> Home values and bankruptcy have been public record for a long time. There is a public interest in being able to see all transactions and history on property, and it’s important for debitors to be able to know when people have declared bankruptcy. Part of filing things in court is that it becomes public record.

But it's important to note that information was never this easy to access.

It's one thing to be able to find out such information on someone in the context of in important financial transaction, it's quite another to be able to easily and casually find out such information for no reason besides curiosity.

I think the traditional difficultly in accessing "public records" was an important feature of having them "public." Now that they're so easy to access, we should perhaps re-think how public they really should be.