For most of their history, public records were public in principle but obscure in practice. A deed, a filing, a registration, a court record: each existed, and each was open to inspection. But inspecting it meant knowing it existed, knowing where it was held, and physically going to the office that held it, often to consult it on paper. The effort involved was itself a kind of protection.

That protection was never designed, and it was never acknowledged. It was simply a by-product of how records were kept. People relied on it without knowing they were relying on anything. A record could be deeply revealing and still, for all practical purposes, remain unseen.

Digitisation removed that by-product. As public records moved from paper to searchable systems, and from a particular office to remote access, the effort that once stood between a person and a record largely disappeared. The record itself did not change. What changed was that it could now be found, instantly, by anyone, from anywhere, often simply by searching a name.

This is why the digitisation of public records exposed so much without anyone publishing anything new. Nothing was disclosed that had not always been disclosable. What ended was the practical obscurity that had quietly kept the disclosable from being disclosed.

For a person of standing this carries particular weight, because the records that accompany property, business and office are exactly the kind that have been digitised and made searchable. A filing from decades ago, once effectively buried, may now sit a single search away.

The point is not that digitisation should not have happened, because it brought real benefits. It is that the obscurity people unknowingly relied upon is gone, and an honest assessment of exposure has to be made on that basis: that what is on the public record is, in practice, now genuinely public.