When disclosure collides with privacy

I was surprised by the article today relating to the archive operated by a county in Florida on the Internet. Clearly it was set up in good faith to comply with state regulations relating to disclosure. They have obviously put a lot of money and effort into making an easily searchable archive and have created Meta information that easily allows for retrieval of document images.

 It was apparent they have worked hard and invested heavily in their efforts to provide their constituents with access to documents that they are nominally entitled to see according to prevailing rules.

 The biggest problem is that there seems to be nothing in the regulations they are complying with relating to protecting private information. Disclosure and privacy fly in the face of each other. It is understandable that the line to be drawn between the two might be hard to identify if there isn't explicit guidance that defines what needs to be protected.

 I find it interesting and worrisome to consider the fact that what is being disclosed in the site's archive in compliance with regulations could potentially bring a company in the private sector to its knees. If we were to disclose things like account numbers and social security numbers our clients would lose confidence in us and our businesses would likely suffer. If a large enough company did it, it would likely make the national news.

 
 Perhaps it is a sign of our rapidly changing times that concerns about identity theft haven't, by virtue of the comments in the article, been written into the regulations  these good folks have sought so diligently and effectively to comply with. Perhaps it is time to circle back on the regulations that demand public disclosure to ensure that the very real risks that exist on the Internet today (which presumably have existed for a while, but in too labor intensive a medium to exploit broadly) are considered and proper constraints are put into the regulations.

 I recognize that, since the site seems to (at least in the archive I looked at) be managing scanned images of documents, the challenge becomes particularly complex because eliminating parts of images or simply recognizing private data on an image, for that matter, is far more difficult than simply choosing not to display specific fields of data.

 Regrettably, there seems no easy answer to the dilemma of making necessary documents available to the public without considerable extra cost to blank out private information, but it really seems necessary that this become a requirement going forward.