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by ascorbic
3317 days ago
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The point made by the site is that because it costs £3 to look at each title document, it's not practical to see it at any scale. Sure you can find an individual property's ownership, but you can't search this in any way except by location, and you can't answer questions such as "who is the largest landowner in this area" or "what are the holdings of landowner x" without spending thousands on laboriously finding and buying each title. You can't even see the boundaries of each title unless you have bought the individual maps. You can just see a list of titles within a radius of a point, and then buy those titles to find out their extent. A secret doesn't need to be impossible to find to be closely-guarded, it can just be impractical. |
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Cite opposition to attempts to reform that system for a better one (that can be polled programatically for example), and then we can say that calling it "closely guarded" is accurate.
It's similar to calling the data contained in microfilm at your local library "closely-guarded". It's cumbersome to parse, yes. It's kept behind lock and guarded doors (when the library is closed), yes. But access is not reserved for those who meet security and/or idological criteral and vetting. There is no attempt to prevent the decemination of the information to others outside a vetted pool of privilaged users. What makes microfilm difficult to access is not it being closely guarded, but rather just that nobody's gone and digitized it — yet (If this is not true, then just image we're in the year 2007, or 1997). If people trying to digitize such material were hampered by active effort of the keepers of the microfilm because the said "keepers" didn't want the information available more broadly... then that would be "close-guarded". But that is not what's happening.
So yes, it's term is click bait. Or just bad, imprecise writing.