Sometimes the best way to prove a point is to let bad decisions speak for themselves.

So, what would you do if politicians ignored your warnings about a serious privacy risk and ordered you to move forward with the plans anyway?

Would you fight harder to stop them? Or would you quietly find a way to combat them?

In the following story, one local government webmaster encounters this very situation and gets the local news involved.

Here’s what happened.

Politicians ignore warnings about publishing everyone’s data online.

Back when every business and government was starting to make their services accessible online for the first time, a new law was passed in my state that all local government public records must be accessible via the web.

The records held by the local government included dog registrations, building plans/permits, property ownership information, etc.

Until this point, you had to physically turn up at the local government offices and have your name recorded to access such information, but it was free to access, and they were not permitted to deny you access.

They tried to warn that it was a bad idea.

At the time, I was the webmaster for one of the local government areas in Australia.

When this was first proposed, we highlighted that residents would be very upset by making this information easier to access, and potentially for people to ‘scrape’ the entire dataset. (Tests to prove you were human were not very reliable back then.)

This was politics, so we were somewhat surprised that the politicians didn’t see the potential public backlash.

We also wanted to protect our residents from people who would try to abuse or profit from mass access to this information.

When no one listened, they changed their plan.

Our warnings were ignored. So we complied… maliciously.

I wrote an absolutely brilliant information portal (with the best captcha we could implement at the time), which complied exactly with what the law required.

We ensured the local newspaper knew the exact date and time it would go online and what would be published.

It was easy to find and put in a lot of time to ensure the news media would be able to easily demonstrate the potential harm.

Suddenly, no one wanted to take responsibility for the portal.

The following day, it was front-page news about the massive privacy issues this could pose.

That morning, we were told to take it offline, and it stayed offline permanently. The portal was up for a total of 27 hours.

In the aftermath, politicians tried to shift the blame to our local government leadership, who shifted it to us in the IT department.

We had prepared a paper trail to ensure that those truly responsible were given all the credit for the project. Those who rebuffed our warnings had their emails included in the freedom of information requests made during the investigation.

Wow! Some people really don’t think things through very well.

Let’s check out how the people over at Reddit relate to information being published online.

This person thinks her city will sell people’s data soon.

They probably would’ve made him fix this.

Some people probably don’t realize this was a thing.

According to this reader, they thought something else was going to happen.

Way to look out for others!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.