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Not sure it's fair to say it's a red herring, or that I'm "co-opted" like you suggest. Transparency is kind of my main dig -- I get it. Like, I recently helped

by chaps 3y ago

Not sure it's fair to say it's a red herring, or that I'm "co-opted" like you suggest. Transparency is kind of my main dig -- I get it. Like, I recently helped a small team of researchers with some FOIA requests to get access to similar information you were denied. But at the end of the day it's fundamentally important to understand at what point transparency and privacy intersect.

doctorpangloss 3y ago
I appreciate you're sincere about these issues. > But at the end of the day it's fundamentally important to understand at what point transparency and privacy intersect. "At the end of the day," these conversations about privacy are like 15 minutes long at private schools. People still keep sending their kids to private schools. I just don't know how much it matters. They surely care about privacy in their internal research and metrics, but they don't employ a full time Privacist. They might employ someone who checks the right boxes for them and deals with FERPA shit. But because they are aligned with the parents in delivering the best educations, for the most part, they are trusted to do with data what they want, and that sometimes includes inviting outside collaborators to look at it, without anywhere near the same faff as the CDE. If you're a journalist and you want to help a private school make a better education, out of the thousands of private schools, one of them will both let you write about it and also tell them something they don't wanna hear. Some might use privacy or whatever as the reason they don't want to collaborate with you, but on average it will be about trust. The CDE is never going to do that. There's only 1 CDE, and they are there to preserve the status quo.
- chaps 3y ago
  For sure :) Very similar things happen when investigating criminal cases. There's possibly hundreds or thousands of instances of some type of misconduct or improper arrest... but none of the defense attorneys with those sorts of cases will talk about it with the press because of the very real potential harms of talking with the press. Or the ones that do talk are too high level.. or they might have some ulterior motive like self-promotion. It's really hard to express how many issues are a direct result of lawyers understandably, but systematically not raising any public awareness about truly awful things. Have you tried getting your data through CPRA requests? I'm out in Illinois and our law is pretty decent and not super familiar with CA's public records nuance, but it's really worth a try. What I know though is that California CPRA officers get away with a strange amount of abuse of the law. But even with that, you might be surprised what records are available. So if you do submit some requests, don't exactly expect it to be easy or immediate. Expect to be stonewalled, and need to sue at some point though. But IME public record suits are pretty hands-off (except when they're not..). And most of the lawyers I've worked with are upfront about what they will and won't litigate over. One thing you'll find is that.. basically nobody is looking into most of the awful things you'd expect would have eyes. It's very likely you'll be the only one doing those requests, or incrementally identifying how to get what you want through multiple requests over months. But each step breaks new ground and turns into feedback loops if you can build a community around it.

by chaps 3y ago

doctorpangloss 3y ago

I appreciate you're sincere about these issues. > But at the end of the day it's fundamentally important to understand at what point transparency and privacy intersect. "At the end of the day," these conversations about privacy are like 15 minutes long at private schools. People still keep sending their kids to private schools. I just don't know how much it matters. They surely care about privacy in their internal research and metrics, but they don't employ a full time Privacist. They might employ someone who checks the right boxes for them and deals with FERPA shit. But because they are aligned with the parents in delivering the best educations, for the most part, they are trusted to do with data what they want, and that sometimes includes inviting outside collaborators to look at it, without anywhere near the same faff as the CDE. If you're a journalist and you want to help a private school make a better education, out of the thousands of private schools, one of them will both let you write about it and also tell them something they don't wanna hear. Some might use privacy or whatever as the reason they don't want to collaborate with you, but on average it will be about trust. The CDE is never going to do that. There's only 1 CDE, and they are there to preserve the status quo.

chaps 3y ago
For sure :) Very similar things happen when investigating criminal cases. There's possibly hundreds or thousands of instances of some type of misconduct or improper arrest... but none of the defense attorneys with those sorts of cases will talk about it with the press because of the very real potential harms of talking with the press. Or the ones that do talk are too high level.. or they might have some ulterior motive like self-promotion. It's really hard to express how many issues are a direct result of lawyers understandably, but systematically not raising any public awareness about truly awful things. Have you tried getting your data through CPRA requests? I'm out in Illinois and our law is pretty decent and not super familiar with CA's public records nuance, but it's really worth a try. What I know though is that California CPRA officers get away with a strange amount of abuse of the law. But even with that, you might be surprised what records are available. So if you do submit some requests, don't exactly expect it to be easy or immediate. Expect to be stonewalled, and need to sue at some point though. But IME public record suits are pretty hands-off (except when they're not..). And most of the lawyers I've worked with are upfront about what they will and won't litigate over. One thing you'll find is that.. basically nobody is looking into most of the awful things you'd expect would have eyes. It's very likely you'll be the only one doing those requests, or incrementally identifying how to get what you want through multiple requests over months. But each step breaks new ground and turns into feedback loops if you can build a community around it.