Beware of public digital information purges

Brief summary: a developer creates a tool that allows clear consultation of the information available from the Generalitat about grants. Suddenly, many data disappear and, when they are restored after the understandable outcry, around a million records are missing. There is no need to necessarily suspect foul play: an analysis by IT specialist David Poblador determined that 95.2% of the so-called lost records corresponded to modest aid to individuals for school canteens and similar that, if not anonymized, pose a clear privacy problem. However, the opacity of digital information repositories has become evident. It is not clear which window you should turn to to complain about what happened to information that is no longer available. There is no record that allows identifying what has been deleted and why. This is one of the cases that has driven a manifesto by the Accent Obert foundation on neutrality and transparency on the web. Among the measures it proposes, it highlights that information should be "accessible, continuous, verifiable and auditable" and that public traceability of restrictions and incidents should be established. I can only wholeheartedly agree.

One of Trump 2.0's first measures was to delete all research data from his health service that was not politically convenient for his unscientific agenda. We assume that on the internet information does not degrade or die, but this is only in theory: there are purges that, due to the nature of the medium, can be invisible. If you burn books, at least you can see the smoke. It is possible that there is no bad faith in these data fluctuations in the Generalitat these days. But to dispel doubts, the case forces the creation of forensic protocols for these incidents. More transparency is needed on the management of transparency.