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Comment by Jakob | Hacker News Reader

The linked Kaggle dataset https://www.kaggle.com/foiachap/seattle-email-metadata/ shows that the final returned data are Excel tables with content which looks like this:

  Sender or Created by: "Herring, Kaya" <Kaya.Herring@seattle.gov>
  Recipients in To line: Ortiz, Piper; Jones, Raphael
  Recipients in Cc line: Valdez, Khloe
  Recipients in Bcc line: 
  Sent: 3/23/17 18:08

(I changed the names to random ones)

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I suspected as much. So the names are out there. Pretty sloppy.

It's not sloppy, it's what the law allows for. You seem to have a misunderstanding in stating "the metadata should have only contained anonymized entries for the email addresses of the counterparties." That's simply incorrect in terms of what is allowed under law and for the request, though there is some variation state-to-state as to their FOIA.

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