LawFare: “…In the debate about data privacy and harms to Americans, however, one issue has not received adequate attention by the press or in policy conversations relative to the severity and volume of harm: the link between publicly available information and stalking and gendered violence. For decades, “people search” data brokers have compiled profiles on millions of people—including their family members, contact information, and home addresses—and published them online for search and sale. It could cost as low as $0.95 per record—or $3.40/search, for a monthly fee—to buy one of these dossiers. In turn, for decades, abusive individuals have bought this data and used it to hunt down and stalk, harass, intimidate, assault, and even murder other people. The harms of stalking and gendered violence fall predominantly on women as well as members of the LGBTQIA+ community.  This matters for the privacy debate because many so-called people search websites get this data by scraping public records, from voting registries to property filings. Yet this information is completely exempted from many state privacy laws because it is considered “publicly available information.” One prominent line of argument suggests that since the information is already out there, a company that aggregates it, digitizes it, and links it to profiles of specific individuals makes no difference.

This piece analyzes the links between people search data brokers, stalking and gendered violence, and public records. It also analyzes the state privacy law exemptions and other gaps that permit companies to scrape and use information from those records. I argue that the debate surrounding people search websites and data brokers manifests as a clash between two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives: that the only way to better protect people is to have this information entirely removed from the internet, and that removing any of this information from the internet is unthinkable given it is already published and that government records should be accessible to journalists, civil society watchdogs, and other stakeholders. This binary framing must be resisted. The way forward in this debate is for policymakers to recognize the importance of public records for press reporting and other functions while also dispensing with the myth that digitizing information, aggregating it, linking it to individuals, and selling it online does not somehow considerably change the risks posed to individuals and communities of people…”