I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil.
That said, nice work.
With more and more of that information being digital, we've more or less punted of the question whether all that information should still be public. Overall, more transparency is probably good but, as you say, it's not an unalloyed good as most of this information will live forever and be cheap/easy to access.
Isn't pretty much every technology "dual use"? Just look at social media. You need a platform that gives you the ability to harass someone in order to actually do it.
> Some times a little friction is a good thing.
We as a market repeatedly justify the frictionless experience of being spied on for ads in ways that we have little to no control over, but we're gonna deny ourselves the frictionless experience of being able to see public records because we're worried about our privacy?
It's how I feel about facial recognition technology or other ML-based technology too. The worst people who could ever have access to it, already had access to it. Giving everyone access to it is just leveling the field.
I'd love it if we could achieve that balance by eliminating surveillance, but I don't see that as a realistic outcome (at least initially).
In the absence of eliminating surveillance I'll take full public transparency. Maybe such transparency would even drive the elimination of surveillance.
Just anecdotally, I have a fairly uncommon last name but common first name, I know what states/counties I have appeared in court in and couldn't find any of the records. If you search something like <name> <county> <state> the results are overloaded with <county> <state>, for example.
EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.
You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons:
1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them
What makes you think it isn't?
on edit: actually one third is probably overstating but close.
Precisely I was thinking of how much fun we'll be having in efnet with this.