[LINK] Crimenet Site

[Rick Welykochy]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Howard Lowndes wrote:

> IIRC a precedent was established in the UK about a year ago which
> dissociated the location of the server from the location of its
> management.

How does UK precedent afect Australia law?

> Mind you, if Schulz is found to be in contempt of court for re-publishing
> already published material, then where does that place the media who
> published in the first instance and libraries, etc. who archive that
> published material. Surely they are as equally in contempt.

A point needs to be about accessibility on a massive scale. It
is one thing for data on an ex-criminal or any person for that
matter to be spread higgledy-piggledy over a wide variety of,
yes, publicly available sources. The possibilities of collating,
cross-referencing, using and even abusing such information is
rare because of the degree of difficulty involved.

But. Put all that publicly available data online and into
a database (or several databases), and it is not a difficult 
exercise to collate and mine the data to come up with many
inferences that would be considered a violation of privacy.

It is one thing for a local Sydneysider to waltz on down to
a building and physically request criminal (or other) information
about someone. A form is filled out, a person is dealt with and
there is witness to the enquiry.  Compare this to an anonymous
inquiry from Bradislava digging up your personal details
on Crimenet or through cross-correlation with the ABN data
now available online.

We are simply touching the tip of the privacy iceberg here.

I cannot help but draw the conclusion that part of the potential
to violate personal privacy resides in database lookup speed and public
availability of data in the Internet. The ground rules are shifting.
I don't buy the simplistic argument of "well, it's publicly available
offline ... so it should be so online".

-rickw





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Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services