You recently relocated to California, probably live with or near young professionals in similar circumstances, and don’t have much vested in your location. You will settle down someday and move out of the city, and how the community perceives you and your family will then take on added importance.

I think you overestimate the power of lawyers to keep things private once they are online. Once any information hits the internet, it is definitely too late to do anything about it. Privacy is also probably like good insurance – one of those goods that is not appreciated until after a storm hits. And as you say, privacy is a “luxury good”. I am thinking not of the rich, but of ordinary people caught up in improved law enforcement and data collection techniques.

And the extent that our neighbors don’t care about what we do is sad! Our communities are unraveling, and the prying of nosy neighbors is the flip side to many of them caring about their community. I appreciate this caring. I just wish to frustrate it at most turns.

I’m not sure that there’s always a WILL for one neighbor to go snooping on the person who lives next door. If I had a child I might be interested to learn if the guy next door was a convicted pedophile, but I can’t say I’d care to learn if he has a private plane registered in his name or learn exactly what he paid for his property or even who he gave his political contributions to.

There’s a tendency to get really into digging up data when you’re a reporter, but at the nascent stages that’s little more than flexing new-found muscles. I doubt most people care to know what their neighbors do. Hell, I’ve never even said hello to my next door neighbors of the last 18 months!

And there are probably arguments to be made both for and against public lists and maps that track sex offenders and pedophiles.

Lots of companies have established lucrative businesses by making public data more easily accessible. That value used to be the province of journalists, who would effectively arbitrage the obscure nature of certain public documents and directories. But that “value” or market niche is increasingly usurped by data aggregators. So what’s the problem? I’d rather have the data that’s out there on me available via google, where I can monitor it and counter it than stuck in some obscure data-tracking system accessible only to private investigators.

I’m not sure I buy your argument that our civil liberties and freedoms are at stake here. The idea that someone would go through the FEC database to find the one democrat in their neighborhood seems an over-exaggerated fear. Is there a real threat or is it just FUD?