Arizona Court Says Metadata On Public Records Is Public As Well

from the lobbyists-rushing-to-scrub-metadata dept

Fri, Oct 30th 2009 3:22pm — Mike Masnick

An interesting ruling in the Arizona Supreme Court found that the metadata on a public record should be public as well -- so people could, conceivably, look at who created certain documents and when they were created. While that might not seem like a big deal, as the article link above describes, plenty of interesting data often can be found in the metadata -- such as what lobbyist wrote up what documents for other organizations to send. While this only applies in Arizona right now, you have to imagine that lobbyists are quickly learning how to better scrub metadata off their astroturfing letters.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: arizona, lobbyists, metadata, public records

5 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 30 Oct 2009 @ 4:06pm

People whose idea of a sentence with â��metadataâ�� is...
“I never metadata I didn’t like”.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 30 Oct 2009 @ 4:25pm

As on metadata I did meditate ...
... I met a date whom May did hate, as my Mediterranean mate.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Fred McTaker (profile), 30 Oct 2009 @ 6:40pm

Falsification?
Does this carry any explicit or implicit penalty for metadata falsification or spoofing? A recent case showed that astroturfing lobbyists even used false letterhead in faxes, to send letters to congress members as other "grassroots" organizations, to fraudulently attribute "grassroots" support to their own messages. Most Spam exists by falsified header data, so I'm pretty sure lobbyists know how to falsify data. I want to make sure they can be punished for it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 31 Oct 2009 @ 7:28am

simple solution
use vi
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 31 Oct 2009 @ 2:22pm

Here's a problem with all this: What happened to the concept of private communications?

Will freedom of speech be lost if people's personal opinions expressed to representatives or to government agencies becomes public record? Where does it stop? Would my request for a clarification on my properties taxes become public record?

I think the court sort of missed the boat on this one.

On the plus side, you got to use Metadata in a headline. SEO score!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]