Can we please remember that things can be "public" without being "online"?
The big companies don't want you to think about this because they benefit from being able to hoover up everything with a couple of clicks. There's nothing wrong with having to show up in person at a courthouse to see arrest records.
Making a human have to physically show up to make a request for a record does a nice job of adding just enough friction that you can't create these abusable repositories quite so easily.
Yeah, IIRC in New York arrest records are available and can be requested online… but there’s a $50 fee per request, and you don’t get mugshots. Enough availability to ensure the police can’t hide arrests, but also enough barrier to discourage mass collection and abuse of the data.
Mugshots, like fingerprints and now DNA, is opportunistically collected because it makes policing in general easier (you can stick "10 most wanted" pictures in the post office, if they still do that). Wanted posters with photos of wanted miscreants go back to the 1800s and drawings before then. As seen on TV they are used in mugshot books -- I wonder if those books ever have any value in the real world?
So no, I don't think that is the point, per se. But I think they do make it more likely that someone will say, "hey, DiggyJohnson, isn't that your uncle Fred?" If you're in a revolutionary or criminal group you might scan the arrest records in text, but if you don't have a specific reason, you're unlikely to but might recognise a photo.
More to the point, can we remember that things can be "online" without being freely reproducible by the surveillance industry? That's kind of the entire realization of privacy protections!
Trying to control the information by saying it's freely redistributable but you have to go down to the courthouse doesn't work - the surveillance industry just pays someone to go to the courthouse and retrieve the records however often is necessary. In fact putting up such a barrier actually helps them, as now other people looking for that data are inclined to just pay a surveillance company.
What's needed are regulations preventing companies from amassing and trading in personal information, regardless of how and where it is available. There still may be lone individuals who create their own repositories of records (ala free speech), but stomping out the commercial motive for surveillance would eliminate the sheer majority of the activity and preclude it from being a cornerstone of societal control.
If the state tried to prevent people from talking about officially public information, that seems like something that would be slapped down on first amendment grounds alone.
Normally, I agree with you. Stuff like land boundaries, budget allocations, etc. should all be free to access, aggregate, and propagate.
Arrest records are a bit different as you need to balance the rights of a person against the benefits to society.
A person should not be punished simply by having an arrest record--that violates "presumption of innocence". Blind promulgation and aggregation of such records violates lots of people's rights. The police arrest people for shitty reasons all the time and then never press charges.
If you want to promulgate an individual's arrest record, you should have to have some reason that overrides the right to "presumption of innocence" if you want to promulgate or aggregate that record. And you should have to show up with a piece of paper in person to get that record.
The big companies don't want you to think about this because they benefit from being able to hoover up everything with a couple of clicks. There's nothing wrong with having to show up in person at a courthouse to see arrest records.
Making a human have to physically show up to make a request for a record does a nice job of adding just enough friction that you can't create these abusable repositories quite so easily.