From the Wall Street Journal:
. . . An important note: The records being put online are public, and available – sensitive information and all — to anyone who goes down to the courthouse or county seat. And many of them have already been compiled and digitized by data warehouses, who often make them available to marketers and real-estate professionals. Open records are a longstanding American tradition; so too is a hold-your-nose acceptance that commercial entities will try to make a profit by exploiting that openness.
But at the same time, it’s too simplistic to say that just because records are available by going to a government building and talking to a clerk, we shouldn’t worry that they’re now available through some Web sleuthing. Sometimes a difference of degree is so significant that it may as well be a difference of kind: Foes of the recording industry rightly note that people have always stolen music by taping it for their friends, but it’s risible to compare the potential effect of running off some cassette copies of an album to that of making a digital copy of that album available for the taking online.
Similarly, it takes a pretty determined busybody or thief to visit the courthouse, and the law has acknowledged this, noting the “practical obscurity” of such records. The Web may not change the status of public records, but it means the end of practical obscurity, enabling drive-by voyeurism for the bored or petty – or identity thieves in the cybercafes of, say, Nigeria or Romania. . . .