Rebecca Shaefer's murder is a red herring. See my previous post. The information used was public record. The fact that it was accessed at online is not relevant to the discussion, as it could be equally accessed from the physical records of the courthouse as well. The criminal who killed her could have just as easily walked into the county courthouse, opened a deed book, and found her name, address, etc... Unless you want to make the point that all county records should be private and controlled, and only searchable only by county staff personnel, and any information released should be recorded as to who it was released to, with appropriate prosecution and punishment for release of that information to any third party (which would promptly put all of us out of business).
You have exactly made my points from before. All my information is already available over the internet, for free in fact, if you know the proper places to look. The information is treated as a commodity exactly because it is public and available as a compilation from several different locations, not only the public record. The "Value Added" service that the companies you reference is providing is that they are taking all the information and compiling it all into one place. Where do you think all those credit card applications with all the information pre-filled out come from? The information you provide any time you apply for anything from a credit card, to cable, to telephone service, to a vehicle loan is already bought and sold. You can take every single county record off line, and the information will still be available from dozens of different sources.
I will not be made afraid by the fact that some deranged psychopath might decide open a search, choose my particular name out of thin air, and come kill me. He could just as easily go down to the county courthouse run my name in the county computers direcly tied to the mainframe hosting the records and get the same information. For free, without any record of ever doing it. If someone is that intent to kill me, they're going to succeed. If they're just deranged, then they're going to kill someone randomly, and if it happens to be me, it doesn't matter if they get the records from the county office building physically or if they access the records from a remote location, I'm still dead.
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