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Attitudes toward online availability of US public records

Published: 12 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Many have enthusiastically greeted the ability to search and view public records online as a great advance for transparency and accountability. Such ability, however, also creates value tensions with privacy and other important human values. In this paper, we report findings from a survey of 134 residents of the US Pacific Northwest on their awareness of and attitudes towards online access to political campaign records and real estate transaction histories, bringing to light some of the social implications of technological changes that increase ease of access to public records. We show that, while respondents often understood the reason behind making these records public, considerable concern about the current accessibility of these records exists, along with a precautionary indication that such open access may reduce public participation for some individuals.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    dg.o '11: Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times
    June 2011
    398 pages
    ISBN:9781450307628
    DOI:10.1145/2037556
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 June 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. access
    2. political campaign contributions
    3. privacy
    4. public records
    5. real estate records
    6. transparency
    7. value sensitive design
    8. value tensions

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    • University of Arizona
    • San Diego Super Computing Ctr
    • Emerald
    • University of Maryland
    • IOS Press

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 271 submissions, 55%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Surveying a Landscape of Ethics-Focused Design MethodsACM Journal on Responsible Computing10.1145/36789881:3(1-32)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2024
    • (2022)A value sensitive design approach for designing AI-based worker assistance systems in manufacturingProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2022.01.248200(505-516)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2021)“I’m Not a Millionaire”: How Users’ Online Behaviours and Offline Behaviours Impact Their PrivacyExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451603(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
    • (2017)A Survey of Value Sensitive Design MethodsFoundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction10.1561/110000001511:2(63-125)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2017
    • (2017)On addressing privacy in disseminating judicial data: towards a methodologyTransforming Government: People, Process and Policy10.1108/TG-12-2015-005111:1(9-41)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2017
    • (2014)Necessary, unpleasant, and disempoweringProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2556288.2557126(149-158)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2014
    • (2012)On the institutional archiving of social mediaProceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Libraries10.1145/2232817.2232819(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2012

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