4 ms·

wow! in Europe, this request 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date correlates person-related information

by froh 3y ago

wow! in Europe, this request 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date correlates person-related information (who was in contact with whom at which date and time). storing it, let alone processing it is only admissible on a need to know basis. even if you jump through the hoop of an officer acting on behalf of Seattle is not a person any more, which is a stretch already, even then all email addresses outside the Seattle gov domain are completely taboo without a court order and a cause (and being criminal investigator) oh privacy ...

nostromo 3y ago
In the US emails to and from government workers are generally considered public record. It's important for transparency.
- techsupporter 3y ago
  I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service. In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsletter means a public record has been created. Data brokers and people who want to "just reach out for a simple conversation" and political parties routinely make grabs for this data to populate mailing lists and the like. That's annoying and shouldn't be a function of public records laws. We exempt utility billing records, even when the utility is owned by a city, and library card data and so on. Asking for a service from the government should be wholly exempt.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    The counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their neighbor was claiming poverty income on their spacious mansion with the new well-appointed carriage house, they could sic the feds on them. Today, many states still post the voter rolls (and their status, such as "out of town for this election") at voting places because it's considered to be part of the public's right to defend the vote by noticing that Steve said he'd be out of town (or moved last month), but here he is in the voting line; is he trying to double-vote?
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      We have learned to our chagrin that such data is functionally useless to joe average voter because he is far far too ill informed and ill positioned to use it. For instance it's incredibly easy to detect double voting if you have to check in at the polling location and send your ballot in in a signed envelope how on earth would it be possible to miss such? What can happen and does happen to thousands of folks in an election with over a 100M voters is folks plan to be out of town and come back. Lets be mean. When you thought of this sort of circumstance is an imaginary problem that would have thousands of false positives and zero true positives. You ably demonstrate why its useless to crowd source election integrity because the crowd doesn't know anything. If you need further evidence look at all the other imaginary election fraud from causes as simple as not understanding things like - people cast legit votes then die weeks or months later - people move in area and forget to update their voter registration - people have the same first and last name as the recently dead/moved/imprisoned/otherwise ineligible
  - legitster 3y ago
    We already do this and put up with it with mailing addresses. The only difference is that the transaction cost of your email address is basically nil compared to your mailing address.
- Fomite 3y ago
  Washington State, in particular, has a very broad public records act.
legitster 3y ago
So, email addresses kind of suffer from the same problem as Social Security numbers - they were never designed to be private information! But they have been forced to fit that role. And, you know, cities have no problem giving out personal information all of the time. Your personal address, or whoever owns property in a city, is a matter of public record. And so the city has no problem handing out your name and address to anyone that asks. Your email address is much lower stake.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  > So, email addresses kind of suffer from the same problem as Social Security numbers - they were never designed to be private information! I would have considered my personal From and To associations to be private information since my email address started with ...utzoo!
- ralferoo 3y ago
  The issue isn't that email addresses are private information, it's that they are personally identifiable. [EDIT: to be clear, the following refers to the GP comment referring to in Europe, where as the parent comment is clearly US-centric] Even if you replaced every distinct e-mail address with an ID or hash or whatever, they would still fall foul of GDPR because that ID or hash would become PII. You might say that's impossible, but for instance, if you knew that you happened to send specific e-mails to people in that dataset, you could correlate the times to discover your own hash, then filter by your hash and use the times to correlate with who you sent them to. Now you know the hashes of everyone you corresponded with, and can do PII-based analysis on that, e.g. how many people e-mailed them and when, whether they responded, who else they e-mailed after receiving those e-mails (so you might be able to start identifying colleagues etc), etc. PII, even in what looks to be anonymous data, is very valuable to people who are determined to mine it, which is why typically data such as this should only be disclosed in aggregate, and usually after verifying that each aggregated set of data actually covers a large enough group of individuals that also can't be correlated another way.
araes 3y ago
Generally agree with this. Whoever the author is has a totally different view of "metadata". Metadata from my perspective would be "general amount of emails", (possibly) "address blocks (just involved, not from/to/bcc/cc)", "time frames" (with large window averaging), (maybe...) "very vague categories".
db48x 3y ago
That’s true, but remember that these are government employees. All business that they conduct is a matter of public record by definition. They are required by our laws to maintain a record of all actions and communications, which anyone is allowed to consult. Technically they’re not supposed to use government resources for private communication, and legally they are not allowed to use _private_ communication resources for _public_ business.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  No, they aren't. 'They', being the people whose email addresses are being released, includes everyone who emails or receives an email from a government official. Thought you'd like to receive updates on the construction outside your house by email? Now it includes you.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Yes, they are. Virtually every consequential interaction you have with the government ends up as part of the public record. You don’t have to do that via email, and if email is convenient then having two email addresses is not that difficult. There are well–known exceptions, such as library borrowing records, which are exempt and have been since long before email addresses were invented.
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      You said these are government employees I pointed out that no, it includes the non-employees who interact with the government. You answer...they don't have to use email, therefore everyone who does is a government employee? No.
      - db48x 3y ago
        No, you misunderstood. Perhaps I stated it poorly. My statement is that every interaction with local government in the US generates a public record. This is true even when email is not involved. For example, let’s say that you have purchased a property. The deed is registered with a county government. The tax assessor decides how much property tax you will owe. They record whether you have actually paid that tax or not. All of these records are public information, and there is very little concession to privacy. In the US, there is no expectation of privacy around these records. Anyone in the US can look up these records for any property at all, and your name is there for all to see. The amount you paid for the property is there for all to see, and so on. Your phone number and email address would be there too, except for the fact that they don’t collect or store that information. They don’t need too, because they always do business with you by mail. These days you can also use their website to pay your property tax, or to look up information about a property you are interested in, but that is ancillary. The same holds true for almost all other ways that you might interact with the government. Building permits and inspections are public records. Arrest warrants are open. Trial records. Water bills are public records, if the water is provided by a utility owned and operated by the government (varies from place to place). Drivers licensing is almost entirely open. Vehicle registration. Bids on providing goods and services to the government are only sealed for a short time; once the winning bidder is selected all of them become public records. All of this is business as usual in the US. Finally, all of the official communications of government employees and elected officials, whether internal to a government department or not, are public records. That means that if you talk to a mayor, whether by phone or by email or by written letter, and the mayor is acting in an official capacity, then the entirety of your communication is a public record. That includes the type of communication, how it was delivered, your phone number, your email address, etc. All of it is to be recorded and made available to the public upon request. Of course public records may contain information that is not public. When a member of the public requests a public record, such non–public information should be redacted from the copy that they receive. That includes things like credit card numbers and social–security numbers, but not necessarily phone numbers or email addresses. Especially not the phone numbers or email addresses of the parties to the communication. Maybe it’s different where you’re from, but here those are important parts of the public record. If you want to talk to the mayor but don’t want your email address to become part of the public record, then don’t talk to the mayor via email! Write a letter instead.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
Public records are for the public! I both love and hate it. I think it makes sense for citizens to be able to check in on what the govt is doing. Unfortunatley the govt likes to keep tabs on a lot of things and it'd sure be nice if they didn't and it'd be even nicer if those records didn't have to be public. If you think that request was bad you should look up the history of LexisNexis. Their bread and butter is requesting data and collecting it all into a single database that you can use to background check anyone the american government vaguely knows about. There also used to be a site called masscorruption that I'm pretty sure focused on a single county government in massachusetts run by some whacker with an axe to grind. He filed a FOIA request for every image file on a government desktop, which was fulfilled, and he went on to publish the employee's personal images that probably should not have been stored on a govt computer. At my workplace whenever I put a government employee in the to: line a banner appears in outlook informing me that the message I am writing can be FOIA'd. Especially with local govts you just never know how people are going to get activated and what will be interesting to them.

