New York State Office of Family and Children's Services: no confidentiality agreements are sought from "trainees" before disclosing to them parents' confidential information and no procedures exist preventing re-disclosure

On November 4, 2016, I have filed a Freedom of Information Request with the New York State Office of Family and Children's Services (NYS OCFS), after that office denied me access to a "training video" because it contained a confidential "identifiable" information from a certain family.

In that FOIL request, I asked for copies of confidentiality agreements from those to whom that information WAS shown and for consent of the family to have their information shown to a 242 "trainees".

Within 10 days, I received a reply from NYS OCFS.

Here it is, in its full glory.

I will remind my readers what I was asking for in that FOIL:

So, since NYS OCFS claims it has NO RECORDS "responsive" to my FOIL request, that means that NYS OCFS admits that:

1) The 242 "trainees", including judges, CPS workers and attorneys and private attorneys who were shown a video on November 18, 2014 that NYS OCFS did not allow me to see because it allegedly contained "identifiable private" information about a family or a child were shown that same video without being required to sign a confidentiality agreements;

2) NYS OCFS released confidential information to whoever created that video without a contract for creating that video - so, that video may very well have been an investigative video from a real CPS/police case, shown to the whole wide world without consent of either the parents, or the parents' attorneys, and possibly shown to the parents' opponents in litigation, neighbors, competitors in business or judges who never had, and never supposed to have access to that case;

3) NYS OCFS did not follow the very law that it used to deny me access to the video and did not issue a prior written approval for the use of private information contained in the video for research and training;

4) that NYS OCFS did not seek consent of the family whose information was, on the one hand, confidential for release through FOIL, but not confidential to be shown to 242 people who had no legal grounds to see that video, and had no restrictions on redistribution of its contents; and, as the most important information, that

5) NYS OCFS does not have any policies, rules or procedures tracking the once-disclosed confidential information and seeing how that information was further re-disclosed.

In other words, NYS OCFS admitted that, with all claims of "confidentiality" - for FOIL purposes, it treats information in the Child Abuse Register as disclosable to the "chosen" individuals at a whim, with no care or concern about how it will further be re-disclosed or used.

This is a class lawsuit waiting to happen, and NYS OCFS knows it.

Any parents who have been in the cross-hairs of CPS in New York before November 18, 2014 have a reason to file that lawsuit now, seeking disclosure whether their confidential information was subject to unlimited dissemination to unauthorized individuals, and challenging the lack of procedures in NYS OCFS tracking re-disclosure of such information.