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Comment by jabiko | Hacker News Reader

Also with the planned changes, you have to prove that you have an legitimate interest in the information. Which makes the whole thing very vague. So the government can just say that they don't think you have a legitimate interest in the information and deny your request. You would then have to sue.

Also also want to invoice you for all costs that your request causes. Previously it was capped at 500€. So your request could cost you thousands of euros. You are at the mercy of the government how many people are working on your request and how efficient they process it.

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> Previously it was capped at 500€. So your request could cost you thousands of euros.

To be clear, it is currently costing the taxpayer said thousands of Euros. Time spent by government workers on FoI requests is meaningful and not free. That does not make them a bad idea, but we should be clear that passing costs on to the requester isn't precisely nefarious?

Yes, it is costing the taxpayer. However, I think there needs to be some cap, because otherwise the government can weaponize that and be extra inefficient when processing requests for things they don't want to become publicly available.

The current cap of 500€ is a good compromise IMHO: It deters people from issuing unnecessary FoI requests while at the same time keeping it in reach for the average person if they really want that information.

Perhaps the cap should be multiplied by the number of people in an organization or business making the request?

The transparency of this information is a public good in itself, so it is in the interest of the public that this information can be requested as freely as possible.

Of course there should probably be a way to limit waste, but putting all financial cost onto a single person is a way to effectively limit freedom of information to the point where it contradicts and undermines the whole idea behind it. That's one of the reasons why this change is being proposed, and it is not a stretch to call this nefarious.

If you design processes to be open by design, the cost of extracting data (removing sensitive data that is indeed not needed) goes down radically. Governments know this and resist it.

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