courts service not allowing search engines search legal diary

Carawaystick

Why does the courts service not allow search engines search the legal diary or judgements

http://courts.ie/robots.txt wrote:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /legaldiary.nsf/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /judgments.nsf/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /LegalDiary.NSF/

Graham

Data protection issues, people are named in cases regardless of the outcome of those cases. A casual Google search by a prospective employer for example could turn up the name of someone completely innocent but to a prospective employer there could be a 'no smoke without fire' judgment made very quickly.

234

Graham wrote: »

Data protection issues, people are named in cases regardless of the outcome of those cases. A casual Google search by a prospective employer for example could turn up the name of someone completely innocent but to a prospective employer there could be a 'no smoke without fire' judgment made very quickly.

Thats not a data protection issue at all. The names of parties to litigation are a matter of public record. And anyone can use the High Court search function on the website anyway. Same with legal diary.

Graham

234 wrote: »

Thats not a data protection issue at all. The names of parties to litigation are a matter of public record. And anyone can use the High Court search function on the website anyway. Same with legal diary.

It still is public record and it's available to the public via the Courts website.

I know first hand the DPC has made recommendations to several state bodies that they block search engine indexing for specific parts of their websites where members of the public are listed by name.

Dandelion6

Graham wrote: »

I know first hand the DPC has made recommendations to several state bodies that they block search engine indexing for specific parts of their websites where members of the public are listed by name.

That still doesn't explain why the High Court Search is, erm, searchable but the legal diary isn't. Legal diary only shows surnames anyway, and no real details of the cases, so it's highly unlikely to reveal any damaging info to potential employers.

I'm inclined to think the real reason is simply the same reason the search function for the judgments section is so poor i.e. it's a badly designed website.

Graham

Dandelion6 wrote: »

That still doesn't explain why the High Court Search is, erm, searchable but the legal diary isn't. Legal diary only shows surnames anyway, and no real details of the cases, so it's highly unlikely to reveal any damaging info to potential employers.

I'm inclined to think the real reason is simply the same reason the search function for the judgments section is so poor i.e. it's a badly designed website.

The very appearance of a name in connection with a Court case can have negative oundertones and lack of information can be every bit as damaging (if not more so) than full information.

I'm not sure what you mean by searchable, Legal Diary and High Court are both searchable directly from their respective sites.

Here's how this happens:

State body launches a website some of which contains personally identifiable information.
Member of the public realises his name returns results in a Google search.
Member of the public complains to the state body and/or the DPC.
If not referred to the DPC by the member of the public, the state body refers the complaint to the DPC.
The DPC issues a recommendation. In the case of public records containing personally identifiable information this recommendation is usually to discourage search engine indexing through the use of a robots.txt

Dandelion6

Graham wrote: »

I'm not sure what you mean by searchable, Legal Diary and High Court are both searchable directly from their respective sites.

Oops my mistake, I didn't realise Legal Diary was searchable on the site. That would have been handy to know a few times