Online publication of court records: circumventing the privacy-transparency trade-off
This work tackles privacy issues in legal data publishing for the open data movement, but it is incremental as it builds on existing privacy-preserving techniques.
The paper addresses the privacy-transparency trade-off in online court records by proposing a multimodal architecture for privacy-preserving legal data publishing, as current methods like access control and text redaction are insufficient for massive data access.
The open data movement is leading to the massive publishing of court records online, increasing transparency and accessibility of justice, and to the design of legal technologies building on the wealth of legal data available. However, the sensitive nature of legal decisions also raises important privacy issues. Current practices solve the resulting privacy versus transparency trade-off by combining access control with (manual or semi-manual) text redaction. In this work, we claim that current practices are insufficient for coping with massive access to legal data (restrictive access control policies is detrimental to openness and to utility while text redaction is unable to provide sound privacy protection) and advocate for a in-tegrative approach that could benefit from the latest developments of the privacy-preserving data publishing domain. We present a thorough analysis of the problem and of the current approaches, and propose a straw man multimodal architecture paving the way to a full-fledged privacy-preserving legal data publishing system.