Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators and dream team @elsachen.bsky.social Ericka Adams and Carolina Caliman!

The project raises big questions about the role of the qualitative researcher in a digital world, and how much work we should put into "verifying" the experiences of people who provide data for our studies.

We discuss the attrition at each level, including our interactions with bots, social media recruitment, using MTurk and Prolific, and how we handled the interviews we ultimately dropped from our analysis

In aiming to reach 100 interviewees who had a specific type of legal system experience, we ultimately heard from 2706 people who were interested in the study, individually screened 685, interviewed 93, and ended up with 86 interviews suitable for analysis.

2. Also, as automated record clearance gains traction, we argue that informational privacy plays a crucial yet understated role in legal reforms. But can tech-driven expungement truly deliver on its promise? Our piece highlights both its potential and risks.

1. The article explores U.S. criminal record expungement policy through the lens of privacy. Tracing its evolution from the 1950s to today, we examine how privacy concerns shaped, then faded, and now resurfaced in an era of data-driven policies and criminal justice reform.

This piece by @robertstewart.io and @sarahlageson.bsky.social highlights how (among other things) the digitization of municipal records - public data - has been monetized by informal background check companies, which facilitate easy discrimination in lending, housing, etc.