We are big fans of transparency at TARTLE. In fact, if you listen to TARTLEcast (and if not, why not?) you might remember that it is one of the big seven things we are most concerned with, especially as it applies to government and corporate entities. We particularly like transparency when it comes to how these entities are using the data that they gather on a regular basis. Being that data transparency is important not just as a matter of principle but as a matter of individual privacy and security, we were very happy with a recent decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
The case brought by Tyler Halva is an interesting one. As a software engineer he had been requested to pitch a registration system for the state back in 2015. He never got a response, positive or negative. What’s the big deal? For anyone who has ever worked freelance, the big deal is apparent. First, a freelancer would always like to know what he can do better, meaning that even rejections are important learning opportunities for his business. Second, intellectual property theft is a big problem in the freelance world. There are plenty of people out there who think that if a person isn’t protected by a business and the lawyers that typically go along with that, they can take advantage of the situation and not pay for the freelancer’s hard work. That’s why Mr. Halva went to the trouble of submitting five requests for the data he was looking for.
This is where the case gets interesting. Halva was able to learn that another developer had gotten the job and even got the evaluation that went into making the decision. What he couldn’t find was the original marked up proposal, which is something that he thought should exist. That is the real basis of the case, whether or not a person should be able to sue for data that should exist.
Why is that important? If you have paid attention to digital privacy and transparency over the course of the digital age at all, you know that records have a habit of not being able to be found. Whether one is a fan or not, the Obama administration was noteworthy for the amount of hard drives that had crashed, losing the data requested. Governments and corporations both can conveniently delete incriminating information in order to deter investigations into questionable behavior. This new ruling means that in Minnesota at least there should be accountability even if the data that is desired should be there but isn’t.
As the article states, this is a massive win for transparency advocates. One, the whole case should be a reminder to governments that at the least they should be communicating better with others and offering information outright. That means not waiting around for someone to ask for something they have reason to expect would just be granted as a matter of course. If the Minnesota government had just let the software engineer know his pitch had been rejected outright and given him the reasons why, he probably would not have pushed as hard. That would have saved the state’s legal system time and money. Two, it’s also a notice that people should think before deleting information, whether digital or hard copies. You never know what information might be requested and the absence of that information can now have legal ramifications, even if there is nothing out of order. Therefore it serves both the public and the government to hold onto that data, at the least for the sake of transparency and making sure that everyone can see that things are as they should be.
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