There are still privacy rules relating to public records, though, Toni. For instance, BMD records are public records but there are strict rules about those in Australia, even the indexes. Many public records are closed for 100 years. I don't know what the access rules are for the court records at the Victoria Public Record Office but even if the recent records are open there for anyone turning up to view them, that is very different from them being available online. Victoria doesn't have "spent convictions" at the moment, but it is supposed to be up to the Victoria police to decide whether to release information on old convictions, and this database will bypass that rule in some cases.
I contacted Liberty Victoria (the Victoria civil liberties group) about this but had no reply. I have also contacted Civil Liberties Australia and they have passed it on to the Australian Privacy Foundation.
Even if the authorities rule that this is o.k., I feel that people who are affected by this should at least be aware that their data has been made available online, and I don't see any such announcements online to the wider community, only to family history researchers - and I would dispute that such recent court records are necessary for family history research.
|