Public Information

[Steve Bennett]

In a past life I co-founded and led a company specialised in the analysis of publicly available textual information. The basic idea I had was that if you could read every newspaper published everyday, and throw in other easily accessible information sources like company filings to Stock Exchanges and national regulators, then you would learn a lot about: mergers and acquisitions investment strategies alliances and pilot projects using emerging information technologies. The hunch was right and after 1 million lines of code and several million dollars, we had a system that could automatically extract meaning from news 24/7. We launched a subscription service that read thousands of articles each day and then visualised these activities. We sold many subscriptions to leading corporations and government agencies around the globe. On the right is a print-out from that application. Everything was interactive and you 'surfed' through the 'mind maps' using a simple point and click interface. Here is a larger file that you can zoom into to explore: The Virgin Group. In the course of this journey from start-up to a real company with cash flow we were presented with an interesting dilemma. Early on in the history of the company we produced a detailed view of the personal investment strategy of the founder of one of the world's largest software companies. We did it by analysing the web of legal entities he had established and then tracking share transactions, venture capital and M&A deals and news reports, etc. The end result was very interesting and a printed copy of one of the main mind maps was lent to a Board Member of Philips (the Dutch electronics group). By coincidence, this same founder whose investment strategy we had analysed, turned up for a meeting and he saw the chart in their office. Apparently he hit the roof and thought that he was the target of some sort of corporate espionage. This got us thinking and because I had lived in the States, I immediately contacted our trusty lawyer. Our legal council advised us that in the US we ran the risk of being sued for breaching privacy laws. This was despite the fact that all of our source information was freely available. As a side note, the problem was solved by us agreeing not to locate our technology on servers in the US. We remained offshore and (presumably) were much harder for US citizen's to reach us legally. It meant that we paid a little more for the data centre and internet traffic - but I think it was worth it. Why am I writing this today? Well ever since then, I have had a keen interest in what public information is available and what you are allowed to do with it. So I read with interest the following article in Ars Technica: Lobbyists beware: judge rules metadata is public record The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that the metadata attached to public records is itself a public record. Given the frequency...

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