Privacy Guides Fund Committee Minutes from 2026-01-06

Announcements
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Previously: Privacy Guides Fund Committee Minutes from 2025-12-02

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Privacy Guides Fund Committee Minutes from 2026-01-19
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FOIA requests let’s goooooooo

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What are those?

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In the US you can submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to government organizations to ask for information that is not already public. It’s an important transparency tool that can be used to better understand what the government is or is not doing. Important for journalism and advocacy. It can bring important things to light.

Seems like Privacy Guides may start submitting their own this year? :eyes:

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Ah right that is helpful. I just didn’t know the accronym.

So in the US you need to get approval to submit such requests?

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I’m sure there is some information which you can just ask for and an org will share, but FOIA requests are a more powerful way to get information that an org may not want to share unless they legally had to.

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Not really what i was asking. I understand that but do I understand correctly you need to be approved to fill such FOIA requests?

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There is no prior approval needed to submit a FOIA request (ie anyone can submit one) but there is a standard submission process.

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I assumed anyone could make a FOIA request, so my guess is that setting up an organization to file the requests is to protect the privacy of the staff here.

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As I read the meeting minutes, I can’t help but be impressed with how well Privacy Guides is run!

Outstanding job!

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Uh basically what happens is FOIA requests are handled differently by every government agency. So there’s this organization called https://www.muckrock.com/ that will file and track them for you, makes it much easier. They have very low fees and most newsrooms use them, so all we discussed was setting aside some money to pay those fees if we want to use it in the future.

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Right okay thanks for clearing that up!

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Quite a nice one :+1:t2:

We discussed paying current news volunteers on a per-article basis to continue publishing news briefs, and voted on an annual maximum budget of approximately $19,000 for news articles. We noted readers need to know what to expect based on what section they’re in, Articles vs. News.

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