> You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data.
That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.
ACLU is often manipulative in how these stories are framed. They are an advocacy group advocating for their priorities.
If the headline was “Researchers publish confidential student data through litigation filings”, the crowd here would be pearl clutching about that. You may recall years ago when NYC released taxi data on their open data platform, that data let you basically track the movements of frequent taxi users.
The other question is… why don’t the researchers file a FOIA, which has no restrictions.
That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.