<story><title>Going Quiet: More States Are Hiding 911 Recordings</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/more-states-are-hiding-911-recordings-from-families-lawyers-and-the-general-public</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>Similar issues can arise with police body cameras. Seattle&amp;#x27;s initial attempt to use body cams had to be stopped because all of the footage was available under state open record laws, and someone was filing requests for all of it and putting it up on YouTube. This was a massive violation of the privacy of numerous people caught on those videos. Police go into people&amp;#x27;s home, often uninvited and on short notice, and can easily see intimate and private details of those people&amp;#x27;s lives.&lt;p&gt;At first Seattle tried editing the footage before release to redact parts that might violate the privacy of anyone other then the officers and alleged criminals. I don&amp;#x27;t remember how many officers were involved in the initial body cam deployment, but it was enough that they generated so much footage that they didn&amp;#x27;t have the budget to edit it. I remember at one point they were even asking hackers for help with automating some of this.&lt;p&gt;A couple years or so later, they resumed using body cams. I&amp;#x27;m not sure how they dealt with the privacy issues.</text></comment>
<story><title>Going Quiet: More States Are Hiding 911 Recordings</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/more-states-are-hiding-911-recordings-from-families-lawyers-and-the-general-public</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>decasia</author><text>I generally support regulations that protect privacy, as I&amp;#x27;m sure most of us do. But they can come at a very real human cost, as in this case. Especially when it comes to regulations that affect people who aren&amp;#x27;t able to express their preferences (because they have died, are incapacitated, are not able to think clearly for whatever reason, etc), any general rule is going to lead to some bad outcomes.&lt;p&gt;FWIW I tend to think 911 calls ought to be public because they are public records. There are probably ways of making them public but not completely easy to access (eg, you could only listen to a specific record on site in a records archive). That would at least guard against the problems of releasing everything on the internet, which would impose major reputational risks to everybody who ever made a 911 call.</text></comment>