What Mugshots Mean For Public Data

Posted: October 6, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: data, mugshots, privacy | 12 Comments »

The New York Times has a story this morning on the growing use of mugshot data for, essentially, extortion. These sites scrape mugshots off of public records databases, use SEO techniques to rank highly in Google searches for people’s names, and then charge those featured in the image to have the pages removed. Many of the people featured were never even convicted of a crime.

What the mugshot story demonstrates but never says explicitly is that data is no longer just private or public, but often exists in an in-between state, where the public-ness of the data is a function of how much work is required to find it.

Let’s say you’re actually doing a background check on someone you are going on a date with (one of the use cases the operators of these sites claim is common). Before online systems, you could physically go to the various records offices, sometimes in each town, to request information about them. Given that there are ~20,000 municipalities in the United States, just doing a check would take the unreasonable investment of days.

Before mugshot sites, you had to actually visit each state’s database, figure out how to query it, and assemble the results. Now we’re looking at an investment of hours, instead of days. It’s possible, but you must be highly motivated.

Now you just search, and this information is there. It is just as public as it was before, but the cost to access has become a matter of seconds, not hours or days, and we could image that you might be googling your date to find something else about him and instead stumble on the mugshot image. The cost for accessing the data is so trivial that can come up as part of an adjacent task.

The debate around fixing this problem has focused on whether the data should be removed from the public entirely. I’d like to see this conversation reframed around how we maintain the friction and cost to access technically public data such that it is no longer economically feasible to run these sorts of aggregated extortion sites while still maintaining the ability of journalists and concerned citizens to explore the records as necessary for their work.