> This is similar to court records, which are also default-public

It's hard for me to see how the trial of a rapist is similar to a rape victim calling for help.

The trial needs to be public so we can monitor the application of justice in the legal system.

The details of somebody's worst moments of their life needs to be public because...?

If I ever need to call 911, I want to only focus on getting help fast. But as it is, I also need to think about how I'll sound if this call is being played on the news or Twitter.

The same details of a rape (and probably more details than many people even want) would very likely come up in court just the same, you know.

But courts will anonymize the victim and can seal records.

It is important conceptually because it involves essentially a petition of government power and a check on abuse on both sides.

If they provides absolutely horrible public service as in callously calling the rape victim a slut who deserves it and then later denied the misconduct and circles the wagons that is important.

Or if the abuser of the calls isn't held accountable.

Transparency vs privacy isn't a straightforward matter and there is ample room for debate and differences in opinion.

Using them to monitor abuse does not require making them public. It just requires making them available to those who claim they were abused, or if they did not survive their estate or whoever would have had medical power of attorney for them or someone similar.

The same arguments apply to making my doctor visits public. At least if I go to a government employed or financed doctor.

> The details of somebody's worst moments of their life needs to be public because...?

The article highlights cases where the 911 records revealed misconduct or negligence.

> But as it is, I also need to think about how I'll sound if this call is being played on the news or Twitter.

If that matters, perhaps it wasn't an emergency that required the use of 911?

I imagine if you had a short-lived mental issue that caused you to go to court over it but were eventually found innocent, that might also be viewed as highly private, but the records would likely be public.

There will always be edges around any law or policy where positive outcomes are not includes and negative outcomes are. It's trivial to come up with negative outcomes for almost anything, the question is whether frequency of magnitude of the positive and negative outcomes result in a net gain of enough to make the law useful overall.

The question is not whether 911 calls include private information. They do and invariably will by their nature. The qeustion is whether the gain by making them public outweighs the loss, and whether we can incentivize the positives while mitigating the negatives.

One possible way to do this might be to make them gates through providing your SSN and name (which is then attached with a timestamp to future requests as an access log), severely rate limiting based on requester's SSN and name (with the ability to petition higher limits based on profession/need, automatically expiring over time), and licensed by the governing institution to only be used/copied in specific ways.

Ah, so they should only release the contents of your doctor checkup if the doctor is a government employee, like in the UK.

Thankfully, that particular one is hopefully dealt with by the fact that deliberately infecting someone with AIDS is punishable and hopefully deterred. The whole world doesn't need to know that a person has AIDS for that person to take necessary steps to avoid infecting people.