How can data collected by the government be private? That should all be available to the public since it was gathered with public funds. Has no one issued a freedom of information request?
Personally, I think an individual’s privacy should take precedence here.
There's no individual's privacy even at stake here. None of the data that's non-public is even material or relevant to the dispute here, beyond that the professors in question signed an agreement to access the data for unrelated matters.
Agreed. What gives the government the right to reject my FOIA requests for the exact specification and design files for gaseous centrifuges, implosion devices, and nerve gas?
Extreme natsec examples aside, there are a thousand reasons to keep government data private, not the least of which is constituent privacy. Deanonymizing data is far easier than preparing it for release and the data schools keep on students is particularly sensitive (I'm not claiming that that's the case with this data, just making a general observation).
In this case it was for "student-level data that detail the demographic information and the performance records over time of California’s 5.8 million students but without any names or identifying information. That data is the gold standard for accurate research. A partnership contract details the department’s commitments and researchers’ responsibilities, including strong assurances they will have security protections in place to protect students’ privacy and anonymity."
The thing about this sort of data is, removing PII from the dataset doesn't make it fully or even sufficiently anonymous. If there's only one Pacific Islander student in the Shasta Union High School District then it's easy to figure out who that is by coming it with other public data.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy :
] Statistical organizations have long collected information under a promise of confidentiality that the information provided will be used for statistical purposes, but that the publications will not produce information that can be traced back to a specific individual or establishment. To accomplish this goal, statistical organizations have long suppressed information in their publications. For example, in a table presenting the sales of each business in a town grouped by business category, a cell that has information from only one company might be suppressed, in order to maintain the confidentiality of that company's specific sales.
The clear justification for keeping this information private is that the government won't get sufficiently useful data without this promise. The United States Census Bureau released "confidential" information about draft evaders and Japanese-Americans; if you think they might do that again, perhaps you'll lie about some of the questions.
People who receive this sort of information are required to take special care to maintain the needed level of anonymity.
There's of course no reason why this should be used to muzzle researchers for completely unrelated fields.
Society shouldnt accept this data should be behind paywalls or accept high costs to access it. Or paper only releases to stop release restrictions for costs and size.
A lot of the rest I'd rather was private. Although it'd be nice to get aggregated data for certain crimes which currently are tracked at each individual department level and not in any sort of national manner.