

Government Offers Data to Miners - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/technology/internet/07cities.html

======
physcab
In Florida, the Sunshine law permits any resident to obtain consumption
information of any household if they are serviced by a municipal utility. I
can walk into Gainesville Regional Utility and ask for a copy of all
residents' consumption information and they will grudgingly hand me a cd of
data from over 90,000 homes.

Thinking this might be pretty useful for comparing similar cities from across
the nation, I started calling and e-mailing other local municipal utilities.
No such luck. Apparently Florida is an anomaly and they know it--currently
they're trying their best to eliminate this part from the law because they
think it encourages identity theft.

Getting good data is indeed quite difficult.

