Re:California moves to silence Stanford researchers who got ...
by smcin on Friday July 28, 2023 @11:03PM
(#36916429)
I didn't see any mention of individual student records anywhere; seems like a red herring.
It's very possible to aggregate and anonymize (remove PII); aggregate the records by zipcode, anonymized school ID, school district, grade-level of student, age of student, educational attainment, etc.
You agree that's possible, FOIA-compliant and has been done already for decades? Like how Census data is made public (the Census also uses fuzzing to prevent reverse-engineering to individuals, esp. in tracts with small populations).
> Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department.
Red herring: the CDE is not trying in good faith to define what level of aggregated data would be sufficiently anonymous; they're blanket-opposing legitimate public access to this data (even highly aggregated) via the researchers being allowed to testify in court.
> How about data pertaining to your kids?
Absolutely can and should be disclosed, in aggregate. Otherwise you have a public entity spending $128.5 billion taxpayer money that is not performing so well, gotten worse since 2020, and violating disclosure.
It's very possible to aggregate and anonymize (remove PII); aggregate the records by zipcode, anonymized school ID, school district, grade-level of student, age of student, educational attainment, etc.
You agree that's possible, FOIA-compliant and has been done already for decades? Like how Census data is made public (the Census also uses fuzzing to prevent reverse-engineering to individuals, esp. in tracts with small populations).
> Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department.
Red herring: the CDE is not trying in good faith to define what level of aggregated data would be sufficiently anonymous; they're blanket-opposing legitimate public access to this data (even highly aggregated) via the researchers being allowed to testify in court.
> How about data pertaining to your kids?
Absolutely can and should be disclosed, in aggregate. Otherwise you have a public entity spending $128.5 billion taxpayer money that is not performing so well, gotten worse since 2020, and violating disclosure.