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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

I understand the open court argument, we need to see what goes on so nothing funny happens there. But unless we're talking about a major crime, what good does it do to list and index on Google everything from 30 years ago?

I am no fan of this at all.

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If our society decides it is necessary to act with the full weight of the law behind it, then it would seem better to have the information available for the public to verify than not. I'm not saying it is all great, but that it is far better to have information available so that things like average sentence length for a given crime based on demographic and psychographic information can be queried by all. If a city that is 50/50 male/female and 20/80 black/non-black finds their speeding tickets are 70/30 male female and 35/65 black/non-black, then it may be worth investigating to see if police are being fair who they give warnings to, who gets reduces tickets, and who gets neither.

As for major privacy concerns, it is generally the more major crimes that have the larger issue with the victim being known. Knowing that some one was the victim of mischief vandalism is far less a privacy invasion than knowing they were the victim of sexual assault of a child (and even hiding the victim's identity often doesn't do more than hide the name from a passive search).

Then there are the benefits that other posters have raised, such as being useful for knowing past decisions used even in minor trials.

The general privacy issue that most jurisdictions have decided they just don't care that much about is that easy, indexed, free access to public records is different from the case where that same information is in a dusty file cabinet somewhere. There are a lot of things that people are, in principle, OK with being a matter of public record but are maybe less OK with their neighbor being able to casually discover it through Google.

Totally agree. I'd be all for open court records, requested in person, received in paper form against a small processing fee.

I do have a different cultural background so it's probably natural this feel horrible. Everything about this site would be so illegal in my home country it's almost hilarious in comparison. I'm used to (and fully approve of) a law that you can't keep a list of names in a notebook without a proper reason and everyone's consent, that would already be an illegal register.

So a Christmas card list would be illegal? That seems...excessive.

Good points.

If you look at the info page there is a specific example about how to look up codes of cases that had the same charge.

Being able to see how other offenders are sentenced is useful to make sure people are being treated fairly. Lawyers use this kind of data up to the point of producing analytics from data like that to understand outcomes. Major legal data companies have a large segment of business doing analytics for lawyers handling high and lower level cases.

Here are a few related links: https://cluesearch.org/ https://measuresforjustice.org/

Worse, there's no obvious business model or disclosed funding source or institutional affiliation here.

That leaves me with the distinct impression that they're monetizing data about visitors and searches in some horrible way. (Data targeting for mugshot shakedown operations?)

I'm not going near this.

Maybe ads at some point.

Sometimes even seemingly trivial cases can be caselaw precedent that people should be able to see and access without paying (they are public records).

Good point. PACER, in fact, has been called out by major news publications for literally being a scam the way the change for access to public records.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/20/pacer-cou...

Only 3 pages are indexed on Google. Actually, most of the other legal databases (listed on info page) have their cases indexed on Google. However, judyrecords cases aren't indexed on Google. I understand your general sentiment.

How did you get google to index that many pages? For me Google only crawls about 1000 pages per day, no matter how many I show in the index

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