The COMELEC recently posted a list of registered voters online, “in pursuit of transparency to the end that the stakeholders in our election will trust COMELEC more.”

Unfortunately, the list also includes the registrants’ addresses, birthdays, date of registration, and where they have to vote come Election 2007. It’s by no means comprehensive (the names of family and some friends are missing), and it apparently covers only the NCR. But the personal information of thousands, if not millions, of Filipinos are now available for public consumption.

Even addresses and birthdays aren’t something we usually try to hide, that’s beside the point. There’s a reason why people value their privacy highly. There are many ways to exploit knowledge of a person’s location and age. I’m sure such freely-available demographic info will be a gold mine for unscrupulous marketers. And henchmen looking to silence vocal critics of their boss. Like Marrku said: “A little of connect–this and connect–that will get you more information than you’re ever supposed to know.”

Ironically, what the COMELEC did may have made people less confident about the elections. The committee’s efforts to improve the transparency of the process came at the cost of integrity. Because if the government agency has no problems making private data public without permission, people may no longer bother to register next time.

There are much more effective ways to use the list of registered voters. The COMELEC could store all the data in a protected database. To access their personal information, registrants can prove their identity by logging in with their name and date of registration. The encoded list doesn’t stay unused in a hard disk somewhere, while privacy is maintained. Some naysayers may call such a system impossible to implement or secure. Yet given our world-class IT expertise, creating such an application, reasonably secure against hardware failure and hacking, will prove no problem.

It makes sense to post the election results online. But not to threaten a voter’s basic right to privacy—which lets him make a truly independent decision, free from excessive influence or threat of retaliation.

Update: the list has been taken down.