2011/10/23 Mark Goodge <[email protected]>: > > It would be hugely controversial, as a lot of people would see it as an > invasion of privacy. I get regular emails and letters from people > complaining that I've put details of their house on > britishlistedbuildings.co.uk - I even had a letter from an MP last week - > even though all of the published data is already freely available. Making > data available that isn't currently free would be even more likely to > attract complaints.
Many of my clients have this sort of problem. Being the kind of lawyer who attracts open data people I see it all the time. Information that is available to the public, but only in some register somewhere or otherwise not widely publicised, suddenly becomes available on the internet and deep unhappiness follows. But I wonder if this is something that we will see decline as a new generation of internet users becomes more used to that sort of publicity, or perhaps becomes less concerned with "privacy". But of course the land registry should be available freely on demand so that we can cheaply build API's on top of it that do this kind of job, just as (apologies for plugging a client but ..) Level Business (http://www.levelbusiness.com/) have done with Companies House. I don't know how much money the Land Registry make out of selling their data, but really their running costs should be mostly funded out of the transactional cost of land registration. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
