If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What's everyone else think?
But should the information even be public, especially with all the mistakes that plague the data?
The legal system provides recourse for publishing false information. If someone turns you down for a job because of the false criminal record, I'm sure your lawyer can help you out. In most cases, though, the information is probably correct, so there is no point in hiding it.
This is sort of like the argument against Google Street View -- "what if someone sees me walking out of a sex shop." I say, well... eventually society will realize that people buy stuff at sex shops, and we can stop worrying about what other people think. It will help society evolve.
I think the same is true with criminal records. If everyone sees how prevalent marijuana use is, eventually society will stop demonizing it. In the case of other crimes, perhaps you can explain yourself out of the shame.
Either way, I think this will hurt individuals in the short run and help society as a whole in the long run. (That probably means it will be made illegal in another week or so. Call me cynical :P)
This sort of assertion I tend to doubt. Many of the people who seek to demonize and preserve the criminal status of marijuana have, in fact, used it, although they defend their behavior with pithy excuses like "I was young and dumb" or "it was the '60s; it was different back then". Society doesn't demonize the rare vices, unless they are dangerous to innocent people, e.g. pedophilia, so much as it lunges for the common ones. What do the morals police stand to gain from crusading against, say, a blue-and-yellow-striped-dress fetish? Virtually no one has such a fetish, so it gives them no power base. Premarital sex, on the other hand...
You might hope that people with rigid moral stances might soften them when they discover good people who live differently, but the fact is that a lot of these people are more inclined to turn against old friends than to revise their opinions.
The issue with vice voyeurism is, moreover, not one of acceptance so much as privacy and professionalism. Pretty much everyone accepts that sex is a part of normal life, but no one would want to have his/her sexual history available on the Internet, nor come up at a place of work.
On second thought, tattoos can be erased by laser, Myspace might be much more permanent...
(I say that only partially in jest)
It's been said, and I agree, that the ability to forget is what keeps us civil -- both with our family members and with others.
I think we need to legislate some kind of forgetfulness when it comes to misadventures.
I'm afraid we're beginning to live in a period without history.
One older guy I went to school with made a posting over 15 years ago on some small usenet group about doing LSD.. its now one of the top 10 results for his name on google.
He would have never thought back then that anything he writes on that small forum would every be accessible and searchable by the general public.
Its not fair. Google should really anonymize most usenet postings done > 10 years ago.
And it is one of the reasons I make little use of Facebook. I realize that silly stuff or things I'm passionate about now might come back to haunt me.
Weird...