Samir Chopra, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, posed an interesting question on Facebook this morning:

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The consensus of the comments is that since arrest records are public, there is nothing that prevents police departments from posting them to social media. But a worthwhile follow-up question is whether there is a qualitative difference in making a record “public” by filing it in a courthouse somewhere and making it “public” by posting it on Facebook? Given the Internet’s eidetic memory, are the two types of “public” records really equivalent?