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Comment by ProllyInfamous | Hacker News Reader

This is tangentally-related, but I feel it is very wrong that so many smaller governments (e.g. smaller US cities) host "public information" on private servers (e.g. links to PDFs from a Google Drive)... or even worse inside some walled-garden (e.g. Facebook).

My own personal DNS does not resolve to any Google/Facebook products, reducing profiling; but by denying their ad-revenue, I also deny myself access to information which IMHO should be truly available to the public (without using a private company's infrastructure).

I absolutely understand that many people will just say "don't block them, then." My argument is that governments should not host public items on private servers.

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Tangentially, I really dislike walking into the DMV and seeing ads from private companies. I heavily dislike that ID checking and document verification is done by ID.me and others for what is a public service I pay for through my taxes.

Maybe for a while I can avoid submitting my documents and information to partners-of-the-DMV, but just like airport security it's a convenience tax. They do not value your time, and they will demonstrate it by putting you through extra hoops to coerce you into giving them everything.

Unfortunately, you can’t avoid having your information sold by the DMV in California. Likely others too.

How this is legal is beyond my comprehension.

Honest-to-god, I do not have a permanent email address (I use burners, when necessary). It has been years since I received any SPAM (cause there's nowhere to receive).

Just over a year ago, I had a civil court action where the court REQUIRED I list my email address; when I wrote "none," the clerk was upset; eventually a judge required me to sign an attestation that I do not use email.

Just seemed ridiculous that Tennessee's court systems even ask for this, let alone assume everybody has/uses email. Plus, it's all public information...

Yep. California DMV. 1 in 10 Americans live in California and these companies have our data.

I had body camera video sent to me over a "private" YouTube link. I would have welcomed GDrive over that. On the plus side, I took advantage of the automatic transcript generation to review the obnoxious things the officer said without having to watch it all.

>automatic transcript generation

There is a neat application called "Whisper" which will translate/transcribe just about any media format, locally on your computer.

But I guess that's only necessary if bodycam footage isn't uploaded to YouTube (wow!).

>obnoxious things the officer said

My hope is for your swift and proper resolution, whatever the charges/incident. They're allowed to lie/bait/entrap; glad you got the footage.

> governments should not host public items on private servers

Some works of the US federal government are not subject to copyright and can be mirrored freely.

What licenses do city government use to release public information?

Depends on the city/state laws but vast majority of the time, it's all public domain under FOIA laws. City/State won't say that because it's assumed.

Local newspapers could mirror public domain citygov content, providing a public service and growing their online traffic.

Getting a PDF published on a government website is a six month long process involving approval from a dozen managers, editors, and assorted hangers on. It’s little wonder people use things like Google drive and Dropbox.

So that should be an indicator that the government offices should just change their internal policies if people are going to go around them anyways.

I agree, but the keyword here is “just” - if you think 6 months is a long time for publishing a pdf, imaging trying to make actual changes to the same system :/

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36574i

> My own personal DNS does not resolve to any Google/Facebook products, reducing profiling

This is incredibly silly.

If you smashed your computer with a sledgehammer you would also be unable to access those documents.

Do you stop there? What if they host their site on GCP? Amazon? Azure? They're all in the ad business. It's a slippery slope to a whitelist-only Internet.

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