Thus, much information in metadata may arguably be withheld from disclosure under
Section 6254(a) as preliminary drafts or notes, or under Section 6255(a) and the
deliberative process privilege.
A second, different type of example arises from the law's special concern
for privacy rights. (Sections 6250, 6254(c); Cal. Const., Art. I, sec. 1.)
Earlier versions of an electronic record that are present in metadata may include
information the disclosure of which would violate a third party's privacy. A wide
range of types of information may be encompassed within the right of privacy, from
residential phone numbers and Social Security numbers to sensitive medical,
financial, and sexual data to information provided by, and the identity of,
whistleblowers. When a record is finalized and put forward for public view, it
hopefully will have been sufficiently reviewed to be sanitized of private
information. But earlier versions of the record may not have been crafted with
the same sensitivity to privacy that will have gone into the final document.
As a third example, metadata may include confidential communications between
attorney and client that do not appear in the text of the record. The law
protects such communications from disclosure and imposes on attorneys a duty not
to disclose such information. (Cal. Evid. Code 954; Cal. Bus. and Prof. Code
\ufffd
6068(e).) Thus, in response to a public records request of a city attorney's
\ufffdoffice, in many instances an attorney would be duty-bound to search the metadata
in electronic records as to which he or she may have had input, even if the record
on its face does not reveal an attorney-client communication. And if a city
department in custody of an electronic record that had been developed
collaboratively with its attorney disclosed the record as a Word document without
checking the metadata embedded in the record, it would run the risk of
inadvertently disclosing confidential attorney-client communications.
These examples
and more could be cited
merely illustrate the point that
\ufffd
\ufffd
metadata may contain information that is subject to redaction under the Act. If a
city were to give a requester a document in Word form, the city would be required
to review the metadata embedded in the document
or avoid doing so at its peril,
\ufffd
because failure to conduct this review would risk disclosure of privileged
material. Yet reviewing the metadata would be a laborious and problematic task\ufffd
different in nature and magnitude from the process of reviewing the text to
determine information that should be redacted and information that is reasonably
segregable from that which should be redacted.
While the paper cautions that the author's views are his own and not those
of the City Attorney's Office, that office's advice to city agencies has been to
convert Word documents to pdfs before release to the public.
Meanwhile, as noted yesterday by Ansley Schrimpf for the Reporter's
Committee for Freedom of the Press,
The Arizona Supreme Court today ruled that metadata
information about the
\ufffd
history, tracking and management of an electronic document
is subject to the
\ufffd
state s public records law.
\ufffd
Several national media organizations supported Phoenix police officer David
Lake s challenge that the city improperly denied his 2006 public records request
\ufffd
for the metadata about documents he had previously requested and received. The
city refused Lake s request, arguing the metadata did not fall within the state s
\ufffd
\ufffd
definition of public records, which a court established in 1952, long before the
advent of electronic documents.
In a unanimous opinion released today, the state s high court held, If a
\ufffd
\ufffd
Leave a Comment