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

[Jonathan Gray]

Thanks Tom, thanks Chris - examples now in the doc.

http://bit.ly/personalinfo-publicrecord

Any others warmly welcomed (on or off list)!


On 3 September 2013 23:27, Chris Taggart <countculture at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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>*
>>>>
>>>> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>
>>>> *
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Jonathan Gray
>>>
>>> Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*
>>>
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>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------
> OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate World
> http://opencorporates.com
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> Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture
>



-- 

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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