Next to our medical records, our most closely guarded secrets probably involve our household finances.
So it's understandable that many of the half-million retirees currently receiving a public pension from California were freaked out recently when CalPERS, the state pension agency, announced it was poised to post their names, their monthly retirement stipends and other personal information online in a very accessible way.
There's no question that all this information is public. Two recent state court rulings, including one involving a press inquiry, make that crystal clear. After all, the courts have ruled, the retirement payments come for the most part from public funds, and taxpayers have an indisputable right to know how their money is spent.
As to how it should be made public, or to put it another way, how public it should be — there's the rub.
And though this might look like an easy question (just dump it online, what's the big deal?), it's not. If the CalPERS database affair tells us anything, it's that the time has long since passed for a public discussion of how to balance the increasing availability of information about ourselves, much of it indisputably "public information," with our equally indisputable right to privacy.
The position of the retiree advocacy groups fighting the CalPERS database is that it steps over the line in making public information just a tad too public.
"We're not against transparency," says Donna Snodgrass, legislative director for the Retired Public Employees Association of California. "But retirees' biggest concern is that this would give someone enough information to prey on elders."
In any case, the principle that recipients of public funds, such as government employees, should expect to cede some privacy isn't consistently applied; no one has free access to the names of relief or Social Security enrollees, or to the medical records of Medicare enrollees.
It might seem strange for a journalist to raise questions about the availability of public information. The Los Angeles Times often has used public records to expose wrongdoing, such as the scandalous behavior of municipal officials in Bell. We've fought hard for the disclosure of payroll records at the L.A. Department of Water and Power. As a columnist, public information is my bread and butter.
But the danger in ventures like the CalPERS database is that it could make information less public, which would happen if it creates a backlash in favor of more confidentiality, even where it's not warranted. That's not an abstract threat; CalPERS has temporarily put its database plans on hold to give the retirees association and other groups time to lobby the Legislature to make more pension data confidential. That would be a blow to the public interest.
Until recently, a kind of natural principle achieved the balance between publicity and privacy all by itself. It's known as "privacy by obscurity." It amounts to protecting privacy by leaving public information hard to find or hard to compile.
"I call obscurity 'pretty good privacy,' "
Woodrow Hartzog, a privacy expert affiliated with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, told me. "There are a lot of things that fall into the category of what we think is OK to be public because we feel nobody will find it."
Almost everyone has felt the sting of lost obscurity at some point. A decade or two ago, few people thought twice about having listed home phones. Sure, the numbers were published in the phone book, but that served as its own shroud of privacy. Anyone who wanted to reach out and touch us had to know where we lived and then hunt down the local white pages — not impossible, obviously, and not necessarily all that hard, but it was something.
