Comment Re:Stallman puts blame in wrong place. (Score 3, Insightful) 367
Disclaimer: I used to work in journalism as a reference librarian and researcher.
There are MANY legitimate reasons for many public records to be public. It's in the public's interest to know if one person or company is buying all the land/homes/businesses in an area (and who's lending them the money to do it). It's in our interest to know who owns businesses. It's in the government's interest to know where people live and how to contact them, and it's in the public's interest to know what the government knows about us.
When records are public, people are going to collect them, analyze them, and put them together in more useful ways (and often provide them for sale). It's certainly not a perfect system, and it makes people feel funny when someone knows things about them. But I'm not sure catering to your funny feeling (even if you think it's somehow a threat to democracy) is worth the tradeoff of not having this information be publicly accessible.