On May 3, Sara DePaul, SIIA’s Senior Director for Technology Policy, moderated a panel at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit 2019 in Washington DC on “Balancing Transparency and Privacy in Open Access to Public Records.” The panel featured the views of Cindy Van Ort, Chief Privacy Officer of Thomson Reuters; Chris Calabrese, Vice President for Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology; and David Cuillier, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism. The panelists engaged in a spirited discussion and found a few high-level points of consensus, such as: that the use of public records confer important social benefits, that open access and use can yield the potential for harmful results that should be accounted for, and that the treatment of public records by privacy laws can raise First Amendment concerns that must be balanced by policymakers. They differed, however, in whether and how a privacy law should apply to public records dat ...