public officials as well.
California's Form 700 is an example:

http://www.fppc.ca.gov/?id=500

The real devil is in the unstructured disclosure fields. We've seen this
recently in the FCC's political file <https://stations.fcc.gov/> database,
which brought already-public but previously-inconvenient data into
electronic form. In this case, that included not only PII but scans of
checks, the account and routing numbers from which could be used
fraudulently.

You do occasionally see PII in structured fields -- the USASpending.gov
datasets leaking SSNs from agencies that unwisely used them as award
identifiers for grant recipients is one example -- but in my experience
it's the bags of text where problems really crop up. PII concerns are a
strong argument for mandating structured disclosure, I think.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> Thanks everyone!
>
> I've now compiled these examples here:
> http://bit.ly/personalinfo-publicrecord
>
> If anyone else can think of any more please let me know!
>
> All the best,
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> On 2 September 2013 13:52, 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>*
>>
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>
>> *
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*
>
> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>
> *
>
> Empowering through Open Knowledge
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