When public records move online and become instantly searchable, does “public” still mean the same thing — or have we lost the practical obscurity that once protected personal privacy?
Most of us assume that once information is “public,” privacy concerns disappear. Yet when court records, property deeds, company filings or old news stories become instantly searchable, something important changes. What was once practically obscure — buried in physical files that required time and effort to find — is now only a few keystrokes away.
Herman T. Tavani, in Ethics and Technology and his work on search engines, calls this the problem of “privacy in public.” Search technology and digitised records allow personal information to be located, aggregated and reassembled far more easily than before. The ethical issue is not that the information was secret, but that individuals lose meaningful control over how widely and in what context it circulates.
Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act, Cap. 97, recognises this tension. While the Act permits collection from public records in certain cases, it still requires fairness, lawfulness, purpose limitation, and that data remain adequate and not excessive. The constitutional right to privacy under Article 27 continues to apply. Making records searchable does not automatically remove all protection against how that data is later used.
Real-world examples show the stakes. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition of “practical obscurity” in Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee (1989) highlighted the difference between scattered paper records and a single searchable dossier. Mugshot websites and open court databases have enabled harassment long after cases ended. In Europe, the “right to be forgotten” rulings against Google showed how old public information can continue shaping a person’s life when it stays highly visible online.
The result is a quiet erosion of personal space. Information that was public in theory becomes persistently public in practice. Protecting privacy here requires more than assuming “public equals free for all.” It demands careful design of online record systems, clearer limits on secondary uses, and respect for the standards already set in Uganda’s data protection law.
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