by froh 3y ago

nostromo 3y ago

In the US emails to and from government workers are generally considered public record. It's important for transparency.

techsupporter 3y ago
I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service. In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsletter means a public record has been created. Data brokers and people who want to "just reach out for a simple conversation" and political parties routinely make grabs for this data to populate mailing lists and the like. That's annoying and shouldn't be a function of public records laws. We exempt utility billing records, even when the utility is owned by a city, and library card data and so on. Asking for a service from the government should be wholly exempt.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  The counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their neighbor was claiming poverty income on their spacious mansion with the new well-appointed carriage house, they could sic the feds on them. Today, many states still post the voter rolls (and their status, such as "out of town for this election") at voting places because it's considered to be part of the public's right to defend the vote by noticing that Steve said he'd be out of town (or moved last month), but here he is in the voting line; is he trying to double-vote?
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    We have learned to our chagrin that such data is functionally useless to joe average voter because he is far far too ill informed and ill positioned to use it. For instance it's incredibly easy to detect double voting if you have to check in at the polling location and send your ballot in in a signed envelope how on earth would it be possible to miss such? What can happen and does happen to thousands of folks in an election with over a 100M voters is folks plan to be out of town and come back. Lets be mean. When you thought of this sort of circumstance is an imaginary problem that would have thousands of false positives and zero true positives. You ably demonstrate why its useless to crowd source election integrity because the crowd doesn't know anything. If you need further evidence look at all the other imaginary election fraud from causes as simple as not understanding things like - people cast legit votes then die weeks or months later - people move in area and forget to update their voter registration - people have the same first and last name as the recently dead/moved/imprisoned/otherwise ineligible
- legitster 3y ago
  We already do this and put up with it with mailing addresses. The only difference is that the transaction cost of your email address is basically nil compared to your mailing address.
Fomite 3y ago
Washington State, in particular, has a very broad public records act.

legitster 3y ago

So, email addresses kind of suffer from the same problem as Social Security numbers - they were never designed to be private information! But they have been forced to fit that role. And, you know, cities have no problem giving out personal information all of the time. Your personal address, or whoever owns property in a city, is a matter of public record. And so the city has no problem handing out your name and address to anyone that asks. Your email address is much lower stake.

