>AFAICT the default in policy is that privacy doesn't matter I think that may be true for some, but not for others. It depends a lot on previous experience I t

>AFAICT the default in policy is that privacy doesn't matter I think that may be true for some, but not for others. It depends a lot on previous experience I think. My uncle was a county clerk and digitized a lot of public records, for which he was rewarded by unhappy citizens filing a FOIA act on his e-mail account (a great reason to never e-mail relatives at their work address if you don't want it all potentially public someday). After that, his office was a lot more cautionary about data releases, even though it was public record. For some counter-examples on the business side, Netflix got bit by the re-identification bug and now is very careful about data releases. At Kiva, I face this problem all the time of turning down research requests for what would be interesting and useful analysis. We release an anonymized dataset of our loan activity (that's taken a lot of work to properly sanitize). However, we get requests nearly every day to release more information, which we can't do, due to the real possibility of re-identification.