"PUBLIC RECORDS IN THE INFORMATION AGE"
GIS, the Internet, and Your Privacy

Moderator - Neil MacGaffey, GIS Administrator for the City of Newton, Mass.

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General Issues

• Rights to privacy
• Access to Public Records
• Traditional data access (phone call, letter, some type of personal contact) vs. Internet access (more casual and anonymous)
• Internet access of public records is increasing -- some sites have shut down due to "over access"

Presentation by Shawna Wagner, Assistant Supervisor of Public Records, Office of the Massachusetts Secretary of State

"Provisions of the Massachusetts Public Records Regulations"

Public Records - what are, what aren't

• Paper or electronic records, nearly anything created by a public employee are public records
• Public records must be made available to anyone who wants access to them
• Some common exceptions:
• records exempt by statute, such as
• criminal offenders
• tax records
• Registry of Motor Vehicles records
• Investigatory records (witnesses, hindrances to investigations)
• Privacy exemption
• Medical and personnel (of a personal nature)
• Performance evaluation
• Social Security Number
• or where personal information access is "unwarranted"
• substance abuse
• welfare
• or other "intimate details"
• Some common records that are public:
• Overdue bills (e.g. utilities, taxes)
• Assessor's information
• Zoning issues

Fees

• The actual cost of copying a record electronically
• Employee salary
• Media (disk, tape, etc.)
• Electricity
• Cannot include money to recoup cost of acquiring system or to maintain equipment because the system has been paid for by taxpayers
• Other possible circumstance is where a private company maintains the database for, say, a municipality. In this case fee determination starts with how much it cost the municipality to get the information from the company.

Presentation by Karen Loh, Vice President and Publisher of Data Products, Banker & Tradesman

• Banker & Tradesman collected real estate information in its weekly newspaper publication, which is used by brokers and home service companies to set property values. Individual consumers also use this information.
• Information includes
• owner
• price
• address
• Information comes comes from registry of deeds and includes transactions of $1,000 and up, whether a realtor was involved or not.
• B&T is now really a data processing company, with monthly and yearly recap reports.
• The information is combined with deed and lot information and history
• B&T has a paid subscription service, with some free access on boston.com web site.
• B&T adds value to the data:
• Sort through the data, pick out common information customers are willing to pay for, then assign a 6-digit number to mortgage lenders for records and compliance to Home Mortgage Lending Act.
• "Clean" and normalize the data used by different towns and agencies; make everything streamlined (i.e. town names, street names, land use, fuel type).
• Combine all the information into one database and extract information that may be useful to customers as reports, etc.
• B&T does respond to individual requests not to sell a name on mailing lists or reports.
• Karen says that "The information must be consistently priced and predictably priced" and that there may be a conflict of interest if government is in business to sell data if it represents competition to private companies.
• Data is available to many national database companies, but B&T feels it must protect certain people, such as witnesses and battered wives, etc.
• Karen says "Data yearns to be free." People want individual privacy, but the public should know general statistics by town or state, for instance.

Presentation by Bruce MacDougall, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Adjunct Professor of Geography, Director of the Center for Rural Massachusetts, and Director of the Office of Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The GIS Law & Policy Institute

• http://www.amcad.com/mission.htm
• Research mission:
• Access to GIS data
• Impact of GIS on individual privacy
• Potential liability related to distribution of GIS data
• Intellectual property issues related to GIS software and data
• Authentication and evidentiary issues related to digital documents and transactions
• Integration of GIS and title registry
• GIS and title registry systems in developing countries
• The Institute states that GIS can be seen as a particularly intrusive computer technology in that it can serve as a convenient window for detailed information on individuals, and because these databases are being developed universally by government. However, Bruce says not to worry too much about this "invasion" because many online programs are not yet advanced enough to truly invade your privacy.

Geographer's Craft Project at the University of Texas at Austin

• http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/gcraft/contents.html
• Public Access
• Liability
• Privacy
• GIS data as evidence
• copyrights

Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada

• http://www.ipc.on.ca/
• GIS should be a way of increasing the amount of public information dissemination
• But, GIS should not make for higher costs to get the information

Contact information:
109 Hills North
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
USA 

E-mail: macdougall@larp.umass.edu
Web site: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~abhu000/
 

Question and Answer Session Points of Note:

Shawna Wagner: Public agencies must provide generic data format if the agency is capable of doing the conversion from a proprietary format to a generic interchange format; also, if the agency is capable of converting the generic format to a proprietary format, the agency must do so (i.e. running the ARCDXF command in ARC/INFO to convert ARC coverages to DXF files for use in AutoCAD). 

Shawna: Fees for creating records or custom products do not fall under the Public Records Law. 

Karen: Government can stimulate private business -- i.e. Census data is released in raw format, then private companies clean it up, put it in smaller chunks, etc. and sell it. 

Neil MacGaffey: The trend in data release will move toward bottom-up (from towns to state) rather than top-down (state developing all data and distributing to towns) as more municipalities set up their own GIS data delivery procedures. 

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Last Updated 4/19/2000
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