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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

> But there's arguably a big difference between records that you have to go to some county clerk's office to access and possibly provide at least a cursory justification for doing so and being able to click a few keys on your computer and skim through records for the hell of it.

I think it's important to consider the context. Privacy is important, but in an environment where authorities happen to "disappear" records that might be used against them or could be used to hold them to account, and fight tooth and nail to prevent easy access to them as in the US (and are often able to weaponize the courts to prevent access), there's a case to be argued that there are clear benefits to keeping it public in a way where there are no barriers.

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The converse is also true: in an environment where random strangers take perverse pleasure in using any record in which you may appear to provide the worse possible representation, where you have no way of controlling this potential invasion of your privacy, where the record will endure _forever_ (and other groups will go to great lengths to ensure access to these records by anyone on the planet who happens to be curious), and where your ability to contextualize an event in which you happen to appear will be drowned out by whatever outrage machine has the biggest megaphone and fastest meme team, there is a strong case to be argued that there should be significant and prohibitive barriers to public access.

They're 911 calls. Show me one example of a 911 call and its misrepresentation being used to really harm somebody. Control only means those in power will abuse that control and prohibit its use as a method of ensuring accountability and transparency in how 911 hotlines are run.

Further, I think privacy is worth preserving for privacy's sake. We all have a right to it. But there are times where we have to give up rights in order to serve the interests of the community. I know it's not a popular way of thinking in the US, but it's just a fact of living in a society with other people. We don't have the complete freedom to do anything and everything we want. Giving up the privacy of 911 calls has clear benefits, and I haven't yet seen sufficient evidence that enough harm is caused by them being public to consider otherwise.

Even further, these states aren't making these records private for privacy reasons. You're just playing into their narrative and defending them on morality when they're doing it to cover their asses.

Really harm seems like an arbitrary and unrealistic bar for this stuff.

Calls before the caller died often make the news, personally I don’t want to be remembered that way and I doubt most of them want those moments made public. Often, 911 callers are in situations they would like to keep private and outside of criminals cases it seems unlikely for significant public benefit to occur should they generally be made so.

Sure, you can get the details on 911 calls made from the World Trade Center on 9/11 here: http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/911-911-calls But, why must this be public info?

Citing 9/11 is a great example. We have better information of what happened, how people became trapped, and how the response was handled. At the very least family members should be able to obtain access to recordings about their family and callers should be able to obtain their own calls. This isn't some wildly hard concept. Calls to a public entity about private individual happen. Medicine is another field that exists but family members can gain access if needed.

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