COMELEC and the right to privacy
Posted Friday, March 16th, 2007 11:31 am by Arnold Gamboa
Viewed 2249 times | Related entries: The Internet
I don’t want to sound angry as this guy, but he has the right to feel that way. I think COMELEC made a terrible — make that stupid — mistake by publishing the personal information of thousands of NCR’s registered voters. Comelecncr.com — NOT .gov, take note (is this even sanctioned by the government?) is a partnership between a COMELEC official named Dir. Ferdinand Rafanan and San Miguel Corporation (yes, what does a multi-million peso company has to do with Philippine elections?).
Dir. Rafanan said the goal is transparency. Ok, sounds like a noble intention. But the big question is, does publishing someone’s name, registration number and home address over the internet where billions of people can access a violation of the right to privacy?
Believe me, it’s in there. I saw my name and other personal details. Try it yourself.
Update: as of 7:30 pm today, the pdf files are not available anymore. Looks like they didn’t even bother to put up a good fight. Blogging did it again, eh? 
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5 Responses to “COMELEC and the right to privacy”
[...] the stupidest things with information entrusted to them. Take this case for example. PTB contributor Arnold Gamboa discovered that a certain website purporting to belong to the Commission on Elections NCR (National Capital [...]
Transparency is about public officials and public servants being accountable to taxpayers. It’s not about exposing the private lives of private citizens for all to see.
I guess they intended to just publish the list of voters. Its transparency in the sense that the list is open to scrutiny for everybody. Perhaps they thought, maybe rightly so, that the list is a public document anyway. I think the inclusion of the addresses, if indeed they were, was a mistake. Can’t tell now because when I visited the site the list is no longer there. Just my two cents.
Yeah I read about this before from http://rebelpixel.com/archives/2007/03/15/a-privacy-nightmare/
I think he was the first to blog about this.
Yeah, Markku’s entry was also how I found out about everything…
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