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

Tue Sep 3 21:27:10 UTC 2013

Of course, company directors in the UK has been the classic example of
this, and my date of birth can be found on public websites, because I'm a
company director. In fact I think getting hold of date of births is easy
enough (whether from the web, or otherwise, e.g. by buying it) that my
biggest concern is that banks etc consider your date of birth to be some
secret fact that verifies identity

I'm sure it's fairly easy to reverse engineer significant size datasets
from social network info, and given that it's a regular question on all
sorts of sites that don't require it has sufficiently devalued it as a
'fact'. I'm sure I'm not the only one who randomly makes up a new date when
it's a required field.

Chris

On 3 September 2013 19:05, Tom Lee <tlee at sunlightfoundation.com> wrote:

> 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>*
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Jonathan Gray
>>
>> Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*
>>
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>
>> *
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