Comment by remexre
1 month ago
The first reasonable concern that springs to mind is that correlating a few fields that are individually non-identifying in a dataset can lead to deanonymizing people; in principle, the FOIA process gives the organization being requested time to think about what needs to be masked to protect privacy.
> in principle, the FOIA process gives the organization being requested time to think about what needs to be masked to protect privacy.
Although of course that's a lot more in principle than in practice! Like rolling your own crypto, I think experience shows that, against determined de-anonymizers, there is basically nothing you can do to preserve anonymity except to severely limit the information, and the only way definite feedback you get is if you don't succeed and someone discloses the de-anonymized information that they were able to reconstruct.
If government has access to all those fields the data isn't private.
Your argument makes me think we really SHOULD make all government data public. Then people would have an incentive to not let governments have so much of their private data.
I'm essentially comfortable with the government knowing what banks I've banked at, what homes I've lived in, and where and when I've been arrested. I'm much less comfortable with those being in a public database anyone can query.
Why are you comfortable with the government knowing what banks you have banked at?
Also, I hope you don't mean the federal government should know if you've been arrested. I don't think that should be available to them at all.