## 4 Privacy and Open Government
### Finding the Right Balance: Public Personal Information
There is a large body of personal information in the hands of governments that is \"public\" according to various laws or regulations. In many cases, decisions around the public nature of the information were made in an era before the Internet. Because this information is considered to be \"public\", its availability under access to information regimes or through the consultation of public registers may seem self-evident. Yet these \"public\" access points contain their own limitations; an effort--sometimes even travel--is required to manually search public records. In an era of open government, it may seem self-evident that these records and registers be digitized and made available for a more open release; yet doing so may raise significant privacy concerns [39]. Digitized information can be rapidly copied, mined and matched, and can be used for a broad range of purposes that many would consider privacy invasive. An example of a controversial use of public registry data is found in the publication by a newspaper of interactive, online maps showing the names and addresses of all registered gun owners in two New York counties following the tragic school shooting in Newtown Connecticut [40, 41]. These maps, by combining public registry data obtained through an access to information request with a Google Mapsinterface, matched registry information with specific houses in a searchable and interactive format. The \"public\" personal information was thus published in a format that made it much more accessible both in terms of its presentation and its dissemination. It was also placed within a polemical context. When the maps were published online, citizens expressed outrage either at being identified as a household for which a gun permit had been issued, or at being identified as one for which one had not. There was a strong sense that this information, which had been acceptably public when contained in a register accessible only through a government office or an access to information request, was unacceptably public when it was represented on an interactive map and posted on the Internet. As an additional complicating factor, either the data was released by government with inadequate metadata, or its users did not take appropriate care in examining the metadata. Data that was accurate within the particular limitations of the gun registry was wildly inaccurate when mapped in this manner. The inaccuracies compounded the privacy problems associated with the release of the data [42]. There is precedent for the refusal to disclose public personal information in reusable digital formats. In _Matter of New York Times Co. v. City of New York Police Dept._[43], the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court considered a request filed by the New York Times for access to an electronic copy of a database of the names and addresses of all residents of New York City with handgun licences. The appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court denied disclosure of the database notwithstanding that the information it contained was a matter of public record. The court stated: \"The fact that Penal Law SS400.00 (5) makes the name and address of a handgun license holder \"a public record\" is not dispositive of whether respondent can assert the privacy and safety exemptions to FOIL [Freedom of Information Law] disclosure\" [43]. The court went further, noting that this was so \"especially when petitioners seek the names and addresses in electronic form\" [43]. It also indicated that other case law supported the view that the disclosure of a person's home address \"implicates a heightened privacy concern.\"  
Another example of the conflict between public government data and privacy can be found in the Proposition 8 map [44]. Proposition 8 was a proposed amendment to the California constitution that sought to ban gay marriage.