ava's blog

summary trust issues

I have previously written about what resources I subscribe to (newsletter, RSS, manual checking) to keep on top of data protection law news, cases, new reports, recommendations by authorities, papers of notable personalities in the space, and more. Since then, it grew to even more sources.

Many of these notify me of new releases and briefly summarize them before linking to them. While I use the summaries to judge how relevant it is to my specific interests or needs, I can never just let that be it. I can't even just read a longer article by someone else who has read the entire original document and is diving a little deeper into it while still being shorter than the original. I have to read the original myself.

I just don't fully trust summaries or coverage by others. I need to confirm myself whether the conclusions are true, it was correctly interpreted, nothing was taken out of context, exaggerated or left out. I don't want to miss out on any additional info or new knowledge the other person did not think was worth sharing or was outside the scope of the summary. It also feels wrong for me to reference anything I haven't read fully myself, when you would clearly expect me to, or are led to believe that I did.

Last year at a different conference, I was surprised, because there was a running gag throughout the presentations that everyone is grateful for the same few personalities in the space for quickly giving a summary of a new happening or source material on LinkedIn, because no one else has the time or patience to read it, or it is too difficult to read and they wouldn't be able to make sense of the court case or whatever without someone else interpreting it first and writing it in shorter, easier language. What the hell? These are industry experts. I just cannot relate, at all. I'd rather put in the time and effort. I never want to be caught in a situation that makes it obvious I didn't read something when I should have.

I think the only exception I am comfortable to rely on reading deeper summaries by different people about the same thing are some US bills. Anything EU, I wanna see it myself.

My web reader, Artemis, has a dedicated folder titled "privacy" where all of the relevant stuff is sorted into for ease of use, and when going through it to see what to check out, I have a dedicated space in my browser where the to-be-read stuff goes. I sit there multiple times a week chipping away at it. I will now do so again. Let's do some inventory; I have:

to read. Each day adds more.

That seems little so far, but in my experience, it doesn't stop there, as the stuff I am reading is also linking to other articles and papers, which I then also often want to read completely, or at the very least, read the relevant chapter completely.

AI summaries obviously have the same issue for me, if not even more so. I trust a human to see the point of the paper better than the machine. Whenever I tried it out, I still felt dissatisfied, uninformed, and like I got the children's version of it, spoonfed in a way that would make me feel competent without actually being so. In my view, you can't just technically know things in some easy terms to be good at something, you also need to be able to read the original papers, know the jargon, and know where to find something, and I don't think summaries serve that goal well. By learning to read the complicated stuff, it sticks more in your mind, and it also serves your academic writing skills (good for my uni stuff).

It still frustrates me, because that isn't even half of what I'd actually like to keep on top of; I have to be ruthless in what I pay attention to and read as time and focus is limited, and I still keep adding new resources into the mix to hopefully get even more of what I want and need. Data protection and privacy is such a dynamic and interesting field, with so many people and orgs publishing interesting stuff each day. It's hard to keep up for anyone, and I still have to work full time, study part time, and volunteer on the side, blog, socialize, answer emails, visit conferences, etc.

On the latest conference, there was an ad for a service that keeps track of so much. The most important documents in the EU digital rights space, cross-referenced and updated daily. It's expensive, unfortunately, but I might consider it in the future...

I'm hoping to tackle all articles today, and then both papers tomorrow, and then see for the rest, and whatever else is coming in the next day.

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