Ensorceled 3y ago
> So, email addresses kind of suffer from the same problem as Social Security numbers - they were never designed to be private information! I would have considered my personal From and To associations to be private information since my email address started with ...utzoo!
ralferoo 3y ago
The issue isn't that email addresses are private information, it's that they are personally identifiable. [EDIT: to be clear, the following refers to the GP comment referring to in Europe, where as the parent comment is clearly US-centric] Even if you replaced every distinct e-mail address with an ID or hash or whatever, they would still fall foul of GDPR because that ID or hash would become PII. You might say that's impossible, but for instance, if you knew that you happened to send specific e-mails to people in that dataset, you could correlate the times to discover your own hash, then filter by your hash and use the times to correlate with who you sent them to. Now you know the hashes of everyone you corresponded with, and can do PII-based analysis on that, e.g. how many people e-mailed them and when, whether they responded, who else they e-mailed after receiving those e-mails (so you might be able to start identifying colleagues etc), etc. PII, even in what looks to be anonymous data, is very valuable to people who are determined to mine it, which is why typically data such as this should only be disclosed in aggregate, and usually after verifying that each aggregated set of data actually covers a large enough group of individuals that also can't be correlated another way.

araes 3y ago

Generally agree with this. Whoever the author is has a totally different view of "metadata". Metadata from my perspective would be "general amount of emails", (possibly) "address blocks (just involved, not from/to/bcc/cc)", "time frames" (with large window averaging), (maybe...) "very vague categories".

db48x 3y ago

That’s true, but remember that these are government employees. All business that they conduct is a matter of public record by definition. They are required by our laws to maintain a record of all actions and communications, which anyone is allowed to consult. Technically they’re not supposed to use government resources for private communication, and legally they are not allowed to use _private_ communication resources for _public_ business.

lazyasciiart 3y ago
No, they aren't. 'They', being the people whose email addresses are being released, includes everyone who emails or receives an email from a government official. Thought you'd like to receive updates on the construction outside your house by email? Now it includes you.
- db48x 3y ago
  Yes, they are. Virtually every consequential interaction you have with the government ends up as part of the public record. You don’t have to do that via email, and if email is convenient then having two email addresses is not that difficult. There are well–known exceptions, such as library borrowing records, which are exempt and have been since long before email addresses were invented.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    You said these are government employees I pointed out that no, it includes the non-employees who interact with the government. You answer...they don't have to use email, therefore everyone who does is a government employee? No.
    - db48x 3y ago
      No, you misunderstood. Perhaps I stated it poorly. My statement is that every interaction with local government in the US generates a public record. This is true even when email is not involved. For example, let’s say that you have purchased a property. The deed is registered with a county government. The tax assessor decides how much property tax you will owe. They record whether you have actually paid that tax or not. All of these records are public information, and there is very little concession to privacy. In the US, there is no expectation of privacy around these records. Anyone in the US can look up these records for any property at all, and your name is there for all to see. The amount you paid for the property is there for all to see, and so on. Your phone number and email address would be there too, except for the fact that they don’t collect or store that information. They don’t need too, because they always do business with you by mail. These days you can also use their website to pay your property tax, or to look up information about a property you are interested in, but that is ancillary. The same holds true for almost all other ways that you might interact with the government. Building permits and inspections are public records. Arrest warrants are open. Trial records. Water bills are public records, if the water is provided by a utility owned and operated by the government (varies from place to place). Drivers licensing is almost entirely open. Vehicle registration. Bids on providing goods and services to the government are only sealed for a short time; once the winning bidder is selected all of them become public records. All of this is business as usual in the US. Finally, all of the official communications of government employees and elected officials, whether internal to a government department or not, are public records. That means that if you talk to a mayor, whether by phone or by email or by written letter, and the mayor is acting in an official capacity, then the entirety of your communication is a public record. That includes the type of communication, how it was delivered, your phone number, your email address, etc. All of it is to be recorded and made available to the public upon request. Of course public records may contain information that is not public. When a member of the public requests a public record, such non–public information should be redacted from the copy that they receive. That includes things like credit card numbers and social–security numbers, but not necessarily phone numbers or email addresses. Especially not the phone numbers or email addresses of the parties to the communication. Maybe it’s different where you’re from, but here those are important parts of the public record. If you want to talk to the mayor but don’t want your email address to become part of the public record, then don’t talk to the mayor via email! Write a letter instead.

jabroni_salad 3y ago

Public records are for the public! I both love and hate it. I think it makes sense for citizens to be able to check in on what the govt is doing. Unfortunatley the govt likes to keep tabs on a lot of things and it'd sure be nice if they didn't and it'd be even nicer if those records didn't have to be public. If you think that request was bad you should look up the history of LexisNexis. Their bread and butter is requesting data and collecting it all into a single database that you can use to background check anyone the american government vaguely knows about. There also used to be a site called masscorruption that I'm pretty sure focused on a single county government in massachusetts run by some whacker with an axe to grind. He filed a FOIA request for every image file on a government desktop, which was fulfilled, and he went on to publish the employee's personal images that probably should not have been stored on a govt computer. At my workplace whenever I put a government employee in the to: line a banner appears in outlook informing me that the message I am writing can be FOIA'd. Especially with local govts you just never know how people are going to get activated and what will be interesting to them.