In Sander v. State Bar of California, published August 23, 2018, the First District Court of Appeal, Division 3 affirmed the trial court's decision upholding the California State Bar's denial of a California Public Records Act request for information from the bar admissions database for individually unidentifiable records for all applicants from 1972 to 2008 in such categories as race and ethnicity, law school, GPA, etc. The petitioners proposed a number of protocols for rendering data anonymous, such as setting up a data enclave housing data stripped of identifiers that could be accessed only by select persons, recoding and binning, "k-anonymity," or mathematical standardizations. The trial court denied disclosure on multiple grounds, including that the disclosure under any of the protocols requires the creation of a new record.
The appellate court agreed with this ground. While the CPRA requires agencies to provide access to their existing records, it does not require them to create new records to satisfy a request. Requiring the Bar to recode its existing data would require it to create new records. Public agencies can be required to gather and segregate disclosable electronic data from nondisclosable exempt information, and perform data compilation, extraction, or computer programming if necessary to produce a copy of the record. But they cannot be required to undertake extensive manipulation or restructuring of the substantive content of a record such as petitioners proposed here. It cannot be required to change the substantive content of an existing record, or replace existing data with new data.
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