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FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.
by pratheekrebala 8y ago
FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.
- ekianjo 8y agoYou obviously did not read the article. > public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security
- clessg 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
- danso 8y agoThis policy exists in many states. But plenty of local reporters have tales about how officials respond with PDFs because they either don't realize that the PDFs are generated from a (legacy) system that could output XLS/CSV, or because they fear that Excel sheets/text files are alterable. The benefit of having the law, though, makes it easier to convince officials to tell their IT people to get it right, under threat of lawsuit.
- mikestew 8y agoNot only are you being rude by implying the article went unread, you’re also showing an astounding lack of imagination (perhaps stifled by a need to point out the errors of others). Parent is saying that despite whatever parts of the law you care to snarkily quote, government employees will find a way to screw it up.
- Rexxar 8y agoScanned pdf of a spreadsheet is clearly machine-readable, as you can read this document with your computer.
- canibal57 8y agoI'm pretty sure that isn't what machine-readable means, especially in this context. But this kind of obtuse reading seems like it would be exactly how the concern of the parent comment would come into being.
- ekianjo 8y agoIf you have this kind of standard then literally everything is machine-readable, even handwriting with proper machine learning models. That's quite clearly not the spirit of the wording.
- wilde 8y agoI’ll defend this practice. It’s the only way of knowing for sure that you’re transmitting exactly the information you intend to send. Even copy/paste often picks up other stuff you don’t intend.
- prepend 8y agoIt the only, but maybe the easiest. Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult. But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as “easy” as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago_ugh_ if only CSVs were standardized sooner and more completely. There are many encoding, delimiter, escaping and truncation conventions to deal with in real world data.
- prepend 8y agoDefinitely. They are better than PDFs, but still have lots of room for improvement.
- jellicle 8y agoBut as the public is typically entitled to that "other stuff" information as well, you're just obstructing.
- lostlogin 8y agoPDFs can and do send non visible data that wasn’t intended to be transmitted.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoIt's more of a way to prevent transmitting any easily accessible data at all. Using a human-auditable but still machine-readable format like CSV is what should be done.
- catacombs 8y agoThis is the worst. Thankfully, there are tools like Tabula to extract the data.