The Right of Privacy

[DblBarrelJ]

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Corporations are just people. And people can collect freely-available data. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous. Should people be legally required to "forget" things that we don't want them to remember?

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I will admit, one of the most shocking things I learned while going through the academy is the amount of free information available on anyone to anyone.

While I do think safety necessitates the general public to have access to information on certain types of offenders, namely violent sex offenders, I do think that it is absurd that anyone can go to the county courthouse and pull up copies of every traffic ticket you've ever recieved in that county, along with your home address, drivers license #, and a copy of your signature.

If we're talking philosophy here and not hard law, I'm not too crazy about making court proceedings for civil cases public record either. If you want to make the records for felony criminal matters public record, that's fine, but I can't tell you how many times I've been involved in an investigation and done a records search at the courthouse and found vital information on a suspect through the means of a divorce proceeding or other child custody matter.

By vital records, I am referring to things such as bank account #'s, SSNs, salaries, place of employment, etc.